Kit Bowen at the interview table – June 3, 2023

We met Kit Bowen at the June 3, 2023 outdoor 40 Year Anniversary, sponsored by the Garden Home Community Library and the Garden Home Recreation Center. Kit was remembering his early life as a first and second grader at Garden Home School in the 1950s. His family lived near the end of SW Occidental, now 76^th Avenue, one of the major streets of early Garden Home. He remembers when the tiny conifers were planted along the dividing line between the homes and the school’s playground, now 50 feet high. He later graduated from Beaverton High School in 1967.

Kit, and many other Garden Home men we’ve interviewed, recalls the unsupervised and free play of the period. They enjoyed hunting for crawdads, having a one penny jawbreaker, and playing in the forested land. We know this area now as Whitford Park, the development west of Garden Home Road’s turn to the north at about 91^st Avenue.

At a young age, he explored further afield into the Aaron Frank properties off of Oleson Road. He was impressed with what appeared to be a huge castle which needed further inspection. As he cupped his hands to see through the glass into the living room, he was told later that he was a Peeping Tom!

Below are excerpts from a 5-page memoir that Kit provided to us.

 “Ice, Ice” we screamed as my kid brother Marc and I raced down our front yard with our black high top Keds pumping us towards the waiting milk truck. It was 1956 and in those glorious days of summer milk was delivered twice a week, always packed in a ton of crushed ice. With a broad smile our milkman would step out of his Alpenrose milk wagon in his freshly starched white uniform and let us help ourselves to hands full of unused ice. Flopping down on the dew covered lawn under the ancient black walnut trees with our Airedale and our German Sheppard as pillows we would lay back and watch the field hawks lazily circling the hot August sky.

My first years of memory were spent in a house two boards this side of a chicken shack that my pop had bought back in 1951 for the hefty sum of $6500. (at the north end of Occidental, now 76^th Avenue ) Garden Home was a kids paradise and going to the country meant walking out the back door. Down the road and to the left was a huge forest where we would spend hours playing Robin Hood and little John. Whether building forts or lean twos out of branches and ferns pulled out of the forest floor or trying to bash each others brains out while forging mighty rivers er,uh streams, the fun meter would never max out. On the other side of the forest was an abandoned sawmill and just beyond that an old milk dairy with a huge hay barn.

Summer was about to close and something called first grade was peeking around the corner when I was going to face my first great loss. It was Labor Day weekend and the only kid in the neighborhood who was my age along with being my best friend was a sweet child named Johnny Clauson. We spent endless hours on top of the fort steering our ship or climbing up into stacked orange crates his burly dad had created for us in his garage and pretending they were race cars, “Look out, Look out eeeerrrrr…

“Oh yeah, passed ya mmmmmmm…

“No you didn’t, got you on the last corner…

And then Johnny was dead. The Clausons, and I believe it was the Wests, took their boat out one last time and somehow Johnny was thrown overboard, and even though he wore a life jacket his skinny little body still managed to sip out of it. Mr. Clauson had gone after him but by the time they got to him, Johnny was gone. For the next few weeks after everyone had gone to bed the only sound you could hear under the moonless sky was that of Mr. Clauson hammering away at his demons in his garage workshp, and then that too fell silent. The Clausons moved away but Johnny never did. I couldn’t grasp dead, or forever, so Johnny just became my invisible friend. When Christmas would roll around there we’d be looking at the coolest tree ever and giggling at each other as I showed him all our presents. He has been there always. First girlfriends, driving license, graduation, trenches of Viet Nam, marriage, my children being born. We have always been, and will always be, 6 years old together. As I’m writing this I feel sorrow giving way to tears because in just a couple more years my boys will be leaving, and the thought of it just rips me up, because it seems that just yesterday they were 6 years old and I don’t have many more good byes left in me.

Kit closes this story with a teacher delivering discipline and telling him: Your father just bought a beautiful house over in Raleigh Hills and you’ll be moving in about two weeks. “Bombshell number two.” After Johnny’s death this ws the worst possible thing that could happen to a child of seven. Garden Home was all I knew and now it was being taken away from me and even though it was only three miles away it could have been on the other side of the moon as far as I was concerned. When I told the neighborhood gang where I was headed they all shook their heads and looked away, then one of them muttered, “That’s where the rich kids live.”