They Made It

My nearest second-hand bookshop is in a small town five or six miles away. Like many traditional small-town shops it wears many hats. Downstairs at the front are stationery and artists’ materials, upstairs are second-hand books, while the downstairs back is devoted to a small, private, pleasantly ramshackle printing museum. It was there, in a shop of a kind she would have recognized and loved, that I found my copy of Charlotte Paul’s Minding Our Own Business. In it she wrote about the first five years during which she and her husband Ed owned and ran a small American country printing firm, the Falls Printing Company, and its associated newspaper, The Snoqualmie Valley Record. (She was Charlotte Paul Reese by birth, Charlotte Groshell by marriage, Charlotte Paul as a writer.)

Minding Our Own Business reads like the script for an early Capra movie and one of the pleasures of reading it is in trying to cast it from the Hollywood actors of the day. Jimmy Stewart would certainly be Ed, the idealistic, unrealistic, disaster-prone innocent of a hero, who nevertheless eventually triumphs. Katie Hepburn might just about – but less certainly – be Charlotte, whose vulnerability is masked by sharp observation and acid one-liners. There would also have been relishable parts for dozens of character actors, from Elisha Wood Jr to Sydney Greenstreet, and even two heart-tugging, scene-stealing parts for whichever child-actors were hired to play the Groshells’ small sons, tough little Hi (clearly the young Micky Rooney) and his even tinier sidekick, Johnny. The Groshells were working in Chicago as, respectively, a successful journalist and a successful journalist who was tentatively turning herself into a short-story writer and novelist when in 1949, on impulse and almost overnight, they changed their lives completely. When they moved to rural Washington on the other side of the continent, and from safe pensionable jobs with big firms to the perils of running their own small business, they were looking backwards as well as westwards.

We had heard for twenty years that it was too late to go back to the days when a man and his family could buy a small business and make a go of it . . . The big outfits squeeze you out . . . There used to be a place for daring and independence, but the world has changed . . . We hadn’t listened. We had gone back, in a sense, to the farm where everyone who sat down at the dinner table had some part in providing the food he raised to his mouth.

The Snoqualmie Valley lies at the foot of the Cascade Mountains, thirty miles east of Seattle – and in those days about fifty years behind it. One of the Valley’s oldest residents then, Mrs Olive Quigley, had been only the third white child ever born in the valley. She remembered going to school ‘when daily routine included sending some agile pupil out to climb a tree to see if a war party of Yakima Indians was coming’. All the boys knew that if they reported ‘Yakimas are coming!’ the teacher would send everyone home. ‘This had the effect of sharpening . . . eyesight to the point where [they] often saw Indians that weren’t there, for the Yakimas never came.’ The valley’s fir- and cedar-covered slopes, green meadows and ice-cold river made an ideal backdrop for the Groshells’ journey into a new yet old life. Along the river was strung a chain of small towns – North Bend, Snoqualmie, Meadowbrook, Snoqualmie Falls, Fall City, Carnation (yes, where the milk comes from), Novelty, Vincent, Stillwater, Duvall, Preston, Cedar Falls. Their inhabitants went a long way – an improbably long way, perhaps – to providing the old-time warmth and interdependence the Groshells had hoped to find. For example, in those days in such places most lavatories were outside. In winter, frozen solid during storms, they became unusable. Such was the situation once when the Groshells themselves were away and their sons, 4 and 6 years old at the time, had been left in the care of Ort, their rather prissy advertising manager. At which point 4-year-old Johnny decided he just couldn’t wait. The only inside lavatory Ort knew of was in the bank across the street. To get to it they had to go through a meeting of the bank’s board of directors. Ort tried to stammer an explanation.

‘I . . . the little boy . . . excuse me . . . he . . .’ At that point Johnny straightened out the president of the bank, the vice-president, the manager, and five members of the board of directors, as to just what it was he had to do. ‘Come right in,’ the bank president said quickly. ‘Right straight through, and to your right.’

