February 17, 1955 was one of those Oregon winter nights when the skies are clear and the temperature falls below freezing. It was a Thursday evening. At about 10:30pm, Emmanuel “Mannie” Kellerhals and his wife Connie went to bed. Their bedroom was in the front of their house, facing the Silverton-Stayton Road, known today as the Cascade Highway, which leaves the southwest corner of Silverton, then turns and runs almost due-south to Sublimity and Stayton. It was quiet except for the ticking of their clock and the occasional car passing on the road.

Mannie was already asleep, but between about 10:45 and 10:50pm, Connie heard a car drive up fast and turn into their neighbor Ervin Kaser’s driveway almost directly across the road. She heard another car drive up and stop, and then a car door slam. That was almost immediately followed by the shocking sound of a rifle shot just outside their house, which awakened Mannie. They both leapt from their bed and rushed to the window and looked across the road towards Ervin’s home where they could see Ervin’s car, sitting in his driveway, with the headlights and the inside dome light on. But just then there were three more shots, which drew their attention to a place about 50 feet to their left, where muzzle flashes seemed to come from about the height of a car window, and a car’s headlights were shining. The shots seemed to come just about as fast as you could lever in another shell. Immediately after the final shot, the driver stepped on the gas and the car sped off past them to the south. As the night was quite light, they could tell it was a dark colored car and a fairly late model. Both tail-lights were on and widely spaced, as on the more recent car models. Looking back across the road, they could not see anyone in or around the car, so they thought Ervin had gotten into the house.

Approximate map of farms and homes in the Evergreen District at the time of the murder.

They went to the kitchen and tried to call Ervin, but after several failed attempts, they called Ervin’s brother Melvin who lived just south of Ervin across an open field, telling him that they thought someone was shooting at Ervin. Melvin called the Silverton Police, reaching Constable DePeel, and then Melvin went over to Ervin’s, where he discovered Ervin’s body in the front of the car.

Ervin Kaser’s body in his car

Constable DePeel notified the Marion County Sheriff’s office, then drove out to Ervin’s house. The Sheriff’s office sent out a call over the Sheriff’s radio network, which was heard by Silverton police officers Yates and Bethschieder who immediately drove out to the scene. All of these officers were familiar with Casper Oveross, his marriage problems, and that he blamed Ervin Kaser for breaking up his marriage. So, they left the scene almost immediately, driving back into Silverton to notify the Silverton Chief of Police, R. R. Main, and to start searching the town for Casper Oveross.

Melvin Kaser’s wife Cloreta quickly spread the news of the shooting to the family, and Calvin and Harvey Kaser both soon showed up at the scene. Calvin remembered:

When Ervin was shot, Kellerhals called Melvin, and then Cloreta called us. Then I got dressed and went out. I just parked along side the road and walked up to the car. Of course, the Sheriff’s Deputies were there, but no one stopped me. I didn’t open the car door, but when I walked up the lights were still on, they hadn’t gone out. He was sitting in there dead. I can see him yet today, his hand was down here, and his head was back and his eyes were half open and his mouth was open. It was obvious he was dead. I stayed around there for a while, then came back home. We didn’t go down and tell Mom about it until the next morning. Harvey was up there, too, by that time. He said, “What’s the point of going down and waking her up. Let her sleep, she can’t do any good.” Harvey and Melvin went down the next morning and told Mom. It hit her pretty hard, did it ever, it worked on her so bad, that she got so that she wouldn’t even sit in the living room in the night time. She’d sit in the hallway with just one little light in there. She figured if someone had shot Ervin, someone would come and shoot her, too. When you came in the front door of our folks’ house, the dining room was on the right side, and the living room was on the left. Right in the middle was where the vent came up through from the furnace in the basement, and there was a doorway that went into the hallway. It wasn’t a hallway, it was a cloak room, but we called it the hallway. It had five doors going out of it, one upstairs, one into the kitchen, one into the bathroom, and one into their bedroom. It was just a square room. The whole front of house was one big room, and we called it the living room and the dining room, and it went clear across the house. From the front door, you walked straight across this room, and that’s where this cloak room was, and when company came, that’s where we hung their coats. It must have been an eight by ten room. And that’s where she would sit all evening. All she had was a straight backed chair and a card table and one light bulb hanging from the ceiling.

