Ch. 3, Two More Times

King only stayed in Portland for about 4 months before he boarded (hopped) the Union Pacific Railroad back to Omaha. Once there, he stayed a short while with his uncle Victor, but eventually ended up in the Riverview Home for Dependent Children. While there, King remembers meeting Imogene, a young girl who also lived there and worked in the home’s laundry facility. He also remembers attending school and being enrolled in “auto shop” where he was discouraged to find out that he would have to spend four years making canteens before he would have the opportunity to work with automobiles.

Faced with the prospect of making canteens for four years, King requisitioned a bicycle and rode out of town. He soon sold the bike, and hitchhiked to Basset Nebraska for a short visit with his younger siblings, Eleanor, Ralph, and Billy. From there, he traveled back to Eureka to see his brother Paul, and eventually talked Paul into accompanying him on his second excursion to the West Coast. This time, they went to Spokane. They did not stay long, and were soon on their way back to Bismarck where Paul got a job on a dairy farm, a job that he stayed with for the next few years.

By this time, King was 15 years old, and his restlessness caused him to embark on a third sojourn west, albeit by a circuitous southern route this time. At one point he ended up in McAlester, Oklahoma where he was confronted by a desolate landscape of abandoned farms (a result of the dust bowl) and unfriendly locals who did not welcome the intrusion of an outsider.

Making a hasty exit, he literally walked from McAllister to Oklahoma City, and from there he was able to make it to Salt Lake City, Utah, and then on to Sacramento and San Francisco in California. To support himself, King worked at the National Youth Authority (NYA) camps in the area, and even worked on a ferryboat in San Francisco Bay for a while. One day, the barge sank as it was being loaded, and King was barely able to escape the disaster. By now it was 1934, and King was approaching his 16th birthday.

Soon after the ferry sinking, King headed North to Oregon where he landed a job driving a milk route, though he had to pull some shenanigans to get a drivers license. During this time, he purchased a 1928 Buick and soon traded it in for a Moreland truck, which he used to haul logs for the Weyerhaeuser Company. This was May 24th, 1935, at the time of the sensational Weyerhaeuser kidnapping. It wasn’t long after this that the Weyerhaeuser workers went on strike and everyone found themselves unemployed. Unable to make the payments on his truck, King lost everything. These events caused King to head east again, and he soon found himself visiting his brother Paul at the dairy farm in Bismarck. He eventually found his way back to Eureka and spent a few months working for Emanuel Straub, the family who had taken in and abused King’ brother Mark.

The wanderlust was in him, and it wasn’t long before King’s eye was “on the road again.” He was approaching his 17th birthday when he embarked on his fourth and final trip to the West Coast. He hitched a ride with the Dais family, friends of the Straubs, who were on their way to “Dusty,” Washington for jobs helping with the harvest. He stayed with the migrant workers for the duration of the harvest, but when they returned home to Eureka South Dakota, King continued on, for the second time, to Portland Oregon, where the operator of the local YMCA was beginning to know him as a regular. During this short span of time, he met an accomplished piano player named Billy Brunton, and a worldly character by the name of Bob Coulier. Bob was a seaman, but was currently a “landlubber” working in restaurants. King struck up a friendship with Bob, and the two of them headed south to San Francisco where they spent some time working the restaurant circuit as “singing waiters,” potato peelers, or anything else they could do to earn a meal and rent money. Bob soon had them both signed up for a world cruise aboard a freighter heading toward Guam, but King decided to stay on solid ground, and Bob went off alone.

It wasn’t long after Bob’s departure that King’s brother Paul arrived in San Francisco, and with King having been in trouble with the local union officials regarding his work status, the two of them beat a hasty retreat, via the “midnight stage,” to Los Angeles. The “midnight stage” was an unusual phenomenon of the time that found many individuals establishing their own small bus-lines. It seems that the Great Depression had rendered large sedan automobiles almost worthless because of their gas guzzling nature and they could be purchased very cheaply. Many entrepreneurs seized this opportunity to start their own transportation companies, which were really just long-range taxi services.

Next: Losing a Friend