AN UNEXPECTED REMINDER OF MY MOTHER

“Here’s a picture of the Orofino High School band in the ‘Blast from the Past,’” said Mike as he read the local newspaper. “Oh, but it’s 1926, so you wouldn’t know anyone.”

“I bet I would,” I replied in a “just-try-me” tone. My dad graduated from OHS in 1924, my mother in 1927. It was their era, and I was acquainted with some of those folks.

Sure enough! My uncle, Francis (“Porkie”) Portfors, stands to the right of center holding a clarinet. And there on his right is his sister – my mother, Dorothy Portfors. The photo served as a timely Mother’s Day reminder.

Mother & Uncle Porkie, 1927

Uncle Porkie was 18 months older than Mother and should have graduated with the class of 1926. However, his best friend, John (“Buzz”) Oud, sustained a serious and scary head injury while playing baseball and lost a year of school. (I think they were young teens when the accident happened.) Uncle Porkie refused to continue in school without Buzz. I don’t know how he managed this; I suspect he deliberately flunked a grade. At any rate, both Porkie and Buzz graduated in 1927 with Mother’s class. Buzz became a pharmacist and operated his own pharmacy and gift store in Orofino, while Porkie eventually operated the Ford garage, established by my grandfather, along with Wayne and Bill Johnson.

The photo is unidentified. If I had a school annual from this time frame, I could identify several other students, but I think the young man behind Mother’s right shoulder is Marvin Dickson, my dad’s cousin. He was Mother’s age and also a friend of Marvin Grasser to whom this photo belonged.

After graduating from high school, Mother attended college in Corvallis, OR. It proved to be too far from home. She didn’t enroll at the University of Idaho because that’s where Porkie and Buzz went. She said that she had carried them through high school and she wasn’t going to carry them through college as well.

“But Mother,” I said, “that just wouldn’t have happened.”

“I know,” she said, “but I didn’t know it then.”

She wanted to be a dress designer, and I’m sorry she didn’t realize at least some part of that dream because I think she had the talent to do it. But attitudes toward women and education were different then, and I don’t think she had a lot of parental support.

Anyway, Mother returned to Orofino where she kept books for her father, C.O. Portfors, at the Ford garage. In May 1929, she married Fairly Walrath and became a mother for the first time in May of 1930 with the birth of Harriet. She and Fairly had three more children – Farroll Joan, Charles, and Nina. Fairly died in 1945, and she married Vance Dobson in 1947. I was her last child, born in 1949.

Mother was a dutiful daughter, a dedicated mother and grandmother, and a talented homemaker. I miss her. KW

[I'm sorry the clipping is of such poor quality. It's not my photo, so I couldn't do much with it.]