Easy Company Soldier (2 page)

How I didn't bust myself all to hell is beyond me. I just remember trying to avoid hitting the concrete walkway and somehow surviving the jump with only minor injuries that I didn't dare confess to my mother, Helen. And, afterward,
believing more fervently in the law of gravity than in the ability of a five-foot-wide umbrella to float an eighty-pound kid fifteen feet to the ground.

Besides being one of the more daring kids in Astoria, I was the best marble player. As kids, we'd gather in vacant lots and shoot marbles, and I'd win over and over. On Saturday mornings, I'd stand on our front porch, and as kids came by, I'd toss back all the marbles I'd won from them during the week. I still remember some mother yelling at me, “You, Malarkey boy, come
here!
” Some of our games were for money, and I guess I'd won a little lunch money from her kid.

But marbles, if good business, weren't as exciting as more physical pursuits. My pals and I played war behind the house in a forest that seemed to stretch on forever. And I dreamed of someday playing football and basketball for Astoria High, the vaunted Fishermen, whose rival down the coast was the Seaside Sandfleas. Basketball, in particular, was big in Astoria; seems like every telephone pole had a rim nailed to it, though you had to be careful because much of the town was notched into a hill overlooking the Columbia River and a runaway ball could wind up at the fish canneries fourteen blocks away.

Astoria won three state basketball championships in the mid thirties. A couple of Astoria players on those teams, Bobby Anet and Wally Johanson, would go on to the University of Oregon and, in 1939, help the school win the first NCAA championship ever held. As a kid, I watched practically every game they played at Astoria High and wanted badly to play for the Fishermen someday.

Meanwhile, I not only thirsted for adventure, but found it. Winters in Astoria usually meant rain followed by more rain; seventy-inch years weren't uncommon. Growing up, I had no
less than eleven ear infections that required lancing because of our dank winters. Summers were far better, particularly a bit inland, where our family's tented cabin was on the Nehalem River, about thirty-five miles from town.

I would swim for what seemed like miles on a summer day up and down that river, my only audience the alder and fir and hemlock that lined the snaking waters. I imagined myself as an Indian living off the land. I'd row my boat upriver half a mile, make camp, build a fire, and stay the night. Trap chipmunks. Hunt with my yew-wood bow. Climb a ridge to Lost Lake. I was a curly-blond-haired Huck Finn, an independent cuss living the life of Riley.

Beyond the books I had to read at St. Mary's Star of the Sea School—and a few, about poetry, which I actually
liked
—there was one set that I buried my head in night after night: the
Bomba the Jungle Boy
series by Roy Rockwood. The books started coming out in the mid twenties just as I was learning to read. They included titles like
Bomba the Jungle Boy in the Swamp of Death
and
Bomba the Jungle Boy in a Strange Land.

I loved those books. I
lived
those books. I was the Bomba of Astoria, Oregon—at least in my mind. At the corner of Fifteenth and Madison, a massive growth of alder saplings ran kitty-corner to Fourteenth and Lexington. I would climb up those slim alder trees and start swinging on a branch until it propelled me forward a bit. You'd let go of that branch and grab hold of the trunk of another tree, and before you knew it, you'd gone an entire block without touching the ground. Amazing!

Astoria is known as the place where the explorers Lewis and Clark ended their journey west, then turned around. As a little
boy, I'd read their journals—in Astoria, kids were spoon-fed Lewis and Clark as if it were our morning Malt-O-Meal—and how some of the men in the Corps of Discovery were going mad, mainly because of the never-ending rain and eight guys crammed into twenty-by-twenty log-built rooms at Fort Clatsop, just across Young's Bay from where I lived.

It's the oldest American settlement west of the Rockies, founded in 1847, a few decades after John Jacob Astor, a rich New Yorker, first established it as a fur-trading outpost. By the time I was born, fur was no longer the draw. Instead, it was fish, lumber, and farming. The town lay mainly on a hillside in Oregon's far northwest corner, surrounded by water everywhere: the mighty Columbia River, separating Oregon from Washington; the Pacific Ocean to the west; and Young's Bay.