Not that things were always quite as rosy as they seemed. There was the occasion when, coming back to the shop late one afternoon, Charlotte and Ed found waiting for them an admiring subscriber, a gentle, smiling, bespectacled little man, a quiet eccentric named Walter Peden, who lived in a tiny hamlet in the woods, alone except for his menagerie of animals. When she returned from buying groceries, Charlotte found Walter and Ed

talking, hands in pockets, like farmers on a street corner Saturday afternoon. The country editor and the faithful subscriber – they fitted perfectly into the peaceful scene. The dogs were asleep in the street, the sparrows were settling themselves in their nests under the roof, and down the block a group of eight or ten children playing Run, Sheep, Run, froze at the shrill call, ‘Jim-ee! I told you, come in and wash up for dinner.’ I sighed contentedly. Thank God for peace, I thought to myself, thank God for old-fashioned neighbourliness, and thank God for a place like this in which to bring up our children.

Soon afterwards, though, this apparently harmless little man became mad rather than merely eccentric, and shot his own dog and four men, one of whom subsequently died. Walter was only an extreme example of the many strange forms of individuality bred by life in rural small towns. Indeed, there seem to have been more forms of human grotesquerie in the Snoqualmie Valley than even an aspiring novelist could have hoped for. There was Verne Roberts, for example, ex-prize-fighter (or, in his own words, ‘canvas inspector’), logger, prospector and fisherman.

For years he had some of the outer attributes of a family man, such as a house and a wife. ‘I may not have the best lawn in North Bend,’ he admitted, ‘but it’s the tallest.’ The house rose unpainted and untended out of a sea of slug-infested weeds, but when a neighbour complained that the creatures . . . were now moving over into his garden, Verne replied, ‘If you don’t like my slugs, you’d better get some of your own.’

Violet, hired by the Groshsells as a live-in housemaid, might have made even Verne toe the line. Six feet tall and weighing in at 250 lbs, she had worked as a cook in logging camps so spoke in a roar designed to be audible above a gang-saw and ‘fried everything except cornflakes’. She dusted under double beds by lifting up the whole bed with one hand while wielding a dust-mop with the other, and put the bed back in place simply by dropping it. Result: end of bed – and, soon, end of Violet. As mere writers, the Groshells also had to rely on a succession of wildly untrustworthy itinerant jobbing printers. There was Mr De Marco, for example, who first appeared ‘wearing a pair of brown trousers, a dark-blue suit coat with sleeves which ended just above his bony wrists, and a straw hat. His face was as haphazard as his costume; the features should never have been thrown together in the first place and were simply making the most of a bad situation. His smile was wide and friendly, but it seemed to be directed at someone standing just behind and to the right of you, and his eyes had the same trouble deciding what to light on.’ Mr De Marco disappeared the moment he had money in his hand. Among his successors, crippled Jim together with his blind wife Bessie and, later, ‘the ace Linotype operator’ Ray Darrow didn’t merely disappear, they disappeared in cars innocent Ed had lent them the money to buy. The Record itself was always likely to disappear, as their overstretched finances and Ed’s grand schemes and unbusinesslike ways had them teetering on the edge of ruin throughout their ‘first five year plan’ for becoming solvent. Hence, early on, his succession of stress-induced heart-attacks and bouts of crippling shingles. And, as in any good Capra movie, there was a dramatic illness for the Groshells’ sons as well – though of course their skirmishes with polio were heroically endured and eventually overcome. At least in the eyes of their adoring mother, Hi and Johnny seem to have been as loathsomely good as any child in Dickens and as cute as any kid in Capra. Hi’s post-polio address to his admiring classmates stands comparison with any of the great literary stomach-turners. As far as Charlotte is concerned, though, her sons are magnificently modest stoics and miniature models of American getup-and-go. In moments of crisis, they help fold newspapers and put them in envelopes. They diss type. They sell subscriptions. They set up their own printing firm, with cast-off machinery from the newspaper office. Hi, by then aged 9, even begins to write his own front-page column for the Record, the little monster, and eventually wins a State prize for it. As with the sons, so with the parents. After all the disasters caused by untrustworthy machines and men and by their own ignorance, they too eventually win through to acceptance by their neighbours and triumph over their difficulties. At the end of their first five years – at the beginning of which another editor-owner had told them, ‘If you survive that long, they’ll have to shoot you to get rid of you’ – the book finishes with all four Groshells embracing while the parents cry, ‘We made it.’ Charlotte Paul adds in a coda, though, that this is really (and here, surely, in that sadly unmade film of her book the narrator’s voice-over would have ridden triumphantly above the music’s gentle but rousing surge) ‘a story without an ending because living happily ever after goes on and on’. And fade . . . They don’t, they really don’t, make ’em like that any more.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 21 © Tim Longville 2009