Ervin’s car, driver side, where the four bullets struck, looking SOUTH. The roof of the house of Ervin’s brother Melvin is just visible through the windshield.

The Investigators – The murder was investigated by the Marion County Sheriff’s Department, with the assistance and cooperation of the Oregon State Police in Salem and the Crime Laboratory at the University of Oregon Medical Hospital in Portland, with some initial assistance from the Silverton Police Department. Since Melvin Kaser first called the Silverton Police Department, they were the first to arrive on the scene only 10-15 minutes after the murder. There was no police report from officer DePeel in either the County or State files, but below are most of the reports that cover the immediate events.

NOTE: These reports were written over the following several weeks, as the officers investigated and as they took the time to write up their notes from their notebooks. I’ve corrected occasional spelling errors, but have tried to leave the reports pretty much “as was” in order to not influence the content and to convey the “sound of the time.” Errors in spelling and grammar are quite common in these reports. Names are frequently spelled in several different ways, and occasionally an entirely wrong name is used (claiming that Harvey did something when it was actually Melvin, calling Harvey’s son Jack instead of Jeff, etc). I’ve corrected some of the name spellings, but not all of them. As always with memories, times are frequently uncertain and different people (and sometimes the same person) report things as happening at slightly different times. As with everything, read the police reports with an open and aware mind, and keep a pinch or two of salt at hand.

Looking WEST at the windshield of Ervin’s car. The Kellerhals house is visible in the background across the road.

Silverton Police Officer James D. Painter:
11:05 PM 2/17/55
At the above time and date the writer was informed that one Ervin Kaser of the Evergreen district had been killed by gunshot wounds by persons unknown. The writer and officer Bethschieder contacted one of our informants in a effort to get a line on who might have had a reason to murder him. The person contacted informed us that a very likely suspect would be one Casper Oveross who lived in the Holland Apt’s on N. Second Street in the apartment furthest from the street. The writer and Officer Bethschieder went to the Holland Aparments arriving there at 11:17 P.M. The writer knocked on the door a number of times and received no answer. The light was on inside of the apt, the key was in the lock on the outside of the door and there were newspapers put under the curtains inside in such a manner that it was impossible to see inside. The writer left Bethschieder at the Holland apt’s and went to the police station to pick up and get orders from Chief Main. Chief Main told the writer to lay in on the Oveross place. The writer knowing that the Holland Apt’s are gas equipped began to worry that Oveross might be committing suicide this suspicion was strengthened by the fact that there were paper over all the windows making observation into the house impossible. The writer, Officers Bethschieder and Yates entered the Oveross apt. at 12:15 A.M. 2/18/55 The writer looked in all the rooms of the apt and found them empty. The writer made a visual search of the place noting, a small box about 3” by 8” sitting on the drainboard by the sink, containing about three 12 gauge green shotgun shells and two 30-30 rifle bullets with various other odds and ends such as nails screws etcra etcra. There was not any weapons in sight in the apt. At 1:55 A.M. The writer again returned to the Oveross apt. with Sheriff Denver Young and party. The writer noted that the box containing the shotgun and rifle shells was not on the drainboard, looking for the box the writer found it in the cupboard. The writer took two cartridges (30-30)*** put them in a paper bag along with another 30-30 shell, found under the couch, and placed the bag on the table informing the Sheriff of its contents. The shell taken from under the couch was different from the others in that it was pointed instead of blunt nosed and appeared much newer being real shinney. The writer also noted a shotgun in Oversoss’s bedroom which had not been there on the writers first visit. The writer observed Sheriff Young take a empty rifle cartridge out of Oveross’s green plaid jacket and also removed the three loaded shells from the bag on the table and place them in his pocket. End of report.
***These were the two cartridges that were in the small box.

Looking NORTHWEST, the home of Ervin’s mother Sarah Kaser is just visible past the hood and windshield.

