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About Smoke signals. (Grand Ronde, Or.) 19??-current | View Entire Issue (April 15, 2003)
APRIL 15, 2003 SMOKE SIGNALS 7 !G Cokedl Up The Good Life busy. dogs, made a big bonfire and kept a .22 rifle with her, too. "Dad would make me practice with a cracker box and see if I could hit it," she said. "My girls are excellent shots. He always trusted me to take care of myself and the other kids. I guess you'd say I was an old tuffy. I could handle horses, haul wood, split wood, anything. Even a drag saw (mounted on a wooden frame with little tiny mo tor an d steel dogs to hold the log steady as the saw went back and forth.) "It was hard work, but that was the way you'd earn your school clothes," she said. "It would just tire you out. You had to really scrounge through berry vines and everything else." When McAbee was 14, she got a job as a live-in baby sitter with the Goldschmidt family in Eugene. At that time, they owned a furniture store called, Rubenstein's Furniture. The baby boy? Future Oregon Governor and U.S. Secretary of Transportation Neil Goldschmidt. "He was a ram bunctious little guy (a toddler) at that time," she said. "Not spoiled, but he wanted to have his way." During the summer when she was 14, thanks to a Ms. Joaquin in the Indian Affairs office here at the Tribe, McAbee got a job washing dishes at the Spouting Horn Inn on the coast at Depoe Bay. It is to this job that she traces her lifelong interest in res taurants and other services. The list goes on to include Gillespie's Restaurant in Valley Junction (where for a time she and daughter, Groshong, worked different shifts at he same job), Birchell's Restaurant at Fort Hill, the Bonanza Restaurant in Grand Ronde, Kimberly Quality Care, a nursing ser vice in Salem, the Cushman Hospital in Tacoma. Her work ranged from washing dishes to cooking pies to man aging restaurants to serving the eld erly as a home health aide. Sometimes, she took patients back home to where they were born and raised. One time that meant a trip to Rock Springs, Wyoming. Another time to Flaming Gorge, Utah. "I loved it," she said of the traveling. But even working here at home could be something of an adventure. At Bonanza, she recalled, "(Oregon Governor) Tom McCall ('He was a sweetheart,') would call on Friday night and come in on Saturday with Ron his driver and pick up (my) pies. I made 125 pies a week, double crust apples and berries. Lots of cream pies. All our cinnamon rolls." "(Oregon Governor and U.S. Senator) Mark Hatfield used to come into Gillespies (he always had cinnamon toast and tea). (Oregon Governor) Bob Straub ('apple pie and ice cream or cheese') used to come into Bonanza. He was Governor at that time. (Oregon Governors) Vic Atiyeh and Barbara Rob erts used to come to pow-wow functions. (Atiyeh )'d be friendly with the staff." "Everybody loved the Bonanza," she said. "There was lots of comraderie with all the mill workers. It was a friendly place." It also drew television anchorman Mike Donahue, meteorolo gist Phil Voelker, maybe five or six of them altogether, who would "always sit in the same place" and have "ice cream and coffee and pie." "I've been very fortunate, meeting dignitaries. I've had a very interest ing life, a very busy life," said McAbee. Herron remembers a different Bo nanza. "At Bonanza, when she would come home, just dead, just wore out, I knew she was tired. I'd do all the iron ingone time, there were 21 pieces of uniform to iron you just did it because you knew what a hard worker she was, and there was no way she could do it. She'd soak her feet. I knew how bad her feet felt. I would give her a pedicure. She had calluses on her feet. I'd cut them off and rub her feet and she'd be so happy after that. She had such a hard life. Nobody will ever know what she went through in her life. I just don't ever want to see my mother in pain." Her memories of early Indian cul ture are general. "We just called it, 'the Reservation.' I heard my grand mother talk about it. A happy gather ing, I think, to get together." She came quickly back to the per sonal. "I never did hear anybody, grandmother or uncle either, say one bad thing. They were very grateful people for what they had, and what they could share. Today, her favorite singer is George Strait. And other than the news, prac tically the only television show she watches is CSI: Crime Scene Investi