3.. Soap Creek Neighborhood

Charlie Olson: would give them fish cans when they were putting on blackberry labels. And of course the girls didn't know it.

Bob Zybach: So people would be buying blackberries and opening fish.

Charlie Olson: Anyway, I worked there for quite a while and then when I got a chance to get into this Northwest Steel I went into that. But I don't know just for sure what . . . I hate to quote that year because I don't know for sure what it was.

Bob Zybach: But it was after World War I had started.

Charlie Olson: Oh yeah, it had started. It was raging at the time.

Bob Zybach: Were your parents, because they were from Sweden, were they worried about the war and relatives back home?

Charlie Olson: You mean from their country?

Bob Zybach: Yeah.

Charlie Olson: Not to a great extent. Sweden had been pushed north. Sweden owned a large area of what belongs to Russia now, they owned Finland, and Latvia and Lithuania and Estonia, and they owned in what is Russia now, Leningrad. Leningrad was built by the Tsars and priests when the Tsars and priests had it long before Russia got it.

3. Soap Creek Neighborhood

Bob Zybach: How about on Soap Creek itself Do you recall what the neighbors, the Goviers, and the cooks and your family thought about World War I? Were they in favor of the US?

Charlie Olson: They were citizens here, yes. My father came over about six years before I was born. And he didn't have the money, of course, to buy the tickets for his wife, my mother. He didn't have the money until he worked in the east and came westwardly, and everybody was working for land. They didn't hire people, they wouldn't pay any wages, really. Everybody was in here to try to get a home, and they moved west. And he did the same thing. And when he got to Portland was the first real job that he got, and of course there was not very much money, a dollar a day, and it wasn't in Portland, it was in a little town that is now part of Portland, on this side, they call it of course, Portland, I've forgotten what the name is. Tigardville. [Now called Tigard.]

Bob Zybach: Would it be Seliwood?

Charlie Olson: No.

Bob Zybach: Lents? Let's see I know there were two or three small communities that got assimilated all the way up to Milwaukie there.

Charlie Olson: It would be west.

Bob Zybach: West of Portland? Troutdale is to the east. I'm not thinking of any names right now.

Charlie Olson: Well, I'll go back and name that. I can't think of it now, but I could name it if I just try to think of it. Anyway, he worked there for quite a little while grubbing stumps and then he came as far as Corvallis, and he went to work for Fisher's Flour Mill in Corvallis. And there, he got pretty good wages, and when he got an amount so that he could he sent for my mother and my older brother. And that was shortly before he went out to Soap Creek and bought the rights from a fellow by the name of Sether. The homestead rights on the place that is pictured here.

Bob Zybach: So that was Sether's cabin that you were born in?

Charlie Olson: I was born in a cabin but that's not on the picture.

Bob Zybach: Did Sether build that cabin or did Sether live in the cabin?

Charlie Olson: Yeah, Sether lived in the cabin, and that's about all, but my father when he first came out there he started to build other farm buildings to put hay in and put stock in and he started to go into stock until we had pretty close to 20 head of stock. And they could range north, west, south, east. East was the shortest distance that they could go, about 4 miles east, but there was so much range, pasture, that that was really a profitable thing. And we milked quite a few of them and a store by the name of S.L. Kline in Corvallis was the only grocery store at the time. And they took our material and they handled everything, clothes and groceries, everything, hardware; anything that you'd want you could buy it on time and they marked it down. And they kept a record of it. And S.L. Kline died and it was taken over by his son, Walter Kline. And by that time more stores was in there and there was another store, and there was a couple of gun stores. And that was about it.

Bob Zybach: How would you get water to your house? Did you have running water to your house, or how would the family bathe living up like that?

Charlie Olson: They lived in the cabin until he got the house built and I don't know how old I was when we moved up to that house but while we were still living in the cabin my father

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[Withheld from this edition pending review. The page keeps its printed number and its permanent link, so a citation to it still lands here.]

Charlie Olson: quite often, and quite a ways to get the cows home, that was the making of my health. And they were going to have a race, a bunch of schools, all the schools in Benton County. I was going to enter that. And Raymond Marcks, a brother to Wanda Marcks Cook, he was about nineteen, and the teacher that we had was teaching the ninth grade, and he saw me eating a piece of pie, and he asked me if I wasn't gonna run in that race and I said yes. And he says you better lay off of that pie then. That was the first hint that somebody knew that diet had something to do with a guy's health and ability. But of course I never told my folks that it ever happened. And of course when this race came up my folks didn't go, so I didn't go, I don't know even where it was held. But later on, not too far later, I found out, on two different Fourth of Julys, and I could have won that if I had gone. There was a big picnic at Sulphur Springs, and there wasn't many automobiles in those days, but that Mrs. Govier counted them when they went by her house, and she said there was 50 cars. And that was a tremendous amount of automobiles that day. They had a race at Sulphur Springs, and I entered it. I was probably 13, and there was grown men, I was the only kid in it. And I would run away from them so easily that it was just comedy. A year later, north of Corvallis was a picnic, and of course there was quite a group, Fourth of July. They had another race there. But before that started they played Last Couple Out. And I met a little kid that came from South of Corvallis, Augusta Hann. And she was athletic, so they couldn't catch us. So we made it fine until I got my ankle into a rut. They had hauled wood out of there with wagons. And the wagons had made deep ruts in the wintertime and then they had mowed the ground without taking the grass off, and the ruts wasn't visible. I sprained my ankle. We had button shoes at that time. So I wasn't in those games anymore. And I went over to one of these fences where it was shady and sat down, and put some strings in the buttonhole so I could keep the shoes on 'cause my foot was swelling up.

Bob Zybach: It was swelling up too much to button the shoes up.

Charlie Olson: Uh huh. My brother came over and said, "they're signing up here for a race, and you'd better get into that." And I said, "with a leg like that?" He says, "you can win it." I said, "with an ankle like that?" He says, "you can win it if you have to