My Sister Lois

Its hard to talk about Lois without first talking about our mother Goldie.  Goldie was born in Eminence, MO in May 1915 to King Isaac McKinnon (aka Ike) and Josephine (Josie) Davis McKinnon.  Goldie had 3 older sisters including Faye, Mabel, Hazel and at least one younger brother Theodore (Teddy).  I think its likely Teddy was gay, though no one ever said that in so many words.  

Josie died of Leukemia in 1930 when Goldie was 15.  After Josie’s death Ike became his own best customer for his illegal whiskey, and, shortly after that became “too interested” in his younger daughters, Hazel and Goldie.  Consequently Hazel and Goldie moved to St. Louis and lived with Faye and her husband Olan for awhile.  During this time Goldie and Hazel worked as cigarette packers at the Leggett-Mayer tobacco company in St. Louis. It was in St. Louis during  the early ‘30’s that “the girls” (Hazel and Goldie) met “the boys” (John and William). I want to say they were married in 1932.  This union would occur during the deepest days of the Great Depression.  William, had already been West, riding the rails, doing odd jobs, being arrested for vagrancy or trespassing in various towns, doing municipal convict work, so he had some knowledge about what awaited the four when they went West.  The couples also did jobs as they found them, including working the woods in New Mexico near Taos…the men working at falling and choker-setting, the women working in the kitchen and dining hall.  Part of their wage included food, and lodging in the rail-road “dormitory-cars” which were boxcars turned living quarters.  Later, William got a job painting structures at the Air Force Base which would become Davis Monthan AFB in Tucson.  I believe both couples moved on to Tucson together.

My sister Lois was born in Tucson, AZ in December 1935.  At that time my parents, Bill and Goldie, lived in Tucson with John and Hazel.  About 18-months after my sister was born Hazel and John Karns would produce a baby boy and name him Wayne.  Lois and Wayne would become life-long friends, and she would see Wayne for the last time in July 1991 on a trip to St. Louis in which Lois and I took Papa to visit his surviving sisters, a short while before he died. They, Wayne and Lois, were “double-Cousins.”  I know very little about the family between 1935 and 1943. I know my father had moved to look for work in the dryer climate of Southern Arizona due to his Tuberculosis, which later went into remission as do approximately 25% of cases. He claimed to have been healed on a specific night involving laying-on of hands at the Tucson Assembly of God, and, was simultaneously “called” to preach the gospel, which eventually led Bill, Goldie, and Lois to migrate North to Montana where Bill and Goldie would pastor a start-up Assembly of God church in Dillon.  I was born there in November 1943.  Lois was seven-years old, about to be eight.  John, Hazel, and Wayne had moved back to the mid-West where the little family broke up, Hazel became a lifelong victim, and John went off to find fresh flesh.  Wayne was embittered by the divorce, and felt abandoned and largely ignored by his father.

Lois and I often talked about the fact that each of us was an “only child.” She had 8-years of singular attention, and I had 8-years without a sibling after she and Leroy married in February 1954.  It should be noted that Goldie had a stillborn delivery somewhere between Lois’ and my births.  My earliest direct memories of Lois start in Kendrick, ID in 1946 or 1947.  Our father was pastoring another Assembly of God church there.  My earliest memory of Lois is hearing and seeing my mother become very upset when a neighbor with a telephone came rushing over to say that Lois had been taken from school to the doctor’s office because she had broken an arm on the “monkey-bars.”  In my 3 or 4 year old ignorance I envisioned a broken arm as similar to breaking a branch on a tree, her limb freely dangling. To my disappointment, when she got home she was wearing a plaster cast, and her arm was not dangling, and swinging freely.  As far as I know, this was the first time I had to consider that words were often vague and ambiguous.

I don’t know why we left Kendrick.  In fact, I never truly knew for sure why we left any of the 36 towns we would live in.  But, leave we did and by deduction I believe we went from Kendrick, to a wide spot in the road East of Spokane (Post Falls), then back to Tucson, where we lived in an itinerant cabin court at the intersection of Oracle Road and The Miracle Mile. This would have been 1948 and part of 1949.  The cabins were fashioned from cinder-block, on concrete slab foundations. They had running water, and hand-pumped device,  screened windows without glass, no heat or air conditioning, 1 bedroom with a door, an indoor toilet and tub, and an open living/diningroom/kitchen, where Lois and I shared a cot by the front door, or maybe it was folding ‘roll-away’ bed…unfortunately for her I regularly and copiously wet the bed.  I recall that many of the tenants worked in the citrus fields near Oracle Road, just North of our intersection.  We attended the Assembly of God church where my dad had been “healed” and where he had been “called.”  Reverend Gilmore and his “wing-nut” wife Fanny Mae Gilmore, were still the pastors.  My Dad was an unpaid assistant pastor, who was allowed to sit on the platform at Sunday services.  It was at this time in Tucson that Lois came out as my champion, though quite often she was the informer who got me whipped.

Several boys in the cabin court cornered me in a vacant part of the desert near the cabin court and sexually molested me.  I can still smell their cheesy crotches, and taste the slightly saline penises in my mouth.  In spite of the memory, I was not traumatized.  The memory seems mostly benign.  It wasn’t a violent assault. I simply just didn’t know what was happening, or even that it shouldn’t be happening.  