1 March 1955, State Police Sergeant Wayne G. Huffman:
Contacted City Officer James Painter, Silverton Police Department, who stated he had heard information of the shooting of Ervin Kaser when it came over the Sheriff’s office radio network, and he and Officers Yates and Bethschieder had driven out to the scene of the shooting and Special Deputy DePeel was there with several other people. He stated they three returned to Silverton almost immediately and called the Chief of Police and gave him the information. He stated from his previous knowledge of the situation that he and the two other officers started looking around Silverton, Oregon for CASPER OVEROSS. He stated this was shortly after 11:00 PM and he is not sure of the exact time, but would place it around 11:10 PM. He stated it was around 11:15 PM when they checked at the Town House Tavern and contacted Jerry Hoyt and told him of the shooting. He stated OVEROSS was not in the Tavern at that time. He stated they then drove down to the cabin of OVEROSS to check there and arrived at the cabin approximately 11:20 PM, but found no one at the cabin. OVEROSS’ car was not parked there. He stated they drove around town but could not find the Oveross car. He stated when they checked the Oveross cabin there was a light on inside and there was newspapers over the window. They knocked on the door and failed to receive an answer, but the key was in the outside lock of the door. They stated they watched the cabin for awhile and seeing no activity decided to check inside thinking possibly there was someone in there and trying to commit suicide with gas as the cabin was equipped with gas stoves. He stated they made a hurried check and there was no one inside. The front door of cabin was not locked. They stated they looked for firearms inside the cabin and failed to find any type. They did observe a box on the drainboard of the sink which contained three (3) live 30-30 shells and it was apparent this box had been left there just recently as it was placed normally where the dishes and other kitchen utensils would be placed. They stated they didn’t molest anything and then left and Officer Yates remained in vicinity to watch for OVEROSS and the other two officers went back uptown to look for Oveross. Officer Painter stated they returned to the cabin when the Sheriff and other officers picked up Oveross and in checking the cabin again they observed the shot-gun and understood it was found by the shower room leaning up against the wall near the shower curtain. He stated definitely that the shot-gun was not there on their first check of the cabin as he had moved the shower curtain to see if anyone was in the shower. He stated the box on the drainboard had been moved and was placed in the cupboard nearby as if it had been replaced in its original position.

Officer Painter stated he didn’t keep any notes of his activities that night of the times of his movements, but a check with the radio log at the Sheriff’s office would show the time he checked in with them, with car #30. he stated the first person he thought about when he heard KASER had been shot was CASPER OVEROSS as he was acquainted with the situation and knew of the threats Oveross had made but not in his presence.

Looking NORTH, Ervin’s house is visible over the car’s windshield, and the house of his neighbor to the north, E. M. Peer, is visible through the driver’s window.

Silverton Chief of Police R. R. Main:
10:55 PM  17 Feb 1955
At the above time and date the writer received a call at my home 336 Hill Street Silverton from the Officer on shift James D. Painter at about 11:13 PM Thursday February 17th, 1955 that one Ervin O. Kaser living on Rt 3 Silverton had been shot to death at his home two and one half miles south of Silverton. Painter informed me that Sheriff Denver Young had been notified and was on his way over to Silverton. The writer asked Painter to radio Denver to stop at the station and pick me up which he did. Denver arrived in Silverton at about 11:40 PM. Denver and the writer drove direct to the scene of the crime. When we arrived we were met by Harley DePeel, Richard Boehringer. Constable Harley DePeel informed us that he was the first Officer on the scene and every thing you see here is just the way he found them, that no one had touched the car or moved anything on the grounds. Ervin Kaser 1949 plymouth sdn was sitting in his driveway about 50 or 60 ft. from the highway with all the lights on including the dome light. Kaser was dead at the time we arrived was laying on the floor board of his car on the opposite side of the driver. There were four bullet holes through the car which looked as tho they were fired from a 45 degree angle.

There was evidence gathered at the scene of the crime which led us believe we should question Casper (Cap) Oveross. There was a call put out over all cars to be on the watch for the car driven by Oveross and his home in Silverton was being guarded by Officers. A short time before 1:55 AM a call came over the air that Oveross had arrived at his home at the Holland Apartments apt 6 on north 2^nd street Silverton. Sheriff Young, State Police Officer Dunn and the writer arrived at Oveross apartment at about 1:55 AM. Knocked on Oveross door and was admitted by Casper Oveross. After entering the apartment the writer stepped by Oveross to a doorway of the two rooms and took a look in the bed room and noticed a 12 gauge Winchester shotgun leaning against the wall next to his bed. The writer examined the gun, found it with shells in the magazine and one in the barrel. Oveross was questioned as to his where abouts in the past evening. He stated the forenoon he did target practice at Virgil Huddleston’s mill on the Silverton Salem highway. We then drove to Huddleston home 1502 Bethany St. Silverton arriving there at about 2:38 AM. Left there at about 2:50 AM and drove to the mill where we saw the 30-30 Oveross fired that morning. Left there at about 3:00 AM and drove to the Kaser Home. The writer sat in the car with Oveross while Dunn and Sheriff Young talked with other officers at the scene of the crime. Left there at about 3:50 AM and drove to Salem. Oveross was questioned by Deputy Shaw, Officer Dunn, Sheriff Young and myself. Left Salem at about 6:00 AM for Silverton arriving in Silverton at about 6:30 AM.

