I'm going to read a passage from the new book.
And I wonder-- you know, this book has been called gritty
by several reviewers, and that's a term that has never
been applied to my work before, and I didn't quite
know how to take it.
And I thought the book before this, "Crossing The Yard,"
the characters are mass murderers,
and murderers, and felons, and crooked cops, and nobody
said that was gritty.
But this sort of innocuous family memoir is gritty.
So I guess it's all in what you mean by that.
I will read a passage which has to do with the person
that I consider the hero, the heroine,
of this book, which is my grandmother, Charlotte.
Without her I may not have survived.
Probably not, actually, because I had typhoid fever and nearly
died, and was just left to die, but she rescued me.
And she was like a mother to me.
And her husband, her third husband, Sherman,
was like a grandfather to me, the only grandfather
I've ever known.
So she figures in this book very prominently.
She keeps coming in and going out.
And she was a remarkable, remarkable woman.
This passage covers a lot of time.
But the characters are grandma Charlotte, my mother,
her daughter, Hazel, my father, Leonard Shelton,
who grandma Charlotte always called Leonard,
but nobody else did.
They all called him Red.
I think my brother and sister are mentioned, Jack and Betty,
but they don't figure prominently into this.
So here we go.
Grandma had raised her four children by herself
after their father, George Washington Ashlock,
took a powder.
My mother said, with some degree of bitterness,
"she ran him off."
But then, my mother had been extremely fond
of George Washington Ashlock and also
had some unresolved grudges against her mother.
She could not deny that George Washington Ashlock
had been a hard drinker.
One of the few stories Charlotte ever
told about this period of her life
was enough to assure me that, even if she did run him off,
she had a good reason.
She said they started homesteading
across the Snake River in 1903, about 15 miles from Ontario,
Oregon.
After a few years, they had a Model A
that wasn't paid for and four small children.
My mother was the next to the oldest
of these and the only girl.
George Washington would take the Model A into town
and get drunk in one of the saloons.
When he didn't come home, Charlotte
would have to get her four children out
of bed, bundle them up if it was winter,
harness a team of horses, and hitch them to the wagon,
and go into town, sometimes when it was snowing,
to bring him home.
"Well," she said to me thoughtfully many years later,
when all those children had grandchildren,
"I couldn't leave the children alone,
and I couldn't let him try to drive home drunk.
I did what I had to do."
And she did it again and again.
Finally, she did something else she had to do.
Although it was severely frowned upon by the community,
she got a divorce.
George Washington Ashlock, after drifting
through the West for seven years,
became a sheepherder in northern Idaho.
Most of the grudge that my mother held in regard
to Charlotte, her mother, had to do
with the men in Charlotte's life, the men other than George
Washington Ashlock.
After becoming a divorcee, Charlotte
worked hard to make a living for her four children.
At first she worked as a laundress
in a brickyard in Pendleton, Oregon.
Later, she hired out as a cook on large ranches.
But she was young, lively, and attractive.
She played the fiddle, and she loved to dance.
I think my mother's account of Charlotte's affairs
and live-in boyfriends was exaggerated,
but it was not, in fact, without a foundation.
Although most of these liaisons probably
occurred after Charlotte's second marriage
had failed, when my mother was in her early or mid-teens,
a difficult time for a proper young lady whose mother seems
bent on flaunting the conventions of society.
The second marriage was, by everybody's account,
a short-lived disaster, although I never heard
Charlotte mention it at all.
His name was Blanton.
All I know about him is hearsay from my mother and one
of her brothers, although I have photographs
that verify part of it.
Blanton, it seemed, was a dandy and a gambler,
accustomed to fine clothes and fancy women.
He evidently saw the money making potential
in Charlotte's children, who ranged
in age from about eight to about 17, and three of them
were boys.
He leased a large track of lumber land, timber land,
somewhere in North Central Idaho and set
about harvesting lumber using Charlotte's children
as the crew.
I have a wonderful photograph of my mother at about 16,
plump and pretty, in a pair of overalls
and a man's cap at a rakish angle on one
end of a large crosscut saw.
But the party came to an end when the youngest child, Bob,
was seriously hurt by a falling tree.
Charlotte divorced Mr Blanton, her second divorce in an era
when divorced women were judged harshly
by the conservative moral code of the rural West.
How she felt about it, she never told.
