Darrington, Wa

When we moved to Darrington, we moved into this house on what I always remembered as "Star Route". Using Google now, all I can find is "State Route" Has this been my mistake all these years> I guess so. Wow.  Anyway, after we moved here, Ben took us all to a "Tarheel picnic, where the would be swimming, food and lots of people including kids. I tried to make firneds  with them but they threw mud and rocks at me. Welcome to Darrington.

 

Somebody who lived here before us must have had a BB Gun, because I found BB's everywhere. I began collecting them and saving them, probably looking forward to the day I could have my first BB gun.

 

I saw lots of garter snakes and had a neat pocket knife, mom probably gave it to me. Ben had purchased a Restaurant  with a partner, Lerot Hasenyager, and they named it the "Benroy". I liked it because I could have hamburgers with lots of ketchup. I wasn't fat yet, but was well on my way. I didn't fit in with the local kids and had unlimited burgers at my finger tips. Recipe for disaster.

 

I was in the third grade, which was a mobination class. Half was third-graders, and the other half was fourth-grade kids. Mrs. Christensen was my teacher and I was a difficult student. I refused to do my work, I got in fights and one day she slammed a stack of National Geographics on my desk and said if I did not want to participate, I could just sit and look at magazines. Fine with me at the time.

 

I remember going to a football game on Friday night. I think Sonya's boyfriend was playing, maybe Brad Green.

 

Another night, while everybody was gone, I stayed home and watched the new fall line-up of Saturday morning cartoons.

 

I had a Star-Trek model Enterprise that mom let me order from one of Sonya's Johnson Smith Co. Catalogs. They had all kinds of novelties and funstuff and we loved ordering things from them.

 

I had one of the most terrifying nights of my life here. I already had scary fantasies about monsters and such, but this house had baseboard heating that makes a rattling/clicking sound as it heats up. I was unfamiliar with that, so one night, laying in bed, I started hearing the heat coming on, but in my mind it was little monsters coming up the stairs from the basement. (Our first basement, too) I just about shit. I was convinced there was an army of demon-insect-monster things marching up the stairs...good lord I was a disturbed kid.