That’s the extent of reports from the Silverton police, as the Marion County Sheriff Denver Young quickly took over the investigation, with the assistance of the Oregon State Police. The majority of the investigation was done by Sheriff Denver Young, Sheriff’s Deputies Amos O. Shaw, John T. Zabinski and Richard C. Boehringer, State Police Sergeant Wayne G. Huffman, and State Police Officer Private Lloyd T. Riegel. State Police Officer Private Robert W. Dunn also assisted in the investigation for the first couple of days. Laboratory work was done primarily by Dr. Homer H. Harris, M.D. and Mr. Ralph Prouty of the Oregon State Police Crime Laboratory.

18 Feb 1955, Deputy Richard C. Boehringer:
The writer while on regular patrol February 17, 1955 received a call by radio to proceed to just south of the Evergreen School on the Silverton-Sublimity highway, the dispatcher stated a man had just been shot. I arrived at the scene at approximately 11:25 P.M. which is Rt. 3 Box 115A Silverton, Oregon. On my arrival Mr. Harley DePeel Constable for the Siolverton district who had arrived a short time earlier showed me a body in a 1950 Plymouth sedan which was parked in the driveway of the above address the Plymouth was facing east. The body was slumped against the right front door of the Plymouth, on the front seat. Constable DePeel stated to me that the name of the person in the car was Mr. Ervin Oren Kaser who lived at the above address.

I at this time called the dispatcher requesting the Sheriff to come to the scene which was done.

Mr. E. Kellerhals who lives directly across the highway from the above address at Rt. 5 Box 115 stated he had heard four shots which sounded like rifle shots at about 10:55 P.M. At that time he attempted to call by phone the Ervin Kaser home but received no answer, fearing something was wrong Mr. Kellerhals called Mr. Melvin Kaser who resides at Rt. 3 Box 114 Silverton who is a brother to Ervin Kaser, Melvin Kaser arrived at the Ervin Kaser home and he called Constable DePeel to the scene who in turn called the Sheriff’s Office.

The scene was left as I found it until the arrival of the Sheriff at which time he took over the investigation. I was detailed to remain at the scene until such time as I was relieved. Coroner Leston Howell arrived at the scene at 12:55 A.M.

I was relieved of duty at the scene at approximately 11:00 A.M. 2/18/55 with orders to bring the 1950 Plymouth to Salem for storage, which I did.

18 Feb 1955, Sheriff Denver Young:
At 3:30 A.M. This date the writer in company with Deputy Sheriff Shaw, Silverton Chief of Police R.R. Main and State Police officer Robert Dunn arrived at the Marion County Sheriffs Office with Casper Oveross of Silverton Oregon.

It was the purpose to question the above person in respect to his whereabouts during the evening of February 17, 1955 during which time Ervin O. Kaser was shot to death in front of his home at Rt. 3 Box 115 Silverton.

Subject Oveross came into the office voluntarily however after arriving at the office he asked to contact his attorney Norman Winslow. He was told that he could call Winslow later if he still wished to but if he had not done any thing wrong he had nothing to contact an attorney for. Subject was talked to in the officers room on the first floor of the Courthouse.

Oveross refused to answer any questions other than to say that he had already told us where he had been on the previous evening, and that he had never owned a 30-30 rifle. To all other questions he would only reply that we would have to ask his attorney, or reply in some manner entirely irrelevant to the question asked.

At 5:30 we discontinued any attempt to question Oveross and at 6:00 A.M. returned to Silverton with Chief Main and to the scene of the shooting at the Kaser residence.