It was a raw, rugged world that never let you forget life was tough, dangerous, and sometimes deadly. Logging, fishing, and shipping freight across an ocean weren't for the light-hearted. You'd show up for school one day and the kid who sat next to you wouldn't be there; he'd be at the funeral for his dad the logger, who'd been crushed by a widow maker. The Columbia's bar at Astoria, with swells to forty feet, was known as the Graveyard of the Pacific. And if we needed any reminding of such dangers, we could always see the skeletal remains of the
Peter Iredale,
a four-masted British sailing vessel that had gone aground in 1906 on the Clatsop Spit.

There were pockets of sophistication in Astoria, a lot of old-money families who lived in the ornate Victorian houses perched on Coxcomb Hill. But, for the most part, Astoria in the twenties and thirties was the smell of fish canneries and salt air and lumber mills and dairy farms. Of blackberries, cedar trees, and, of course, the crap that was dumped
straight into the Columbia River from all our homes. It was the sound of ship whistles, seagulls, log trucks rolling down Commercial Street, and rain tapping on our windows, day after day after day after winter day.

Astoria was warehouses jutting out over the river on pilings, brawls outside the bars and brothels of Astor Street, the Salmon Derby each August, playing baseball in the field notched into the hill behind Star of the Sea School, and a mix of people as different as the ingredients in a bowl of fisherman's stew. The Finns lived in the west part of town, nearest the Pacific Ocean, which pounded ashore about ten miles away. The Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians lived in east Astoria, up into the hills. The Irish, including the Malarkeys, lived in the center.

Our house was a bungalow near the top of the hill, 595 Kensington Avenue, that had a white chimney, smack in front, not off to the side like most houses. That chimney looked almost like a lighthouse. We had a great view of the barges and tugs—white-water cowboys, we called 'em-pulling and pushing rafts of logs; ferries going to and from Megler, Washington, five miles across the river; and ships heading to and from Portland, about sixty miles upriver. To the east of us, on the corner of Kensington and Fourteenth, lived a rugged man named Michael Nolan, a bar pilot, one of the guys who guided ships over the feared Columbia River bar. From his porch, he would tell us all sorts of stories. Of shipwrecks. Of miraculous recoveries. Of rogue waves three stories high.

Though not rich by any means, we were better off than a lot of folks during the Depression. My father, Leo, owned an insurance business in an office above the Liberty Theater on Commercial Avenue. I still remember his ads: “Tick
Malarkey: That Man Insures Anything,” a slogan that the
Evening Astorian-Budget
would say “was for a long time as familiar to local citizens as the Columbia River or Coxcomb Hill.” He picked up the nickname at the University of Oregon, where he played football. As part of his athletic scholarship, it was his job to wind the clock at Villard Hall. Thus, “Tick.” He made enough money to send us to Star of the Sea and my brother John to prep school in Portland. Also enough so he could play golf, and my mom, bridge, at the country club.

I was born July 31, 1921, one of four children. John, about two years older than me, taught me to fish on the Nehalem, near our family cabin, when I was six. Bob was five years younger. Marilyn—I called her Molly, and it stuck—was fifteen years younger.

My father wasn't around much. When we were at the cabin, he would work in town and come out on Wednesday nights. Then he'd go back to work two days and return to the cabin for the weekends. So, most of the time, it was my mom and my brothers and me.

Besides my brother John, Louie Jacobson taught me outdoor stuff, too, like how to shoot a bow and arrow and trap a chipmunk. He was half-Indian. The way I spent so much time in the woods, some people joked that I was full-blooded. I remember shooting what I thought was my first quail. When I ran to where it had nose-dived into some tall grass, I realized it wasn't a quail after all, but a robin. I felt like two cents.

Sometimes I was made to feel bad even when I hadn't done anything wrong. Like when I got nabbed by a Catholic nun at
school for carrying around a chipmunk in my shirt pocket. I don't know why she was mad; I hadn't killed the little critter. Still, an angry nun was nothing compared to the terror I felt one day in the summer of 1933, when I was twelve.