Nor as far as I know did she ever tell anybody else.
She did what she had to do.
She'd had it with Mr Blanton and with marriage,
but she still liked men, and they still liked her.
Her daughter, Hazel, found life with her unconventional mother
increasingly trying.
Even when she was an old woman, my mother
seemed embarrassed to talk about it
and would do so only when I pressed her.
I don't think she mentioned her mother's domestic arrangements
to anybody but me, although she might
have told Betty, my sister.
"She had different men living with her right
there in the house," mother said.
"I couldn't stand it.
I got out.
I was so ashamed."
Mother wanted genteel respectability above all else,
but her mother had worked too hard
and seen too much of life to be overly hampered by such ideas.
Although I'm sure she tried to be as discreet as she could
without severely restricting her behavior.
There was no hiding the fact that they
lived in extreme poverty.
It would have seemed foolish to Charlotte
to adopt the hypocritical gentility
of the upper middle class.
During World War I, Charlotte's oldest son, Jim,
was sent home from the hospital in France as a basket case.
He was placed in the veteran's hospital in Boise
for a long, painful recuperation from the effects of mustard
gas.
Charlotte, with her two younger sons,
moved to Boise to be near him.
Charlotte remained in Boise, and so did all her children,
who one by one married and began their families.
She eventually was living alone.
At some point between her move to Boise in 1928,
she worked as a chambermaid in the famous Basque boarding
house, the Delamar.
The Delamar was named after the mining capitalist, Joseph R De
Lamar, as was the mining community in the Owyhee
Mountains that boomed in 1890.
It was the classiest of several Basque boarding
houses in Boise, and Boise was and still
is a cultural center for the Basques in the Northwest.
My parents married in 1921.
All I know about Charlotte between then and just
before she married Sherman is scandal.
Scandal of such proportions it could
have blown the entire family to pieces
had it been generally known and admitted.
To what degree it was known I have not been able to find out.
I suspect it was known by several members
of the family who chose simply to look the other way
and avoid problems.
At some point after her daughter married Leonard Shelton,
and for several years as far as I can tell,
Leonard's mother-in-law, Charlotte,
was the mistress of one of Leonard's older brothers
who was married and had several children.
My father had five older brothers, all of whom
were married and had several children.
I'm not telling which one it was.
To say that my mother was upset by her mother's
affair with her husband's brother
is a vast understatement.
She was seething with anger and shame,
telling me about it, even 50 years later,
when she was an old woman.
It was painful for her.
My mother's need to project an aura of respectability,
even gentility, was very strong.
When it came to discussing anything sexual,
she was a prude.
Once, when I was about eight, while I
was reading the newspaper over her shoulder,
I came upon the word rape and asked her what it meant.
She refused to tell me.
In regard to her mother's illicit affair
with her husband's brother, Hazel was in a terrible bind.
She could barely stand to look at her handsome mother
during this period, but she could not
break off relations with her because to do so
would be to admit that she knew what was going on.
Poor Hazel, she could only suffer inwardly and hope
her mother would, quote, "come to her senses."
Some scars are so deep that even the family amnesia curtain
can't cover them completely.
Finally, the affair ended.
I have no idea why, not any more than I
know the circumstances that brought it
about in the first place.
Perhaps Charlotte did, quote, "come to her senses,"
as my mother had hoped.
Or more probably, she grew tired of her lover
and the awkwardness of the situation.
My uncle's wife never left him.
And years later, when I was a child growing up in Boise,
Charlotte and my uncle seemed to be on good terms
whenever circumstances brought them together,
which was seldom.
My mother felt that my uncle's wife probably knew about
the affair but pretended she didn't.
Whatever my mother thought, she did not openly
let her mother know how displeased and humiliated
she was.
Charlotte continued to visit with her daughter
and her daughter's family.
And when Hazel was pregnant with her second child, my brother
Jack, Charlotte often came to help her with the housework
or to babysit Betty.
She stayed with the children when Jack was born.
And stayed with family when Jack was born in 1928,
taking care of Betty and Leonard while Hazel was in the hospital
and recuperating.
Charlotte spending much of her time at my parents' house
brought on the next episode in her ongoing love life,
and it was almost more than my poor mother could bear.
"Your grandma, Charlotte," my mother said many years later,
"took up with the ice man."
[LAUGHTER]
The ice man.