gators. It is Groshong's favorite, too. Tribal Crew Finds 125 Pieces Of Shuttle Debris In Rain, Wind And Cold i- r i'i- Shuttle continued from front page John Herrington, a Chickasaw and the first American Indian in space. Herrington spoke about his experience and had a slide show on his space walk. "I learned more about a shuttle that I ever thought I would in my life," said Tribal member Jake McKnight, the only Tribal member on this crew, but one of many, ac cording to Clift, playing a part in the shuttle search. (Most searchers were also for est fire fighters because so many of the processes are similar and Clift reported that as many as 50 percent of the nation's fire fighting crews are also regularly In dians.) For the shuttle project, Duff was among three women in the crew of 19, which was about average for the entire project. About 15 percent are women, and that also holds true for fire fighting crews, according to Clift. The orientation also warned them against unacceptable behavior (a $250,000 fine and 10 years imprison ment for stealing a piece of the shuttle; no photographs except inside the tents; and no talking about what had been found to prevent rumors and specula tions), but, said Duff, "we were all there to do the job." Search and Rescue managers were there to make sure the crews under stood and followed the gridding proce dures, but the crews were so good at it, according to Clift, "Search and Rescue had nothing to do after the second day. ! -4 ,' "- 3 ) ST St -Ul V. hill! hit. J J i''Jn'Mt", 'L Vi,' ..I mi. IT'" - j ' 4 Si 1 " . Bill Borck, Jeremiah Spencer, Shane Harmon, Brandy Duff, Joshua Clift and Tribal member Jake McKnight (from left) enjoyed an experience they'll never forget. They recovered pieces of the shuttle Columbia recently in eastern Texas. We knew what to do and we did it." Workers were divided by divisions, each of which had six strike teams, and each strike team had two 20-per-son hand crews, two two-thre person EPA crews and one NASA represen tative. The Tribal crew was among one of the 20-person hand crews. "You screamed when you found a piece," said McKnight. EPA and NASA representatives came over, located the find with a GPS (global positioning sys tem) tool, labeled it and carted it off. "We were furthest west," said Clift. "We found the smallest and lightest pieces that dropped off the shuttle while it was still flying." "They were really really light," said Duff of the shuttle tile pieces the crew found. The crew walked about 10 miles a day along their grids, covering 700 acres. "They never expected us to find as much as we did," said Clift. "We found as much in one day as they found in the previous two weeks at the camp we were at. The organization was very efficient," said Clift. Clift carries in his memory today "pictures of people with rainwear go ing through the briars and you name it and coming out in tatters. That's how bad it was." Others had memories as well. "There were fire ant mounds every five feet," said Harmon. Somebody told them, "If it don't bite, sting or poke you, it ain't from Texas." Somebody ran into a cottonmouth, according to Clift, who then heard that "it met an unfortunate demise." "It was just wet. You had wet feet all the time. The ground was really saturated," said McKnight. "It was really windy," said Duff. Of the fourteen days there, "the second day was gorgeous," according to Clift, and two days they were off for snow. "Those were our cribbage days," said McKnight. "It was too cold to nap." The food, as Jeremiah Spencer re membered it, was "always beans." Duff remembered, "frozen burritos for lunch." "The mesquite brush had thorns five-six inches long," said Clift. "For one person, they went through the bottom of his boot." Tents were put up on a cement slab, and so many were so close to gether that an illness they called, "camp crud" ran pretty quickly through the crews. "You could hear it all night long," said Clift. When they left, about 27 percent of the shuttle had been found. The project had set about 45 percent as a goal. Many will continue working through mid-April. The Tribal crew left at a good time, however. "All the planes were tied up with spring break," said Clift, "so they flew us back first class. We had the jet that the Rolling Stones had just got done using. It had couches and a bar. It was like being in a living room." "They took care of us pretty well," said McKnight.