The cabins/appartments at 716 N Second Street in Silverton, where Cap Oveross was living when Ervin was shot. Cap’s cabin was #6, the farthest one away in this picture.

19 Feb 1955, Sheriff Denver Young:
VICTIM: ERVIN OREN KASER, Route 3 Box 115A, Silverton Oregon 49 yrs, 6-0, 160# Brown, blue eyes.

DATE OF CRIME: February 17, 1955 Approximately 10:50 or 10:55 P.M.

PLACE OF CRIME: Driveway of Kaser residence at Rt. 3, Box 115A, Silverton, approximately 2 miles South of Silverton on the Silverton-Stayton Highway. It is about 200 yards So. Of Evergreen School on East side of road.

DISCOVERED BY: EMMANUEL AND CONNIE KELLERHALS JR. who live across street from Ervin O. Kaser, and who phoned the MELVIN KASER home immediately south of the victims home.

MODE OF OPERATION: Victim was shot with rifle, fired by assailant unknown, apparently from another automobile parked in the highway about 75 or 80 yards North and west of the victims car. Victims car was heard to drive into the driveway of his home by Mrs. E. KELLERHALS, and immediately afterwards she heard another car drive up and stop on the pavement. Upon hearing one shot both she and her husband jumped out of bed and looked out of the window. Immediately 3 more shots were fired, the blasts of which could be observed coming from the car parked on the roadway. Immediately after the three shots the car accelerated the motor and sped down the road towards the south. (refer to statement of Mr. & Mrs. Kellerhals)

PROPERTY STOLEN: none

ACTION TAKEN: Writer was notified by the Sheriffs office at 11:23 P.M. 2/17/55, that there was a possible homocide near Evergreen school (information from Constable DePeel) Writer asked desk to notify Deputies Shaw and Zabinski to proceed immediately to scene and Deputy Sheriff Boehringer had already been ordered there to stand by. Writer arrived at above scene at 12:10 A.M. February 18, 1955, after picking up Chief of Police R.R. Main in Silverton on the way. (Refer to other reports on continuation of investigation)

SUMMARY: Ervin Oren Kaser was shot and killed in his car in front of his home by assailants at this time unknown. Assailant apparently pulled up behind Kaser from the direction of Silverton and after stopping his car on the main roadway, fired four shots all of which penetrated through the doors and window of the KASER car. One of these bullets entered the body of Kaser, killing him almost immediately (see Dr. Homer Harris report of the autopsy). After firing shots assailant sped southward in the direction of Stayton. Bullet recovered from the body of the victim appeared to be of 30-30 Cal.

19 Feb 1955, State Police Officer Lloyd T. Riegel:
The writer contacted Deputy Sheriff John Zabinski at 6:10 A.M. At the Silverton police station in Silverton, Oregon. At that time the preceding information (contained in Officer Dunn’s report) was related to this officer and the officer received a tentative plan of what he was to do the remainder of the morning. Deputy Zabinski and this officer were directed by Sheriff Denver Young to attempt to locate the weapon used in the shooting of ERVIN OREN KASER. This officer and Deputy Zabinski were also advised to check the cabin of CASPER OVEROSS for any weapons or any other evidence that might pertain to this case.

At 8:55 A.M. Deputy Zabinski and this officer searched the cabin of Casper Oveross. The only weapon found in the cabin was a model 97 Winchester pump 12 guage shotgun. The cabin was quite disorderly. All the clothing, pockets of the clothing, suitcases, cabinet drawers, shelves, mattresses, beds, bedclothing were searched for any evidence relative to a gun or ammunition capable of being fired in a hand weapon. There was no evidence found other than the above mentioned 12 guage shotgun and two shells for this gun.

