Chapter 1

A Brief History of Family and Community

My great-grandfather’s family came to Oregon somewhere around 1888. My grandpa was around six years old at the time. I don’t know much about my great-grandfather, except that he wasn’t a well-liked man, and one day when he was shaving, he dropped dead of a heart attack at the young age of forty. He was buried in a different cemetery than the rest of the folks. His grave was marked with a tire iron and a brick.

In the month of June, 1920, my grandmother Hettice gave birth to my father in a small house in Suver, Oregon. Soon after, they settled in the community of Hoskins, Oregon where grandpa, Charles Oscar Dickason, worked for the Simpson Timber Company, as a logger.

Hoskins is named after Fort Hoskins, a Civil War era fort that was established in 1856, near the location where I grew up. They monitored the land claims of the white-man’s migration west and protected the boundaries of the Siletz Indian reservation. After the fort was dismantled in 1857, the Franz family bought the old fort and built a large sawmill next to the Luckiamute River. A logging community was born.

Back in those days the railways were the most economical way of transportation when it came to the timber. The Valley&Siletz railroad came into existence. It meandered its way from Independence, OR, through Pedee, Kings Valley, Hoskins, and ending up at Valsetz (no longer in existence). All were logging communities at the time.

It was early in the 1960’s when they retired their last steam shay. I remember hearing the whistle blast at the crossing at Ora and Viora’s place just down the road. That was around the time my grandpa passed away.

Grandpa owned a ten-acre strip along the Luckiamute River, three miles upstream from the old fort. Luckiamute is the Siletz Indian word for ‘Quiet River’. To this day, the river gives me peace, tranquility, and a sense of reality and beauty.

My grandma and grandpa had a large family. The oldest was my Uncle George, then Aunt Carrie, Aunt Myrtle, my father, Charles Walter Dickason, who went by the nickname, Buster (Bus for short), then there was Aunt Betty, and Uncle Melvin.

I never knew my Aunt Myrtle because she died when she was a teenager long before I was born. She came down with scarlet fever and then started having seizures. She went crazy and attempted to kill my grandma and my ‘infant’ dad. She tried to dig his brains out with a spoon. She was institutionalized at the asylum in Salem, Oregon, where she later died. She wrote letters expressing her fear of another patient, on several occasions. The family was notified of her death and the ‘official’ cause of death was, pneumonia. Common speculation within the family is: she was strangled to death by the patient she feared. She was buried with the rest of the family. Aunt Carrie made her headstone.

As a youngster, my dad developed a passion for poetry. He wrote some wonderful poems. He would spend hours listening to radio programs like: ‘Lum and Abner’, The Life of Riley’, and ‘Only the Shadow Knows’. We spent countless nights together, at 1:06 AM, (when he got home from work) listening to nostalgic re-plays of those old radio programs. He would read the old ‘serials’ at night, in his bed.

Dad severely broke his arm when he was young. It never knitted quite right and his left arm grew very crooked.

As with all young boys, my dad ran with a few local friends. His best friend was Harley Craft. I don’t remember the name of his other friend, but I remember the tragic story.

Dad, Harley and their other friend were swimming in the Simpson Lumber Company’s log pond. During what was a fun summer day of warmth and cool water. Something bad happened that day. Their friend drowned in the pond. They brought him to shore and Harley ran for help while dad sat and watched over the body of his friend. He sat there in anguished tears and loving memories of all the times they spent together.

Harley and dad grew into their teens and were like most other boys with one thing on their mind –SEX! One night they showed up at a certain married lady’s home (she will remain nameless) and Harley went inside. Dad stood outside the kitchen window and watched while she masturbated him at the kitchen sink. I wonder if that is why I have a fascination for voyeurism.

Dad dropped out of high school in the ninth grade because he hated his teacher. I don’t know what transpired in the years following that and when the war broke out.

