BILL: MY FRIEND BILL
Forty years ago this August, Bill Grismer and Norma Stralovich were married at Kellogg, Idaho, Norma’s home town. I was a member of the wedding party. I can’t remember exactly what my assigned duties were, but they probably consisted of ushering people to the pews at St. Rita’s Catholic Church. Then, as now, it was the brides friends to the left and friends of the groom to the right. If you happened to be friends of both it was “two on the aisle, anywhere”. The other day I looked at a picture of the “wedding party” and everyone appeared to be pleased with their performance. Most strikingly, everyone looked very young.
Bill and Norma had three children, Linda, George and John. All the kids are now married and have children. If Bill and I are having a grandkid derby, I think that we are in a dead heat at nine. On August 3, all the kids, their spouses and the grandkids will gather at Coeur d’Alene to honor Bill and Norma on their 40th anniversary. Bev and I were invited, but couldn’t make it. Congratulations and best wishes are, of course, in order. The ultimate compliment, though, has to be this entry into my recollections, a collection of articles I’ve entitled, “Off The Top Of My Head”.
Bill was not from Kellogg. He was from Wallace which is located 10 or 12 miles east of Kellogg. (It used to be 12 miles, but when roads got better and cars got faster, the distance changed). It was in Wallace where Bill and I first hooked up and it was much longer ago then 40 years. Bill was born at the Providence Hospital on April 16, 1929, the first born in his family. I was born at the Providence Hospital on May 2, 1929, the last born in my family. In September, 1935, we both started the first grade at Our Lady of Lourdes Academy. In December, 1935, we made our stage debut being cast as rabbits in an all school Christmas play presented on the “big” stage at Wallace High School. We were in a magic forest where rabbits could talk but I don’t think either of us had any lines. The big challenge that year, though, was trying to figure out why Dick and Jane had named their dog Spot.
The grade school years are somewhat hazy and were probably pretty dull. What I do remember,quite vividly, was one sub-freezing day after school when I tested the coldness of a steel pipe with my tongue. Another was that Bill showed up for school with his right arm in a cast. Why do I remember this? Because Bill had to do all his writing with his left hand. It was not a pretty sight.
It was in high school when things got rolling. It was the Fall of 1943 when we hit the 9th grade. World War II was being waged in both Europe and Asia so manpower on the home front was short. Jobs for 14, 15 and 16 year old kids were not difficult to find. During the school year Bill and I worked together on Saturday delivering groceries for the Combination Grocery. (I don’t know what it was a combination of. Had I been more astute back then I would have asked). In case their are any young readers out there, back then people called in (yes, there were telephones) grocery orders. Store employees filled the orders, putting the groceries in collapsible wooden boxes. We delivery guys would stack these boxes in delivery trucks with the first boxes loaded being for customers that lived the farthest away from the store. The last boxes were, of course, for those living closest to the store. Bill, being the veteran, taught me this. Piece of cake, I learned how to do that rather rapidly. Except, I forgot that for every rule their is an exception. It seems that the closest customers to our store were Wallace’s renown houses of ill repute. One day when Bill was not at work and I had the route by myself, I loaded out the orders very early, about 7:30 or 8:00 a.m. My first delivery was a block away on Cedar Street. So with a couple wooden boxes of stuff I climbed up the stairs, and, balancing myself precariously, I rang the doorbell. And I rang, and I rang, and I rang. Finally a frowzy, unkempt looking person appeared in the window above me. She was not at all happy and proceeded to let me know what I could do with my groceries—and not to come back until the afternoon, late afternoon. Her parting line I’ll never forget—-“Kid, in this business we’d rather sleep then eat!” After I learned the ropes a little better, the ladies of the afternoon, the late afternoon, became favorite customers. For high school kids making 50 cents an hour a buck or two tip was big money.
Our standard uniform for delivering groceries consisted of a long, white apron. When people around town saw us, they may have thought that we were “grocery guys”. If our delivery truck, with the name Combination Grocery on it, was close by, they knew we were “grocery guys”. One winter day with snow a couple feet deep the town people saw us in our aprons without a truck. It seems that Bill and I had just completed our last delivery up a hill and into a gulch. Heading back down the gulch, my friend Bill had his left foot upon the dash board and was singing, “Marie, The Dawn is Breaking”. I was standing on the back bumper and holding on to the top of the truck (their were no doors on the back of this panel). Being in fairly deep snow, steering became tricky and instead of staying on the road, the truck chose to take the quick way down the hill. Bill turned to me and casually said, “Hold on, Barney, we’re going over the edge”. A couple hundred feet later the truck was grill first into the snow at the bottom of the hill. Bill was still sitting behind the wheel with his left foot on the dashboard and I was draped around his back, having been thrust forward by the sudden stop. In our white aprons we hiked the mile or so into town, stopping at the Chevrolet garage to let them know their truck (the store borrowed this one) was nose first up the Mullan Road.
