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The Innocent Years

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They called me Billy.

Willard Mayo was the name—taken from my great grandfather. However, when the day approached for me to enroll in school for the first time, my parents wisely changed their minds. They decided on Byron as my first name—the same as my dad. (A few years ago, I sent off to the State of Oregon for a fresh copy of my birth certificate. It arrived—still showing Byron as a hand printed entry in front of the original name registration.)

For me, Byron was a quick and easy change. I liked my dad’s name. But my irrepressible Aunt Phoebe, God bless her, continued to call me Billy—or Bill—until the day she died. My grandfather, Jim Dewey, also had a problem getting used to the switch-over. He’d sometimes call me Billy one day and Byron the next. I just went along with the flow—answering to either name.

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A few months after I was born, my dad landed a good job up in Idaho, working on the new veteran’s hospital being constructed in Coeur d’Alene. He took my mother and me along. My dad told me we lived in Coeur d’Alene for a year and a half, until the hospital was completed.

Returning to Oregon, the folks bought a small, white bungalow on a dirt road in the outskirts of Portland—at the base of Mt. Tabor. It had a big, front lawn with no sidewalks, and a little garden in back—one of my earliest memories.

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Memory does play tricks—especially in recalling the earliest years. A blur of images comes to mind.. Hazy chronology. Yet, within that disorder, paradoxically, separate fragments remain sharp and clear.



Bringing my mother a small bouquet of flowers that turned out to be weeds—my dad and my mother singing around the house—holding hands while we walked in the woods—the day my dad proudly drove up the driveway in a brand new Overlandtouring car—the smell of freshly – baked cookies in the kitchen—family trips to Cannon Beach—watching my dad lather up and shave with a mean-looking, straight razor—sitting by my mother at the piano while she played—digging in a dirt pile along with the kid next door—a surprise birthday party—skipping rocks into the Zig Zag River while my grandparents tried to fish—and the firstsnow covering our front yard and all of Mt. Tabor: These are among the joyous memories I treasure from those brief few years at the little house in Portland, Oregon.

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Life on the West Side

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My mother’s lover, Clarence Neff, was a vain, gimlet-eyed, good-looking sonofabitch, with a shock of slick, dark hair combed straight back. He’d-swagger around his apartment with a smoldering look on his face—sweeping my mother up in his arms like he thought he was Rudolph Valentino or something. I’d roll my eyeballs—and head for the toilet.

To this day, I have no idea where they met or how their ill-fated affair ever developed. Even in her later years, my mother refused to talk about it.

Neffs eight-year-old daughter, Gladys, was another story. She was about a year older and about two inches taller than I was at the time. And I was surprised and delighted when she turned out to be a little offbeat and a lot of fun. She had a weird sense of humor, an abiding curiosity, a gangly look, dark bobbed hair and a lop-sided grin. Was it Clara Bow?

We became pretty good pals. Within minutes of our first meeting, she revealed in a dramatic stage whisper that she was going to be a “movie star” when she grew up.

Later, she put on a private performance for me. Wearing one of her dad’s silk shirts, she did an exultant mimic of the arrogant Neff in action. As she swept haughtily around the room in long, exaggerated strides, I thought she was nuts —but interesting. (Looking back now on that bizarre scene from long, long ago, I’d say her performance was more Groucho Marx than it was Clarence Neff—or Rudolph Valentino.)

***

My mother and I moved in with Neff and his screwball daughter. Neff had once been a carpenter, like my dad. Now he was a salesman for some kind of home fixtures company. He really thought he was hot stuff. (Famous Arrow shirts cost about two bucks at that time. Neff insisted on $20 silk shirts as his trademark, every day of the week.)

He had a “furnished” apartment on the second floor of a three-story brick building in the interesting old Lincoln Theater district of Southwest Portland. The apartment was decorated in what you might call cheap moderne—or minimal Bauhaus. Whatever. My mother’s piano looked lonely in Neffs sparsely-furnished front room, jammed up against the bare wall to one side of a bay window.

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