You could have knocked me over with a feather.
It was the last straw.
An ice man used a large pair of tongs
to hoist the big block of ice onto his back,
bringing it into the house through the back door,
and put it in the icebox.
Charlotte and the ice man chatted amiably each time he
delivered ice to my parents' house,
and she would serve him a cold drink.
He was handsome but shy.
Finally, he asked her to go dancing with him,
and she accepted readily.
The romance flared quickly while Hazel bit her tongue
and pursed her lips.
"If she is still so all fired to attractive men,"
my mother said to herself, "she could at least
find one with a little money so she could
be secure in her old age."
The ice man, the very idea, at least this one is a bachelor,
or says he is, that's an improvement, but not much.
How could Hazel face her relatives and acquaintances
who probably knew that her mother had broken
off an affair with Red's married brother only
to take up with the ice man?
The ice man's name was Sherman Beech.
He was, indeed, a bachelor who lived with and took care
of his aged mother, a widow.
They lived simply, but he and his mother
owned a considerable amount of property
that his father had amassed.
It included most of what was then
the tiny community of Parker, Arizona,
several homes in Boise, and land in Oklahoma.
I've heard various members of my family
say that Sherman owned oil land in Oklahoma,
but I doubt that this was true.
Judging by the estate he left when he died,
which was a considerable estate, I
imagine his Oklahoma land was rangeland.
Sherman was very well off, but perhaps not
as rich as oil land would suggest.
At any rate, by my parents' standards,
he was wildly rich, although they would not find out
about it until after Charlotte had agreed to marry him
in a quiet, private ceremony.
At that point, there was considerable backpedaling.
"Well, how was I to know?"
Hazel would say years later.
"He was just as down to Earth as an old shoe,
and he was working as an ice man.
Rich people are too eccentric.
Sometimes you can't tell."
I have never found any plausible explanation
for why Sherman was working as an ice man.
There are hints here and there that he
might have owned at least a part of the ice company,
and probably all of it.
This theory is strengthened by the fact
that two of Charlotte's sons later worked for the same ice
company.
It is entirely possible, however,
that Sherman was working as an ice man
simply because he enjoyed it.
On hot summer afternoons, the children in the neighborhood
forgot about their marble games and ball games
when they saw the ice truck coming down the alley,
often listening to one side with little dribbles of water
leaking out of the back.
The truck contained big blocks of ice
that the ice man chopped into smaller blocks.
There was always a residue of ice chips,
and the ice man doled these out by the handfuls
to the eager children who promptly popped them
into their mouths or down one another's necks,
screaming with delight.
The ice had the faint taste of the sawdust it was packed in.
Often the children rode on the tailgate of the ice truck,
swinging their legs and enjoying the cold air flooding
from inside the truck, until the ice man
would stop in the middle of the next block
and tell them the ride was over.
Yes, I can see how Sherman might have enjoyed being an ice man.
The first thing Sherman did after he
married Charlotte in 1928 was buy a Rickenbacker.
In this, the couple set off on their honeymoon.
The Rickenbacker, I have a whole section on the Rickenbacker
elsewhere in the book.
It was a huge automobile with solid wheels.
It had bud vases and window blinds.
It had a gearshift that was taller than I was,
and with a marble handle, and a separate box
for tools, a toolbox that was covered with rich silk.
It was a terrific, terrific machine.
It probably weighed as much as a tank.
And that was what he bought, and that's
where they took their trip in.
And it became my toy later.
It lived in the center barn, and I spent hours playing in it.
Sometimes I could be driving a ship, sometimes an airplane.
It was a wonderful toy.
On a six month trip that took them
through the West, and Midwest, and deep into Mexico,
I have a photograph of Charlotte taken about this time.
She is standing beside the Rickenbacker,
slender and assured, wearing a dark patterned silk
dress edged with fur around the bottom of the skirt
and the sleeves, and one simple, long strand of pearls
that reaches to her waist.
From her broad brimmed hat trimmed with feathers
to her shoes, she is utterly elegant.
No one could possibly believe this woman had
been a laundress in a brickyard, or a chambermaid in the Delamar
boarding house.
Although it was probably a matter of complete indifference
to Charlotte whether anybody knew these things or not.
She was who she was, and her pearls and beautiful clothes
had not changed her.
The real change was that she had finally
found the love of her life.
[CLAPPING]