Silvershirts Destroy Portland!

by William Dudley Pelley, Cogitations, March 1, 1952

I don’t know whether there’s any metaphysics in it or not, but one wonders how he gets into messes like the following.. One Bill Kay and I were in Portland, Oregon, in 1936, stationed in a tourist camp in the north end of the city. We were living in a two-wheeled trailer, hitched to the rear of Bill’s Ford sedan. Of a summer night, at one in the morning, it became necessary for us to gather up kit and be in Seattle next day. But before quitting Portland I had an important letter to mail. I suggested we drive into the city and deposit the letter directly in the main post office, then leave for Seattle by an interior route.. We came in along deserted Union Avenue with the lumberous trailer rocking groggily behind. The trailer couldn’t understand, it seemed, why it had to be jerked off a comfortable campground between one and two a.m., to be dragged in and out of a sleeping city merely because two political heretics wanted to go elsewhere than where night had found them. Bill made a right-hand turn where he supposed he should make a turn, still in the residential section. An instant later he cried, “Oh-oh!” because his headlights told him he’d made a nocturnal blunder. He’d turned into a narrow blind street. Ahead was a high board fence. He jammed on his brakes and the trailer behind grunted. But we stopped. The street had narrowed so much that if it hadn’t been One-Way, a second car couldn’t have passed without our pulling up on the lawn of the right-hand bungalow. Over on the left was a facing bungalow, built also so close to the cinder sidewalk that occupants of these houses might almost have lain in their upper beds and carried on conversation with each other, had they known what to talk about. We had driven into an obvious cul-de-sac—which is French for trap. If we were ever going to get to the post office, not to mention Seattle, we had to turn somehow, or back out..

Do you know anything about trailers?—especially two-wheeled trailers? Have you ever tried backing one in a desired straight-line, say to get yourself out of a cul-de-sac of nocturnal bungalows? Nocturnal bungalows, of course, are bungalows wherein the occupants are sleeping with lights out, not discussing politics while lying in bed with front window open. Turning about was manifestly impossible—there were only two little pocket-handkerchief lawns in front of each bungalow to right and left. But backing out! Such a trailer simply will not back in straight line. Try as hard as you please, it will back where it pleases. But we had to get out of that place. We couldn’t wait for daylight and have a tow-car come and disjoint us in sections. Moreover, he had to accomplish it somehow without further loss of time, or I’d miss the mail plane east. “You watch out the right-hand window,” said Bill, “to see I ain’t hittin’ nuthin’, and I’ll watch out this left-hand window. If the trailer goes cockeyed and hits anything, you yell.” Here was a pretty prospect. Yelling with all those residents of bungalows peacefully sleeping about us. But supposing I did, what difference would it make to trailer or Ford sedan? Bill reversed his clutch and eased in his power.  We started gingerly backing up. But did that trailer go straightly for even six seconds? It did not. It was a very perverse trailer and thoroughly disgusted that it had been called upon to start for post offices and Seattle in the middle of the night. I heard a splitting noise, and I yelled. Item One: We’d begun the night’s brilliant business by cracking off a wooden post for a letter-box, at the ground.

“Lookit, Bill,” said I, the trailer turned at a rakish forty-five degrees in that lightless street, “you’ve knocked down their letter-box, and how is this family going to have any more letters delivered unless the postman tucks them under the front door?” Bill cut down on his racing engine. “They should not have planted that letter-box so close to the gravel, anyhow,” was his comment. “Uh-huh,” said I, “however, you’ve fixed that for ‘em. Try again and be more careful.” Bill fought with clutch-levers and tried anew. He pulled the trailer out of its rakish angle, almost pushed a hole through the cut-off fence with his front bumper, and stopped with a jerk. Then came another session of fighting with levers. We started backing again. This time something went wrong the whole length of the trailer and it was turned at an angle of seventy-degrees the opposite way with a still more catastrophic crash, as the front steps of the bungalow on the left collapsed. By now an upper window had gone up, and a male figure in a pajama-jacket had head and shoulders out. “What the ‘ell are youse guys trying to do?” he queried us, presumably for information. I said to Bill, “Don’t get into any argument with him. We’ve got an airmail plane to catch. What Bill muttered was unintelligible, because his motor was racing again, but I gathered he was inviting Old Pajama-Jacket to come down and have his face pushed in, which on top of already having his front steps pushed in, was a double order of inward curvature. But Bill started backing a third time. This meant a repetition of mishap number one, however instead of the letter-box post, it was the similar front steps of the bungalow on the right. Mathematically compounded, this was three crashes within half a minute, with almost a block to travel backward, seven bungalows on the right and six on the left. There were going to be a sickening lot of mail-box posts and steps remodeled, so to speak, before we actually got back upon Union Avenue..

