How We Went to the Mountains, Part 2

DOWNIEVILLE

At summer’s end (1937), we moved to Downieville, where we lived for four more years. I started school, this time in a two-room schoolhouse, with four lower grades and four upper ones. Although it was my second year of school, I was skipped into the third grade, as I had completed the second grade curriculum in Sierra City the year before.

Our house, located just across the road from the county courthouse, had been the home of Judge Neville, who had recently died. Upon his demise, the judge, a bachelor, had willed the house to his secretary, Ruth Taylor, who became our landlady. An attractive two-story house, white with yellow trim and large windows, it stood at the end of the bridge, but considerably distanced from it on a high lot raised above the river. The road in front of our house was very steep; it was where the mountain began. Of the two front doors on the porch, one on the left opened into an office, where Mrs. Taylor still worked for the court.

The right-hand front door admitted into our quarters where all the rooms were arranged one after another; there was no hallway, so that you had to walk through each room to get to the next. First was the living room, then came the dining room, next the laundry with washtubs, and the bathroom to the left; last came the kitchen

In this kitchen also Mother set up her easel and continued her painting. The kitchen became her studio. Not only did she paint in oils, she did etchings and silk screening. She made Christmas cards and posters for Daddy’s operettas. She painted a magnificent large portrait of my brother Scotty at the age of four. She could take a pencil, move it around on paper, move it some more, and there would be revealed a person, an object, a scene beautifully rendered

School in Downieville

Those years in the Sierras were the time of my true and innocent childhood, when I was ages six to eleven. In these years we lived in one place. They were a time when I played freely and happily outdoors—our surroundings for the most part were safe.

My father, too, enjoyed his work. He found that he liked teaching, was good at it; he had an outlet for his music; he was writing music and operettas for school performances and the productions for the community. He also was interested in the people who lived in these mountains. He loved to go to the main street of town and listen to the stories that local characters told.

Flood, Part I

“I don’t like the look of it,” Mother said. “I can’t let you go back to school this afternoon.” At eight years of age, I had just finished my lunch and was ready to return to school across town, a ten-minute walk. A rainstorm had been raging all day. Rains and snowmelt were making the river rise. Giant logs, sometimes uprooted trees were tumbling along the river now. At this time, December 10, 1937, we were still living in Downieville, right where the North Fork and the South Fork of the Yuba River meet. The junction of the two forks of the river divides the town into three sections.

Daddy finished his lunch and left quickly to return to his classroom in the old Wells Fargo building in the center of town where he was teaching music for the high school.

Our house was in the section of town at the south of the river just west of the junction. It sat about 100 feet from the river’s edge on a raised terrace-like lot. From this location we always had a good view of the town, including the Wells Fargo building. A steel suspension bridge (Durgan Bridge) for autos and foot traffic crossed the river just at the point where the road passed the front of our house to begin a steep climb up the mountain. At the back of our house, out the kitchen window, one could see another bridge very nearby, a new, white one just recently built by the State of California. It was low and formed of three arches as it reached across the river. This bridge held my attention now.

To be continued next week...