My father had gotten me a job on a dairy farm outside town, on land where our cabin was, working with Jack Bay's nephew, Einar Glaser. Einar, in his mid twenties, was the strongest man I knew; he made Charles Atlas look like a weakling. I started every day at 5:30
A.M.
, milking cows, then cleaning the barns, and, finally, delivering milk in Einar's old Chevy pickup. I enjoyed the job; it made me feel important. Out on the Sunset Highway we'd deliver milk to logging camps and a construction company. The logging companies would send riders on horseback to pick up their orders. One day, while on a delivery, I was in a camp mess hall, eating a cookie and drinking a glass of milk—a cook named Oney Kelly always pampered me—when an out-of-breath farmer burst through the door.

“Everybody out!” he shouted. “Forest fire's headin' this way! Headin' for Ben Gronnell's place.”

We fled west, down Sunset Highway and back to the dairy farm. I spent the entire day with a bucket in my hands, dipping water from Lost Lake Creek and dispersing it to farmers as they yelled for it, trying to save the farm. And we did. My hands were bleeding from the handles on the pails; I'm surprised any water was left in that stream, given how fast we were working, but it made me feel sort of heroic, like a real man instead of a little kid. I'd been up since sunup. It was now about 10:00
P.M.
Finally, my boss, Mr. Glaser, drove me back to our family cabin. My folks were worried sick, which made me feel a little guilty and a little good at the same time, if you know what I mean.

I got a sandwich and some water to drink, then went to bed; my brother Bob and I had a double bunk. An hour later, I heard people stirring.

“Bob, Donnie, get up!” my father shouted. “Fire's comin'.”

The winds had shifted. Our cabin was smack in the middle of an old-growth Douglas fir forest. Limbs were torching into fireballs and falling far too close for comfort. You could hear the crackle, nearly feel the heat. We threw everything we could into the car and a little trailer—I took the stuff I valued most, my camping gear—then all five of us headed out to a hundred-acre hayfield that had been harvested. Safe from the fire. I remember being under this old wooden wagon. I lay there all night long in a sleeping bag, watching this wall of flames gradually gobble up trees and head for our cabin. About 3:00
A.M.
, a fireball exploded on Red Bluff, across the Nehalem. By morning, we all knew what we later confirmed: Our cabin was gone, swallowed by what would become known as the Tillamook Burn, one of the largest forest fires ever to burn in the United States. In one night, that wall of flame traveled thirty-five miles and took away the one thing that meant more to me than just about anything else. Just like that, our cabin: gone.

I would lose other things in my life in the same sort of way: here one moment, gone the next. I would lose other things more gradually. Like my father.

We were proud to be Irish. Proud to be Malarkeys. And proud to be Americans. When needed, Malarkeys served their country. I never knew my uncles, but I grew up with the stories about them and felt as if I knew them. Stories about how Gerald had died in France; he was barely nineteen.
Stories about how Bob was gassed in the Argonne Forest. He survived and came back from the war, coached football for a year at Stanford, and spent the rest of his life being shipped from one veterans' hospital to another. His lungs were like burnt toast. He died at thirty-one.

My uncles were legends in Astoria and revered in our home. In my eyes, they were the equal of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Notre Dame football, and the marvelous basketball teams at Astoria High. The scrapbooks with stories about Gerald and Bob were permanent fixtures in our living room. I looked at them often, showed them to my pals. On July 10, 1918, my grandfather Daniel Malarkey wrote to his son Gerald in France:

Gerald died almost a month later to the day, in Château-Thierry in eastern France, on August 11, 1918. He'd been hit by shrapnel from a German shell. He was barely nineteen, the first soldier from Clatsop County to die in World War I. At the request of the mayor, businesses closed for one hour for his memorial service at Ocean View Cemetery in Warrenton.
The Oregonian
newspaper in Portland, where
Gerald had briefly attended prep school, wrote he was “a mild tempered, quiet, lovable young fellow … talented and painstaking in his studies, strenuous and enthusiastic on the athletic field.” An army honor guard, the Astoria paper reported, “fired a parting salute to the youngster who proved his mettle when his country called and who, in asking permission of his parents to enlist, said simply, ‘Somebody must go.'”