The Family Moves to Spokane

The work of keeping up the apartment building and caring for a baby was a bit much for Icel so they sold the place and moved to Spokane in 1951. They bought a house on Martin street on the good side of Crestline. To the east was an area known as dog town and Icel found it an unfavorable place to raise children. 

Icel really loved her new home. There was a play house in the back yard which the 2 younger girls spent many happy hours playing in when Beverly got older.

A friend, Carl Brown, needed a helping hand so he came to stay with them for a time. He stayed in one bedroom upstairs while Barbara and Betty shared the other upstairs room. Beverly slept in a crib in her parent's room. 

Here is Beverly near the back porch of the house.

  Betty attended Bemiss Elementary. Barbara was a sophomore at John R. Rogers High School and her dad dropped her off at the corner of Wellesley and Crestline on his way out to Kaiser each morning. She walked home, but never alone, there were always groups of people walking the same direction.

The workers at Kaiser went on strike now and again but Ray was never without work. He picked up fill in jobs wherever he could. He drove a taxi, drove delivery trucks. Anything he could get.

Icel's friend, Evelyn, was working at a cookie store and said they needed help so Icel took a job there. She wanted to be able to buy clothes and things for the girls. Later she worked at some kind of potato plant where she fed potatoes into a machine that peeled and sliced them for french fries. Every day she took baby Beverly to her mother-in-law's house over by North Central High School.

Icel remembers a time when Betty got in with a bad crowd. I, the interviewer, said, "she was 8 or 9 years old. How bad of a crowd can there be at that age?" Apparently there was a girl in dog town whose mother also worked (in fact it sounds as if everyone worked)  but this mother would allow boys, not just girls, to come over to the house while she was gone!! Icel would have none of that and said the girl could no longer come to their house, on their side of Crestline ever again, nor could Betty go to her house!! So there!!

Barbara made some lifelong friends during this time, in this neighborhood. They all went to Roger's together - Ken Bradley, Marv Schwartzenberger, and Jim State. Hmmm, all boys... anyway they had a friend, Lloyd Gaines who went to school at North Central. The boys all worked at the Indians' ball park together. Lloyd quit school the summer of 1952, because he didn't think he would pass, and joined the Marines. When he came home from boot camp in San Diego, he asked his ball park buddies if they knew any girls they could set him up with. They told him they had a beautiful redhead friend and they set up a blind date. In the fall of 1952 Barbara and Lloyd met. Lloyd went for infantry training in Pendleton, Oregon and then on to Quantico, Virginia for ordnance training (which he said is where he was taught how to blow things up). From there he was sent back to Pendleton then two months later, to Korea. 

But I digress, Icel has such fond memories of  her home with all the beautiful wood trim and the hardwood floors. There was always a gang at their house, as usual. There was food and laughter and music and dancing, as long as everyone removed their shoes so they wouldn't scuff the highly polished floors. Friends and family played games and cards and danced and whooped it up until the wee hours of the morning.

In this photo Icel and Ray are in the upper left of the group. Ray's sister Vera is in front of him. The other lady in the black dress on the floor is another sister, Mabel with her husband Roy. And a third sister, Gertie, is sitting on her husband Mel's lap.

Ray and Icel in the center with Icel's mother to the right. The man seated is Mel Hubert with his wife Gertie standing behind. The lady on his lap is a family friend Janette Sloskowski. Behind her is Vera's husband Bill. The man on the far right is Ted Sloskowski.

 The guy that's standing looks to me like that guy who was in Indiana Jones and burned his hand with the medallion that had been in the fire and they were looking in the wrong place for the Ark because they didn't know there were intructions on the other side of the medallion. But it's probably not him.... in fact I found out he is Sollie (Solomon) Stromberger. His wife is Nita, another of Ray's sisters. She is the one with the scarf.

Icel was always baking and many times there would be a pie cooling on the window sill that would simply disappear. Of course the empty, but clean, pie dish would reappear a day or two later.