I casually told my sister about it. She had the common sense, as did my parents whom she told, to not come “unglued” in my presence.  Point being, for a while  it didn’t occur to me that anything important had happened.  However, a day or so after this event, at the school bus stop in front of the court’s convenience store, Lois encountered the “ring leader” of the group, picked him up (literally) off the ground by his hair and threw him repeatedly into the hot pavement of the parking lot, promising him certain and sudden death if he or they ever touched her brother again.  I saw her in a whole new light starting then.  Here was someone who was unapologetically, irrationally, unconditionally on my side.  That “thread” persisted until her death.  I knew Lois was on my side, and when Jennifer and I married, Jennifer was automatically included in the deal.  Jennifer and I have often talked of the times that Lois was there for us…a bridge-loan til payday, a borrowed car when ours broke down, a place for Kim to stay when the sitter fell through, or just a friendly, tolerant, non judging presence on the phone when I was scared and about to fly to the Philippines to board my first Navy ship, or our world had turned to shit for some other reason.  So the molestation event would have been 1949.  Lois would be married and gone in another 5 years.

I entered school the first time in the 1st grade in Lewiston, ID probably in 1950 when I was about to be 7 years old, making Lois 14.  We lived in a shotgun shack on Snake River Road, which was on the road which formed the levee for the Snake River flood plain on the outskirts of Lewiston. Lois and I walked up the hill behind our house to our respective schools.  When Lois left the house and walked up the hill there was a particular point at which she stopped, fished in her purse for a mirror and make-up and adorned herself for school. Makeup was verboten at that time, for her, in my family.  I doubt Goldie would have denied use to Lois if she (Goldie) was using it, so I’m assuming this was one of Papa’s “holiness” rules, one of many involving all the sins of “the world” real and imagined.  Lois would often encounter me at the end of the school day, and walk me home. When she didn’t, I considered it an opportunity to use my dubious discretion, which is a euphemism for ‘getting in trouble’.  For instance, one Christmas season I was stealing ornaments off the graves in a cemetery which was on our route home from school.  

From Lewiston, we moved to Thurston, Oregon in time to start the 2nd grade, which probably put Lois in Springfield High School as a 10th grader.  We lived in an itinerant cabin court near the boundary of East Springfield and Thurston, but left there during the school year for a house on D Street in Springfield nearer Lois’s highschool, and resulting in my changing schools.  It was here that Lois contracted rheumatic fever, and developed a heart murmur, starting the cardiac progression that likely ultimately cost her life.  I had just started Cub Scouts, but dropped out when our family and house were quarantined by the city’s health department.  Lois was my baby sitter after my school day ended, thereby assuring that she could not take part in after school activities.  Nana was working afternoons and nights at a nursing home across the bridge in Eugene to augment my Dad’s income from painting. This time in our history was our first contact with the Four Square organization.  We attended church less than two blocks from our house, where my dad assisted as invited.  This contact becomes important later in the story.

Writing this now reminds me of how little Lois and I talked about our family’s conditions, the ceaseless moving, and the consequent poverty which accompanied that lifestyle.  It was a given back then. Complaining would be as absurd as griping about Gravity, or sunrise.  But, I know our life was doubly tough on her, partly because she was a girl, and more social.  But, largely because she was an older girl, and a heavier burden of responsibility and accountability was placed on her.  She was often the glue that made things work.  She was early home from school so Goldie could be gone and making a few bucks as a housecleaner or attendant at a nursing home.  When other girls were practicing with the Cheer Club after school, Lois was hurrying home to intercept me when I got out of school.  That’s one example, but there were many. She was always the third adult that helped life function in the constant poverty, which I believe was created by the constant moving, and the constant search for the “center” of God’s will.  After Goldie died, Lois became more forthright about her own feelings regarding our lifestyle.  I felt that Goldie’s death allowed Lois permission, finally, to express her displeasure.  No need for a loyal, solid front any longer.

We left Springfield in 1953 for Cortez, CO.  Papa announced that, “This is where we’re going to stay!  We bought furniture on “credit” which was the first and only time I ever saw Papa allow the use of revolving credit.  But, a couple months into our stay, during a regular phone call home by Goldie to St. Louis, MO, we found that a member of my Dad’s family was terminal.  My father’s youngest brother Charles had Type I Diabetes and was terminal.  Medical technology had yet to develop ways to scrub toxins from the blood and urine, and patients like Charles could qualify for only limited units of blood replacement.  Charles, at 28 years old, was near losing his battle…so we we left the key under the mat, called the furniture store and told them where they could fetch their items, and went to be with Charles and his wife Edna, during his final months. 

My Dad and Mom were heartbroken.  Charles was not only the baby, he was (everyone agreed) the favorite son.. I joined the 3rd grade in progress, as I remember, which means Lois would have joined her 11th grade already in progress.  It was not the first school year that Lois and I would appear at a new school after the “clicks” had already formed and exclusion was the habit of the herd.  The teachers tried to help, but usually that resulted merely in undesirable attention by the ‘townies’.  Again, it was just a “given.”

