A Look Back

My parents were Mabel and Frank McManus. Mom was born in Sandpoint, ID on a homestead off of Baldy Road and Dad was born in Bemidji, MN.

Our farmhouse was on the Bonners Ferry Highway, about three miles from town. There was no electricity in the area then. Milk and other perishables were kept in a box that had been dug into the ground. We had pigs and chickens and horses. My dad and I drove to town once in a wagon pulled by horses, and it made for a very long day. We went into a bar and my dad had a beer and set me up on the bar and the bartender gave me a bottle of pop.

When I was old enough, say third grade, I got books out of the library. We had a wonderful librarian. I think her name was Mary McKinnon. She was the librarian for many years. When I was in graduate school, I remember her being there and how fine the library was. For other entertainment, we played cards and many other games. When we got a radio, my grandmother and I listened to soap operas. I grew up listening to the radio comics, Jack Benny, Red Skelton, Bob Hope and many others. I think radio comics were the greatest influence on my own humor writing.

The buildings I remember from those days are the Courthouse, City Hall, a barbershop with its candy-striped pole, the Panida Theater, the Tam O’Shanter Bar, and the old Farmin School. There were a lot of gravel and dirt roads in town and around Sandpoint and a lot of nails on those roads. Flat tires were a common annoyance. Getting stuck in the mud was so common we didn’t even comment when it happened but simply got out and went to work getting unstuck.

The snow on the city streets was plowed up into a berm in the middle of the street. Then a large machine would load the snow onto trucks. The trucks would haul the snow to the Cedar Street Bridge over Sand Creek and dump it over the edge. As kids in the lower grades we would often “ski” down the hill of snow in our shoes.

One character was called “Charlie.” He was quite old but every day he would come striding into town from the group home he lived in out by the Great Northern tracks. He would go to each bar in town and would be given a free drink by each bartender. Then he would walk back to the home. A friend of mine told me once that a Farmin School teacher told his class that a Spanish-American War veteran was coming to class to speak to the students. Charlie came and spoke to the class. He was wearing an American officer’s uniform from the Spanish-American War.

My first job was building fences for a rancher named Hedland. I was 16 and worked for him most of one summer. He had a strong accent and would often tell me I needed to "vork" harder. 

The next summer I went to work on the Cabinet Gorge Dam. I worked as a “nipper,” a high scaler, and the person who fueled and greased the construction equipment, although not all at the same time. The next summer I worked as a groundsman conducting the transmission lines over the mountains from the Cabinet Gorge dam. That was how I made enough money for my first and second years of college. It was 20 years before I made that much money again.

The discipline in the schools was fairly harsh. I viewed some of the teachers as mean, some as very nice, some of them as great. Mrs. Hickey was our six-grade teacher. She was one of the great ones. All of the teachers in my later view, were well educated and very intelligent. Classrooms were orderly in both grade school and high school and I don’t recall a single instance in which a student was allowed to disrupt a class.

In all the time I was growing up, I can only recall one murder in Sandpoint. I don’t remember any other crimes. I started delivering the Spokane Daily Chronicle newspaper when I was in the fifth grade. I always took extra papers to sell in the bars. During the days of Farragut Naval Base on Lake Pend Oreille, there was one bar filled with women who were always dressed as if they were going to a party. They usually bought all of my extra papers. I loved those women!

I don’t know much about Sandpoint anymore. In my days there, it was a sleepy little logging town and later, when Farragut filled up with sailors, a loud and boisterous and exciting place. In those days, almost all the mothers worked at home and the men worked in the woods, for the railroads, as carpenters, etc. Even though the jobs didn’t pay much, they seemed readily available. The parents of all my friends owned their own homes and most people tended to be hard-working and self-sufficient. It seemed as if everybody raised rabbits and chickens. People knew all their neighbors and just about everything about them and their offspring. It was difficult for a kid to get away with anything. Sandpoint was a really nice place to grow up.

I began freelancing to newspapers and magazines while in college. After college, I worked as a daily newspaper reporter, television reporter, PR person, and university editor. After receiving my masters degree from WSU, in Pullman, WA, I was hired as an instructor in English by Eastern Washington University in Cheney, WA, where I eventually became a full professor. I took early retirement as Professor Emeritus in 1983. (Darlene said I couldn’t retire from teaching until I made as much money writing as I did teaching.)

I sold my first humor piece to Field & Stream Magazine about 1968 and became an Associate Editor in 1977. In 1982 I became an Editor-at-Large for Outdoor Life Magazine. I wrote monthly stories and columns for both magazines.

[At the time of this writing] I have written 24 books and four stage plays. Four of those books were on the New York Times bestseller list. The plays have been performed to over 1/2 million persons.

I married Darlene M. Keough in 1954, while still in college. I have four daughters and nine grandchildren.

As far back as I can remember, I have always 'seen funny '. What may horrify normal people may strike me as hilarious.

— Pat McManus
From The Deer on a Bicycle