WWII broke out and Harley and dad went in to join the Navy under the 'buddy system'. Dad lied about his age (which was common and overlooked in those days), but was rejected because of his deformed arm, color blindness, and his flat feet. Harley was accepted and went to California for basic training (dad said, he was accepted because he had a 12” penis). I don’t quite buy into that idea, but I digress. Anyway, Harley shipped out on the USS Arizona, and as far as I know, he is still on it, in the depths of the Pearl Harbor Bay. If it weren’t for my dad’s arm, eyes, and flat feet, I may never have been here to write this story.

Dad talked a local recruiter into enlisting him into the Army. He was accepted and did a tour in Belgium, mostly in a clerical position, due to his physical maladies.

During his stay in that country, he met a Belgium girl who invited him to dinner at her folk’s place. They were not very well versed in English, and when asked his name, he responded, “Buster”
The father struggled to understand and asked again. In which my father again replied, “Buster”
“Oh!” Said the man, “without a father.”

I’ve known my dad to be a BASTARD at times, but not that kind.

After the meal, he sat back in his chair and expressed his appreciation and complimented the gal’s mother on the delicious rabbit he’d just eaten. The father looked at him with a puzzled look on his face and said, “no rabbits in Belgium”

Dad found out that he had just ate a healthy meal of pan-fried kitty cat.

After the fall of Hitler and the Third Reich, dad finished his stint in Europe and was put on a plane to the Pacific theater. He just knew in his heart that he was going to die there. During the flight the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (another close brush on my existence) and it brought an end to WWII.

After the war, dad came home to the Hoskins homestead and remained in the Army reserves up until my next younger brother was born.

Sometime in the late 40’s my mother’s family moved to Hoskins. My grandpa Williams got a job as a brakeman on the V&S railroad. They lived in a small shack near the railroad shops in what you would call ‘downtown Hoskins’. There was a store near the bridge, in the middle of ‘town’, where everyone in the community would buy their supplies and just gather.

Dad’s mother broke her arm and was unable to work around the house. The family decided to hire someone to take care of things while she recovered. The folks at the Hoskins store recommended a young nineteen year-old girl that had just moved into the community, Eleanor Williams, (my mother). Dad showed up at her doorstep and offered her a permanent job. Today, at seventy seven years old, she didn’t realize how permanent it would be.

She went to work for the family for $25 a week. After a short time everyone decided it was too much. They wanted her to stay, but they needed a solution to this problem. George, Dad, and Melvin were to draw straws to see which one was going to marry her. Dad drew the short straw. As far as I’m concerned, he won. They were married December 13, 1950.

There was an old sawmill just two miles down the road that went out-of-business. The owner was trying to get rid of the round-roofed mill shacks on his property. Dad took one and dragged it into place on a two acre piece of grandpa’s place. Grandpa divided his ten acres into 5 two acre parcels. Grandpa’s was the northern-most and mom and dad’s was just south of it.

Mom and dad lived in a small shack a few miles up the river at ‘Fisherman’s Camp’ while dad remodeled the old mill shack into a home. During the next four years the house was finally finished and my two older brothers, Raymond and Russell, were born.

Dad, being in the Army reserves, was put on assignment in Anchorage, Alaska as a drill sergeant. It was there on a June night in 1956, where my mother gave birth to a 4lb 11 oz. pre-mature baby boy –me.

Labor inducing drugs were new at the time and my dad had told me the doctors had vacation and golfing plans stateside; I needed to be born right then because of it. The drugs were new and my mother nearly died giving birth. (another brush with death).

I spent the next month in an incubator at the Elmendorf AFB Hospital, in Anchorage, before I was able to travel.

Mom and dad left Alaska when dad was re-assigned to Fort Hood, Washington, for the next two years. That’s where my next younger brother, Calvin, was born.

After my dad’s honorable discharge from the Army, we all settled down in the home my father built.
My earliest memories are there, in a humble old mill shack, next to the Luckiamute river.