Bill messed around with those refractory levers, pounced forward—taking me in one direction, then reversing and taking me in another—then decided to solve it all in a hurry by backing quickly. He backed quickly all right.. he backed quickly into the second bungalow back on the right, pushed the trailer clean across its pocket-handkerchief lawn, up its front steps, and onto its veranda. The floor shuddered a minute, then let go with a crash. The whole front of the house came down—or so it seemed. And by this time, figures in pajama-jackets, nightshirts or nighties, were appearing in all second-story windows, frantically leaning out and bellowing expletives. What did we think we were doing with that trailer, that we had to pick out their particular street and wreck everything at the end of it because someone had erected a high board-fence across it. “Cripes, we’re in a mess,” said Bill—not precisely an original statement. I said, “Well, we certainly can’t stop now. You’ve simply got to keep on trying until you make it.” Bill said, “Watch and see if the whole bungalow comes down, if I pull the trailer free of it.” I watched, but it wasn’t withdrawing the trailer that might bring the house down it was the way the owner in the upstairs window was shaking the structure, trying to convey to us what he thought of us. It was a wholly disturbing circumstance to be aroused at two in the morning by the rear end of a trailer battering at your portals to demand entrance, and coming in anyway, whether you gave consent or not. We got going forward, reversed again, backed again—and leveled off all the horticultural exhibits on the third lawn on the left as though a bulldozer had scooped ‘em. The third set of steps went completely bust and I couldn’t tell which was going to shed tears first, Bill or four householders, one of whom looked as though he were carrying a bed-slat, although God only knows where he’d gotten it.. maybe the trailer had done something to his bed abovestairs without us knowing it. We knew most everything we’d done to premises downstairs, without having fragments waved at us in a disturbingly threatening manner.

Well, we got out of it. I dimly recall that we got out of it by luckily backing the trailer on the seventh or eighth try, between two of the nocturnal bungalows, which gave Bill room to swing a complete arc forward and get turned about and headed for Union Avenue under our own power, pulling the obstreperous trailer after us, with fragments of bungalows falling off as they would. I leave you to guess what settlements I had to make with the thoroughly aroused citizens of that thoroughfare. Bill did his share of the bargaining, the argument that if people would build their houses so close together on a blind street, they ought to be prepared for jolts like they’d gotten, middle of the day or night. Actually, I felt that our trailer was awake at last and laughing at us all the remainder of the way into the city. Funny thing was, the end of our trailer scarcely showed a scratch. Our rear license plate was bent a bit and we needed a new lens in our tail-light. But we certainly did wake up one end of a street in Portland one night back in 1936.. I guess the moral esoterically to it is, if you get into such a scrape, just keep jiggling back and forward until you find two houses wide enough to let you flatten whatever posy-beds, ashcans, vine trellises, and children’s tricycles may be between ‘em, because you’re sure to discover ‘em sooner or later. Somehow it’s like the situation of the frog dropped in the milk-can who kept swimming till he’d created a pat of butter large enough to hold him—although ever since I first heard about that episode I’ve wondered why the fool frog didn’t simply float, after the nature of frogs, till the family opened the can and discovered what was in their milk. They’d have rescued him for free.. Which Bill and I were not, on that Portland blind street.. Oh well! –THE RECORDER

P.S.—I forgot to mention we not only missed the mail plane but didn’t get to Seattle until the second day following—those lousy verandas, or the lumber in ‘em, had actually been hitched together with very sharp nails that had done all sorts of things to our tires.. the meanies!