Chapter 18: Summer Seeds amid the Fall

In my first life, the 1965/66 Rose Bowl was won by UCLA 14-12 over Michigan State. I remembered this game for some reason. It had been a big upset, I think for UCLA to win, which they did with a last second goal line stand.

Michigan State had already wrapped up the national championship by beating Notre Dame by the time we played them in Pasadena, and we played them to a standstill for three quarters. It wasn't until the fourth that they got to us. We answered with a feeble field goal in the dying minutes of the game, but we ended our otherwise perfect season with a 7-3 loss to the national champions in what was the showcase event of the era. Even Coach Clark couldn't find much displeasure to express on the long, black and blue trip back to Pullman.

With football over, and 1966 now under way, I had the rest of the winter to canvas the students, faculty and staff here at Pullman. I had a crazy idea of managing to save the entire faculty and staff, and with the facility, faculty and staff intact, we could maintain the university on some level as a place of learning. Only time would tell if that dream was possible or not. I went to every function, event, gathering, get-together, luncheon and tea I could, and when I did, I schmoozed to high heaven. I was the glad-hander's glad-hander.

Professor Belmont, my History teacher cornered me at a faculty luncheon just before the start of the baseball season. "Mr. Kendall, is it just me, or do I see you at a lot of these functions?"

"You do, Professor," I answered, trying to be non-committal.

"Are you planning to run for office some day Kendall?"

"I may," I offered. "I definitely plan on living somewhere on the Columbia River, and I do want to be known as more than an athlete by the time I'm done with college."

"Well, you have the handshake down pat, and you seem earnest enough," the professor said, with the undertones of a silent 'harumph' in it. He smiled slightly though before adding, "Be careful around some of these old lions, they'll peg you for a sycophant, and your grades will suffer for it. Particularly with your increasing notoriety as an athlete."

"Thank you Professor, I'll be working pretty hard to avoid that happening. I'm physically gifted and love football and baseball, but they are not the most important things in my life. Not even in the top three."

"So you've shown in my class. Keep up the good work."

I had a lot of respect for Professor Belmont. History class was still a lot of mindless memorization, but on top of that, he encouraged honest discussions about the real world events and conditions that surrounded them. Some of it was pretty entertaining, but he would always fire back with a good overview of the social, cultural and political realities of that day that helped you to understand why things happened the way they did. Granted, when the events were from five hundred years in the past, sometimes those explanations didn't help all that much, but at least he was offering some, which was far more than I'd come to expect from Mr. Spier back at Hermiston High.

The expectations going into the start of the baseball season were very different than those of the football team. The Cougars had won the AAWU 'North' championship the previous year and the returning players expected to win it again this year. Coach Brayton was a home grown hero, having played three sports at WSU, becoming the school's first ever All-American selection as a shortstop in 1947. We were not coming into this team as saviors, we were coming in as more fuel for the already dynamic Cougar dynamo.

We'd lost All-American John Olerud Sr., who'd graduated the previous year, but we still had Dale Ford, who looked to have one of those kind of years, and we had coach Brayton. In our first series, I saw action only as a pinch hitter, getting called on twice, grounding out the first time, but belting a very satisfying double over the second baseman's head in the bottom of the seventh.

I won't bore you with the details of the season. The baseball season was nowhere near as exciting as football had been. I got to play some, knocked the ball around a bit, and basked in the glory that was a well oiled baseball machine loaded with legitimately good talent already and coached by someone who was already something of a legend on the Palouse.

We were knocked out of the College World Series by Ohio State, the eventual champions, who had a great team, setting us down solidly, 8-4 in our final game of the year.

-oOo-

The summer of 1966.

I'd have loved to spend it being young and in love, but I had other things to do. I had spent the previous summer traveling the region shaking hands at churches services, quilting bees, county fairs and every flee market and roadside stand we came across. Dad's Peace Corp summit was scheduled to begin at the end of this one, and to get ready, I had several dozen people I had to visit, all across the country. People with skills who didn't know how valuable this made them. Blacksmiths, glass blowers, millers and weavers, coopers and wheelwrights, tanners and teamsters. Not the teamsters we think of today, the union guys who unloaded ships and handled freight, the old fashioned kind — drovers and muleskinners, men who could handle horses and mules in teams.

Dad, with Mr. Argus' assistance, had spent the past few years identifying the country's leading experts and craftsmen, and together, had spent some time making a list of who to try to reach.

We began that journey with something personal. Dad, Mom, Greta and I, flew back east to Boston. Grandma Kendall lived in MarbleHead, Massachusetts, in a yellow house that sat on a bluff and overlooked the sea.

When we arrived, Grandma had everything packed and put away carefully, The house was empty except for Grandma and her best friend Emily. The two of them sat, calmly sipping tea as if nothing was about to happen. We had a nice visit with the two of them before Dad and I left for Portsmouth to meet our first craftsman, Peter Martens, a sail maker. Greta gave me a kiss and told me not to worry, they'd take good care of Grandma Kendall and see her home safely. GRandma had been insistent that I NOT touch her friend Emily.

