My first wife, Ethel and I had started building our first home. It was in what is now the city or town of Shoreline, WA.

I can’t exactly remember our stage of completion. One day a young family came walking down our temporary drive way. They were Charley Wood, his wife Evelyn, and their three year old daughter, Candice who was, of course, Candy.

They were pioneering as we were. They were building a very modern flat top house with huge plate glass windows. It was about half a mile from ours.

This was in the year of 1947. Large, plate glass windows were not very common yet. We learned that Charley was half Indian and half Caucasian. He had an aunt who was very wealthy, owning a large wheat ranch somewhere near Walla Wall, WA.

Between having Indian blood, providing free tuition at the University of Washington and a wealthy aunt, Charley had no real incentive to go to work.

Evelyn was the granddaughter of Hiram M. Chittenden, who was the primary engineer on the Ballard Locks in Seattle and had the locks named after him. He also built a bridge in Yellowstone National Park which is also named after him.

But this story is about Charley. As our houses progressed almost simultaneously we spent a lot of time together. As we approached the time we had to be in the house, we had no plumbing and no electricity except the temporary line to power our saws and drills.

My Dad had rented our duplex for September 1st occupancy thinking we would be in our house. The last Sunday of August Charley came down to our house and wired our electric circuit breaker panel so we could wire our house.

Charley, at his house, had two wires coming out of his ceiling which had loops. He could hang a two wire light socket in the loops. He had a down sleeping bag nailed on for a front door.

He borrowed tools and very seldom returned them. He might leave them right out in the dirt where he finished a job.

Finally, he got a job, scouting building sites for the Lovell Company, a large tract builder. He went to Spokane in tracking down the ownership of some property in the Seattle area.

That day my wife Ethel had baked a rhubarb pie. Charley’s neighbor, Bob Vehse could smell fresh baked pie from the highway which was several hundred feet from our house. Anyway, Bob stopped in for his piece of pie.

While he was there, we were berating Charley over the way he treated our tools. Bob finished his pie and went home. He was back in a very short time with the news that Charley had been killed in a commuter plane crash on the way home from Spokane.

Charley had been a pilot in the air force. In training, in Alaska he had crashed into a forest. When the meat wagon got there to pick up the remains he was standing there, calmly smoking a cigarette. The trees were so frozen that they snapped off allowing him to land. The grim reaper had missed him then, but he eventually got him.

After his death a number of we friends and neighbors spent time finishing what Charley never did. For something I was doing I needed a Crescent wrench. I asked Bob if he had one. He said yes, that Charley’s wife, Evalyn, had given him one. When he brought it to me, it had my name punched in in almost half inch letters. At least I got back one of the tools Charley had borrowed.

By the way, many years before, Bob Vehse was the kid on whose chair I put the two thumb tacks that finally got me kicked out of Sunday school.