It was in the early years of high school that shooting pool became one of our favorite sports. Pool halls didn’t enjoy a great reputation back then, but what the heck, we were the same guys who delivered groceries to the hook shops so tainted reputations wasn’t all that important to us. At this pool hall you didn’t just play “slop”, or rotation, or the common pool hall games of today where you have to keep plugging quarters in a slot and once an errant ball goes into a pocket it’s good-bye ball until you feed in another quarter. No way. In this pool hall you played “eight ball”, or “bottle pool” or you stepped up to “snooker” with all those red balls and miniature pockets. The ultimate was billiards. The ultra-ultimate was billiards with the special pure ivory balls. High school kids could not get the ivory balls; they were reserved for the elder gentry who knew what they were doing. The two elderly gentlemen I remember were Tom Conlin and Norm Ebbley. They were accomplished billiard players and it was a pleasure to watch them “read the table” and calculate one cushion, two cushion, or three cushion bank shots. The diamonds on the table began to make sense, and the use of “high English” or “low English” or back spin became a course in physics that no professor could explain in a class room. It was Bill’s and my good fortune to occasionally be chosen by Tom and Norm to be their partners in a game — using the pure ivory balls. As the Music Man used to sing, there were no pockets on these tables, you didn’t put a jockey on the back of Dan Patch - and Bill and I were being transformed into “gentlemen”. It was so many caroms, so many one cushion banks, two cushion banks, three cushion banks, etc. etc. When either Tom or Norm shot, the balls would dance. When Bill and I would shoot it was more like boogie woogie.
One afternoon after school Bill and I were chosen to be partners with Tom and Norm. While waiting for his turn Bill assumed his classic pose while one of the masters was completing his turn; that was standing up kinda straight but leaning his back and right foot against the wall. As an accomplished billiard player can take several minutes to complete his turn, Bill became a little drowsy. As he relaxed his right foot slowly slid down the wall and into a big old spittoon that was full of a lot of vile looking stuff. Bill has never been accused of being a quiet guy- and he wasn’t then. The aura of quiet concentration was replaced by some choice language and the frenzied shaking of a leg attached to a shoe that was dripping with who knows what. So much for our transformation into “gentlemen”.
It was not all work and play for us though. School did take up a tremendous part of our time so it became a challenge for us to convert dull school work into an interesting exercise. I recall one incident when we took chemistry and while in chem lab had successfully made alcohol from potatoes or some kind of grain. The following week our chemistry teacher asked us to take out our alcohol so we could make esters. Sheepishly we had to admit that we had no alcohol. It seems my friend Bill had showed up the week before with a can of 7-Up. So much for esters.
It was at this time that our prowess at typing was being developed as I wrote about earlier in my article TYPING (OH MY). Turning teen-age boys loose with typewriters and a modicum of knowledge on writing business letters can be a dangerous combination. Our ring-leader, Bill, felt it was time for General Motor’s Corporation to be exposed to our warped senses of humor. Off went letters to GMC’s Cadillac and Buick Divisions offering the services of Barney Brunelle, Dave Fellin, and Bill Grismer to be distributor’s or dealers of their products. My name was first, but the address was that of that place where they told me to bring their groceries in the late afternoon. Now Wallace is a small town and I’m sure that the mail man who hand delivered GM’s responses to that address enjoyed taking letters addressed to Al Brunelle’s son up there. He also enjoyed picking them up later with a penciled note on the envelopes of “not here”. They found their way into Box 116 and were given to me by my dad. He didn’t say anything and I sure as heck didn’t. The GMC incident was nearly forgotten until a couple months later when Bill and Dave pulled up to my house in the Combination Grocery truck wearing their “grocery guy” aprons. They were really excited as they had just been called over to Arnold Keller’s Buick Garage for an interview with a General Motor’s executive who happened to be in Spokane and took the opportunity to drive to Wallace and meet these young dynamos who wanted to sell Cadillacs and Buicks. They wanted to know if I had been contacted. I hadn’t, but often wonder about a couple of things. First, what did he report to his superiors back in Michigan about his meeting in Wallace; and second, did he check out our “address of record” before going to Keller’s garage.
After completing high school in 1947, Bill and I parted company. He went to Gonzaga University in Spokane to study accounting and law while I went to the University of Idaho and enrolled in the School of Mines to study geology, mining and engineering. We were, of course, aging and maturing and working hard to put ourselves through school. By 195l, we were quaffing a beer now and then, legally, and both working at the Silver Summit Mine. The mines in the Silver Belt of the Coeur d’Alene Mining District were deep and hot. By deep I mean straight down 3000 or more feet and then usually an offset shaft down another 400, 500 or 600 feet. This was the devil’s country and after an eight-hour shift in near 100 degree temperature and nearly 100 per cent humidity ones body cried out for a brew, or two, or more. By mid-summer my friend Bill and I had advanced to be the lead miners in our stopes. We were making $18 a day, a 50% bonus over miner’s day’s pay of $12. To top this off we made another $27.50 apiece digging discovery pits on mining claims located east of Mullan, Idaho. We had pretty fat wallets and pretty big thirsts, so Johnny Magee at the Stein Club in Wallace got a lot of our business.
Somewhat amazing to me is that by 1951 Bill and I had known each other for about 16 years and we still had things to talk about. In fact, Bill was an extremely good listener. One night while in the Stein Club I was waxing elequently about something or other. We both needed to “take a leak” at the same time so while standing there I continued talking and looking for eye contact. Bill, always the good listener, and always a gentleman, seldom interrupted, but this time he said, “Excuse me, Barney, but you’re peeing on my leg.”
And so time has passed, and we look in the mirror. We no longer appear to be those guys in the “wedding party” photograph. In our minds though we are still 22 years old, just off shift from the Silver Summit, two young bucks walking down the sidewalks of Wallace, ready for a cold glass of beer. My friend Bill is the one on the right, the one with the wet pant leg.
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