"I can't convince her to come with me, and she would wind up left alone here, a helpless old woman with a kind heart and nothing else." Grandma had said, then leaned in to confess, "When I tried to insist, she accused me of being a lover of women and wondered if I was planning on sneaking into her bed once she had me away from home."

She laughed when she saw my jaw drop at that, and must have decided I was ready for more of the same. "I've been to the isle, and its a pleasant enough place, but lacking a few amenities which I had always preferred."

"The isle?" I'd asked.

"Sapphos, dear by," She's anwered, patting my cheek. "Really, I hadn't thought you were so sheltered, what with all those previous lives sharing things."

Calculated to have that effect or not, I began to see my gentile grandmother in a new light.

The trip to Portsmouth was a quick one, and Peter Martens was a cheerful, pleasant person who didn't believe a word of what Dad and I told him. Unfortunately, I wasn't remembering anything from the news of the day that could be useful in convincing him, or anyone else. He shook our hands anyway, and I asked him to remember us when the time came.

We had debated the practicality of revealing what we knew to those people we were meeting, and decided in the end it was our only option. The people back in Pullman lived nearby and were a large self-contained group. They didn't need to know everything up front to survive. These craftsmen were going to be spread all across the country, and it was important to us to give them a chance to judge for themselves and come with us ahead of the impending event. Peter Martens had been the first disappointing test of our story.

Hugh Schmolk was our second test, in Plattsburgh, New York. Hugh was an old school blacksmith and metal worker who had been teaching a generation of blacksmiths sprinkled across the entire eastern seaboard.

Strangely, he believed us almost right away. When we got to the part about my having returned from 2007, he had a question immediately.

"So, my friend from the future. Do we have men on Mars by 2007?"

"No," I answered, "we had probes, including several very successful mobile probes - wheeled vehicles, that had been sending back incredible stuff, and an orbiting satellite, but no men had been sent to Mars."

"Why not?"

"Well, mostly money, I think," I answered. "I didn't follow things any more closely than the average American, maybe less, but I think it was mostly a matter of the cost."

"The Moon?"

"Yes, we did put men on the moon. More than once." I answered.

"Who was the first?" He asked.

"An astronaut named Neil Armstrong. July 20th, 1969." That was one date I didn't have any trouble remembering.

"You don't say," and just like that, he was on board. Who knew that an old-school blacksmith who had been tucked into the Adirondacks for forty some years would have been a space nut. Hugh Schmolk was.

We left Hugh packing his things into his truck. He planned to drive to Batavia, New York and take the train from there.

"My daughter Alicia lives in Batavia with her husband Nick," Hugh told us. "The both of them are already well trained blacksmith's apprentices, and they've got nothing to tie them down. Nick describes the place as halfway between nowhere and nowhere special', and 'Licia agrees."

We gave him all the contact information he would need to get in touch with the folks back home and took off for Clifton, Tennessee. We actually took pretty much the same route Hugh was probably going to take, but we kept going along the southern shore of Lake Erie until we got to Toledo and then headed south on what was supposed to be I-75, but it seemed like the signs changed from interstate to state and back again very frequently, and I was never sure exactly which we were on. Dad was doing the navigating, and I gladly left it up to him.

Clifton, Tennessee was the home of Homerus Gilead, muleskinner. Homerus was a 'tobacco-spitting, son-of-a-preacher-twice-over, no account reject of the army', and that was his own self description. He was a bow-legged, hairy cuss, that was my description. He listened to our spiel, smiled and spit.

"Dunno 'xacly what all that means, but you need mules and a skinner. If'n ya got good greenbacks, I'm your man."

So we didn't so much recruit Homerus, as hire him, but once the event happened, perhaps he'd be a little more receptive. Moving his three dozen or so mules was once again a task for the railroads, but Clifton's location on the Tennessee River made moving the animals by barge much cheaper and easier, so their trip started out a little bit the wrong direction, headed down the Tennessee to Florence, Alabama before beginning the railroad leg.

We spent several days in and around Clifton, mostly arranging to pay for the various legs of the trip he was going to have to make and helping him stock up on supplies. He was bringing all three of his daughters, and eight grandchildren with him. It appeared that the Gilead clan was moving west.

After Zigging south to Tennessee, it was time to zag back north to Carthage, Illinois to find Ira Neatham, a glassblower and bottle maker with a deep background in both the art and science of making glass. Ira was a hard-nosed businessman who took what he was doing and where he was doing it way too seriously. He barely gave us the time of day, so we scratched him off our list and moved on, hoping that the handshakes I'd spread around his plant would pay off later.

It was a relatively short jump from there to Fergus Falls, Minnesota to meet Jack Barclay, trapper, tanner, furrier and, if the stories we'd heard were true, a dog-musher.

Jack was fifty three, had a bad leg and a hacking cough that he said was from too many years of inhaling tanning fumes. His shop in the outskirts of Fergus Falls was a marvel of old stonework and clay, "but in the winter its colder than hell everywhere more than three feet from the stove," Jack told us. All we had to promise him was a new shop with a real heating and cooling system, and a promise to accept two of his apprentices.