Life As I Knew It

I was born at midnight in our old farmhouse three miles north of Sandpoint, Idaho. According to my mother, I was actually born on the 26th, but Dad got the attending doctor drunk, and he wrote the wrong date on my birth certificate. Years later Mom told me that she paid the doctor in canned goods but felt she had been overcharged by at least two quarts of pickled beets.

 

Our little farm raised mostly stumps and a few weeds but otherwise didn’t amount to much, except it was a wonderful place for a boy to grow up. The farm was located in a valley between two ranges of the Rocky Mountains, the Selkirks and the Cabinets. Sandpoint was located on the shores of spectacular Lake Pend Orville, at that time one of the greatest fishing lakes in the country.

 

My mother was a country schoolteacher, usually teaching all eight grades in little one-room schools tucked away in remote mountain valleys. These were primitive places. The school at Squaw Valley was a one-room log cabin heated by an old barrel stove and lit by kerosene lanterns. Not only did Mom teach all eight grades there, she chopped the firewood, hauled the drinking water from the creek, shoveled the snow out of the path to the privy, handled all the janitorial duties, cooked and served hot lunches, put on school plays and assorted parties for the pupils, and on weekends, arranged card parties and dances for the adults of the community. Oh, and to some extent, looked after my sister, Patricia, and to an even lesser extent, me. Even though I was supposed to be one of Mom’s pupils in first and then second grade, I was pretty much allowed to come and go as I pleased. Indeed, I spent much more time messing about in the creek and in the surrounding woods than I ever did in school. I thought my mother and I were in perfect agreement on this arrangement, until I received my final report card at the end of second grade. My own mother had flunked me! The reason given: Too many absences! Mom explained later that her actual reason for flunking me was that she thought I was too immature for second grade. A likely story.

 

After my father died, when I was six, we moved back to our farm and Mom taught math at the junior high school in Sandpoint. My sister was very smart even skipped entire grades. I, on the other hand, distinguished myself as a student of unwavering mediocrity. Looking back, I don’t know why I didn’t apply myself in school, since I had to be there anyway. Although I put forth an absolute minimum of effort in school, I was not without ambition. From the age of six, I intended to be an artist, and I drew and painted constantly, turning out hundreds and probably thousands of drawings and paintings over my school years. Although I never became an artist, I think all the effort I poured into drawing and painting helped me greatly as a writer. There isn’t too much difference between painting with paints and painting with words, except the latter is a lot less messy.

 

By the time I was ten, my friends and I were already backpacking, usually up Schweitzer Creek, which tumbled down out of the mountains a couple of miles from our homes. The creek was tiny but the adventures large, with every dark night filled with imagined terrors. Never have I been so glad to be greeted by first light of morning than on those first trips up Schweitzer. I know now that those early outings were not only wonderful adventures but great training for life ahead, particularly in learning to control fear of the unknown. They have also provided me with a great deal of material for my writing.

 

While still in high school, I started working summers on the dams that were being built on the Clark Fork River. I drove trucks, serviced heavy equipment, assisted drillers, ran a jack hammer, and one year worked as a high scaler, a job which consisted of dangling from a rope over a steep cliff and clearing away loose rock. I loved it. Then one of the other high scalers got killed when a rock fell on him, and I decided I didn’t love high scaling anymore. I started thinking very seriously about going to college.

 

I saved enough money from construction work to get me through my freshman year at Washington State College (now Washington State University). Because my academic career so far had been distinguished only by its unrelenting mediocrity, I feared I might not be smart enough to survive in college. I started out as an art major but switched to English. My Freshman English Comp teacher, I’m sure, shared my view. Every week we had to write a little essay for his class. My first half dozen essays came back with F’s. Bit by bit, however, I became fascinated with writing and began to spend as much time on writing essays as I had once spent on drawing pictures. This diligence paid off with a major breakthrough: I received a d! Then came a C, a B, an A, several A’s and finally, on my last essay, an A-plus! There was also a note from the professor that he had recommended me for honors English the next semester. I was on my way to becoming a writer.

 

On February 3, 1954, I married my sweetheart, Darlene. It was supposed to be a week earlier, but my stepdad, Vic DeMers, died unexpectedly so we delayed the wedding until after his funeral. As it happened, our amended wedding date was a weekday so the majority of our intended guests couldn’t make it. Thus, the event was nearly entirely attended by children enrolled in the church’s school.

 

By this time I was totally focused on writing. During my sophomore year, I became a WSC campus correspondent for the Lewiston Morning Tribune, whose editor, Bill Johnston, was a nationally recognized editor and taught me much about journalism. I continued to do freelance features for the Tribune for the next few years. Due to a recommendation from Bill Johnston, my first job after college was as a police reporter for The Daily Olympian in the state capital, Olympia, Washington. I eventually became an editor for Washington State University, while working on my master's degree.

 

In 1959, I was hired by Eastern Washington State College (now Eastern Washington University) as an instructor in English and Journalism. At the same time, I was hired as a newsman at KREM television in Spokane, Washington. I continued doing freelance features for television stations and newspapers around the Pacific Northwest. By the late 1960's I was freelancing articles to numerous magazines, including factual articles published in TV Guide and Sports Illustrated. 

 

My writing schedule consisted of writing two hours a night, from 7:00 until 9:00, seven nights a week. One night, at eight o'clock, I finished an article on the use of telemetry in the study of wildlife. I still had an hour to go on my writing schedule, so for the last hour I decided to write a nonsense piece about the use of telemetry in the study of wildlife. The piece sold to Field & Stream Magazine for $300. "Wait a minute!" I thought. "That piece didn't require any photographs or research or anything but thinking, and I made $300 with it!” It was at that moment that I became a humor writer. It wasn’t too long after that that I became an Associate Editor for Field & Stream. When my friend Clare Conley became editor of Outdoor Life, I moved to that magazine as Editor-at-Large. Combined, I wrote for those two magazines for over forty years.

 

I have written many hundreds of humor pieces, including the "Last Laugh" column for Outdoor Life Magazine. My humor pieces have been collected in numerous books, some of which have been New York Times best sellers. I also wrote a children's book, Kid Camping from Aaaaiii! to Zip, and a book on the writing of humor, The Deer on A Bicycle; Excursions Into the Writing of Humor. I also followed a long-held ambition to write mystery novels: The Blight Way (2006), Avalanche (2007), The Double-Jack Murders (2009, The Huckleberry Murders (2010) Tamarack Murders (2013) and Circles in the Snow (2014). I even co-wrote a memoir-cookbook with my sister, Patricia Gass, titled Whatchagot Stew. I have written five plays which were widely performed by actor Tim Behrens in both the United States and Canada.

 

Over the years I am honored to have received numerous awards, including Centennial Scholar from Washington State University and the Trustees Medal from Eastern Washington University.

 

My wife, Darlene (Bun), handled all business and technical matters for our family for over 57 years. For a period of time we even wrote monthly blogs for our website. (These have been archived and we will share one each month in Kelly’s Bar & Grill. The first can be read here.)

 

Darlene and I had four daughters: Kelly (1955), Shannon (1956), Peggy (1961) and Erin (1969). We also had nine grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

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