CHILDHOOD MEMORIES

From 1947 to 1952  my family lived on Villa Street on the westside of Willows, in northern California.  My dad worked for the Production Credit Association, a farm loan company.   Across the street to the west was a farm house with a barn behind it with horses and cattle in the field.     A block to the south was the Glenn County Road Department equipment yard and shop.    Us kids on the block would go down there and play on equipment until somebody would run us off.   From there we would go across Villa Street to where some houses were being constructed and proceed to get into more trouble.  The Sycamore grade school we attended was four blocks to the east and an easy walk or bike ride.   There was a play ground with the usual swing sets, a slide and other contraptions all on a base of sand.   The baseball field was all dirt and weeds.   It was a good place to scrape your knees and tear up your pants when sliding into home base or making a touch down over the next few years.   A block to the north of our house was the Glenn County General Hospital, where all five of my younger siblings were born over the next 11 years.

One boy in the neighborhood, named Jim, who was my age lived down a dirt road beyond the farm across the street in an old unpainted two story house surrounded by a couple of trees in a dirt field.  There was a milk cow tied to a tree in the back of the house, a few chickens running about and a clothes line with mostly diapers hanging from it.   What I remember of the inside the house were dirty dishes piled in the kitchen with an old wooden table and not much else.  There was a bedroom off from the kitchen with just an unmade bed.   I never went upstairs.  It was real poverty, which at the time I did not understand.   The mother was always carrying an infant as other small children ran around the place.  She never looked happy.   I learned later she was the daughter of the family with the farm house and her husband had a drinking problem, maybe from ill effects from the war.   Like many men in the community he probably worked as a farm laborer when he could.   To make some extra money for the family, Jim would go up town, and shine shoes outside some of the taverns after school.    The town had its fair share of drinking establishments and my dad spent some of his time after work in a few of them.

In 1952 my family moved a mile out of town to an adobe house my dad built on 10 acres along County Road H, where he had some cattle.   He also had a new job as a field representative for the California Rice Grower's Cooperative.   A few years later he got into to rice farming.    Just north of the 10 acres is a railroad line going east and west.    For entertainment some of my siblings would place pennies on the tracks to see how the train would flatten them.   A school bus would pick us up sometimes or my mother would drive us to school.    There were many days after school my younger sister and I walked home.   We would cut across a field to save time walking the roads and eventually wore a trail across that field.   After looking at Google Maps, I see that field is now occupied with an ARCO station, a Motel 6, Round Table pizza, a Dollar Store, CHP office and what looks like apartment buildings.  County Road H in now Humboldt Avenue and west of it is a Tractor Supply store,  headquarters of the Mendocino National Forest and a DMV office.   Beyond all this is Interstate 5 going north and south.  There was no Interstate when we lived there, it was all open fields with a view to the coastal mountains.   The 10 acres we lived on is now a housing subdivision, but the old adobe house is still there on one acre.    

It is all just memories now.