When Charles died in 1953 we finished up school and headed for the West. Papa had been making excellent money working in a production spray booth shooting shellac onto large caliber artillery casings at the Small Arms factory.  Remember, the Korean War was in progress, and had been for some time, and America’s economy thrives during war; war in the U.S. raises the economies of even unskilled labor.  We left core family, both Karns and McKinnon, good paying jobs, a 4-plex on a sunny, tree lined Blair Avenue, and Lois’s teen employment at a  “five & dime” in a business district a few blocks away.  I think we went to Lander, WY. I’m not sure why, but we stayed there for only a few weeks, then set sail for (I think) Western Washington.

I don’t know how many moves occurred between 1949 in Tucson, and February 1954 when Lois and Leroy married and we all separated, but there were several different, short-stay towns.  One of the final moves involving Lois was to the Grays Harbor area, and specifically Aberdeen, WA. My Dad linked up with a Four-Square Church minister. We attended his church for a while, and in that congregation was a young man, discharged from the Marines not too long before, named Leroy Seeley.  As a child of maybe 8 or 9 I was awestruck by a large, burgundy colored birthmark on his face.  Lois never saw it.  To the day she died, I never heard her speak about it, and after a few weeks I never again perceived Leroy as having a birthmark.  The Pastor at Aberdeen helped get my Dad connected with church officials, who appointed him to pastor a “broken” church in Colville, WA.  It was a Four Square church with at least two warring families who would rather see the church disintegrate than give an inch to their church enemies.  As a child,  I was entirely unaware of the mutual attraction between Lois and Leroy, until we all began living together in Colville, WA. A few weeks after we moved from Aberdeen, Leroy showed up, got a job at the local Safeway, and became our boarder.  When the church ‘split’ then fired my Dad and we moved to Monterrey, CA Leroy, in his little Studebaker moved with us, and became a boarder at our next house.  The neighboring city, Pacific Grove, was where he and Lois would marry a few months later, in February 1954.

I believe Lois and Leroy stayed until Lois finished up her senior year at Pacific Grove High School.  After that school year ended, the two families went their own ways.  Lois and Leroy ultimately went to Los Angeles where Leroy worked as a photographer for Douglas Aircraft.  I seem to remember that Lois worked for Bell Telephone as a commercial account rep, and of course, the major event was that Jeanie was born.  The three of us, Papa, Nana, and me visited several times over the months and years including speeding toward LA, but still managing to be a little late for Jeanie’s birth.  We visited at other times as well.  By the time Nana, Papa, and I lived in Santa Barbara during 1959 we, or the three Seeley, made the 100 mile trip between Santa Barbara and LA.  I don’t recall the exact year, probably 1961, Lois, Leroy, and Jeanie stopped off for a one night stay at our house in Springfield, OR…they were moving from LA to UP/Tacoma.  I don’t recall if their immediate destination was the house on Olympic or if that came later.  I know they bought the Olympic property from an older couple in the UP church who helped “shoehorn” them into that wonderful house and location where they would spend their years until moving to Taylor Bay.

During the ‘60’s, I boarded with Lois, Leroy, Jeanie and eventually Davie.  I was home on Leave and met baby Judy during her brief stay on the big-ride…and, I know that her tragic death from a birth defect changed Lois forever, and probably Jeanie as well.  Lois blamed herself for the death…maybe not aloud, but in the silence and darkness when she awoke at night, she blamed herself…and, for the first time in my experience of Lois, “Satan” put in an appearance in her Cosmos.  She told me directly that sometime after Judy died, whether in a dream or what I don’t remember, Satan laughed and jeered at her for Judy’s death.  I didn’t know what to say. I hope I said nothing, because there’s no rational response to her claim.  I wrote it off to anguish and despair.  So, briefly, in 1962 between my high school graduation and Navy bootcamp I stayed with Lois, Leroy and Jeanie in UP.  Again, in July 1966 til probably May or June of 1967 I stayed with the Seeley’s, fully paying my way with room and board. I was working at Ft Lewis for the Department of the Army in a Classified Crypto/communications position at the Logistics Center.

Jennifer and I married in early 1968.  Lois accepted Jennifer as a sister, in every sense of the word…and to this day, Lois occupies a place of respect, gratitude, and grace in Jennifer’s memories.  Neither of us can come up with a complaint regarding Lois’s presence or actions in our life.  I personally think that somehow Goldie’s sense of “grace” was passed on to Lois.  They were different, but Lois’s spirit of tolerance and grace was very Goldie-like.

Lois and I were spiritually/emotionally close, even as we were comfortable with our physical and temporal distance. “I’ll see ya when I see ya” was our usual parting exchange.  We spoke on the phone, but not often.  We visited Taylor Bay infrequently over the years.  Its hard to explain how it was sufficient for each of us to just know the other was “out there.”  And, now she’s not out there.  I felt the loss tremendously, and have continued to experience the slow ache of absence.  I cherish her in my life, though I seem less able to express what she means to me, and what she meant to me at each remembered age we had together.  Gratitude. The over-arching emotion is quite simply Gratitude.