Information was obtained by Deputy Zabinski and this officer that Casper Oveross would make frequent trips to the old home place, located on Powers Road, about five miles east of Silverton. It was further learned that the old home place was owned by Casper Oveross’ brother, Henry Oveross, who resides at 514 S. Water St. in Silverton, that the farm at the present time is unoccupied. Deputy Zabinski and this officer proceeded to the home farm, which is the third property on Powers Creek Road south of the Silverton-Marquam highway. The writer and Zabinski were unable to gain entrance to this place so the adjoining house was checked relative to any activity about the farm place during the night. In the adjoining house, just north of the Oveross home farm, is Edward Shubert and his wife. Mrs. Shubert is the sister of Casper and Henry Oveross. Also contacted at the Shubert residence was Henry Amundson whose wife is also a sister of Casper and Henry Oveross. These people were questioned at quite some length relative to any firearms that Casper Oveross has owned or presently owns. It was learned from Edward Shubert that Casper Oveross at one time owned a 32-40 Wincsheter model 94; however, it was believed that he had sold this weapon some time ago. He also stated that Casper owned a 12 guage shotgun, believed a model 97 Winchester, at one time. He stated that they had hunted together several times but that neither of them could recall what type of weapon he used, or could they recall whether the weapon he was using was his own or a borrowed weapon. They further stated that Casper Oveross had gone to eastern Oregon on a deer hunting trip this last season and that he had shot a deer. They were unable to say what he had done with the deer, however, they assumed that he had placed it in one of the lockers in Silverton. The two sisters were questioned relative to Casper Oveross and his general attitude. They stated that Casper Oveross had always been a very level headed, friendly, more or less carefree type fellow, that he had taken quite a lot from his wife, Ethel Oveross, before he had become roiled enough to sue for a divorce. When the officers attempted to question these subject further as to what they had meant when they said he had taken “quite a lot” the officers were unable to pin the subjects down as to exactly what they meant. They stated that they had never seen Ethel Oveross with another man, that everything they knew had been strictly hearsay, but they were sure it was true because it had been told to them by very reliable sources. However, the officers were unable to actually obtain any facts as to Ethel Oveross’ activities or any activities that had caused Casper Oveross to sue for a divorce.

Deptuy Zabinski and this officer then contacted the Montgomery Locker Plant in Silverton relative to a locker or the cutting up of a deer owned by Casper Oveross. No information was obtained at this locker. The Budget Market and Lockers were then contacted. It was learned at this locker that Casper Oveross had shot a deer in eastern Oregon and that they had cut the deer up and wrapped it. The deer had been divided between him and a Danny Gilliam, who supposedly had gone hunting with Casper Oveross. It was also learned that Bill Sprick had also gone on this hunting trip with Oveross and Gilliam.

Deputy Zabinski and this officer then contacted Ethel Oveross at her residence three miles south of Silverton on the Silverton-Sublimity road. Ehtel Oveross related that the Danny Gilliam referred to is Daniel James Gilham, age 19. Gilham is and has been the boy friend of the oldest Oveross daughter, Colene Oveross. Mrs. Oveross stated that Danny Gilham had accompanied Casper Oveross on this hunting trip and also Bud Sprick had gone on this hunting trip. She stated that she did not think that Danny Gilham had stayed for the entire trip as he had forgotten his deer tag and he returned home early. Ethel Oveross was questioned relative to any guns owned by Casper Oveross. She stated that she knew very little about guns but she did believe that he at one time owned some type of gun called a 30-40 but that he had sold this gun some time previous and she did not know whether he had purchased another gun or not. She did state that at one time Casper Oveross had a 30-30 ordered but whether he ever actually purchased the gun was unknown. She stated that he at one time had an old beaten up 22 rifle that stayed about the house for some time but as to its whereabouts she did not know. She further stated that he does have a large shotgun, make and kind unknown. She described the gun as one barrel with some sort of a gadget that you have to slide back and forth under the barrel to load it. When she was questioned relative to Casper Oveross, his general attitude, his general characteristics, and his mental condition, she stated that she knew very little about her husband, that she had been divorced from him for seven months. When she was confronted with the idea that she had lived with the man for twenty years and that it would be quite difficult to forget in seven months she would say nothing. She did state that she did not think that Casper Oveross was of the temperament to shoot a man and if he was wanting to come back with her that she could not understand why he would shoot a man, that she definitely would not take him back after he had shot a fellow. She was questioned relative to her activities the night previous to the shooting. She stated that she had been at home on the night of the 16th of February and that on the night of the 17th of February at approximately 7:30 P.M. She had gone to Stayton, Oregon. When questioned as to whom she went to Stayton with she stated that she had gone with Ervin Kaser and that they had returned home shortly after ten o’clock in the evening. She was questioned as to whether Casper Oveross had been very angry when they had received the divorce. She stated that he had not and that he comes back to the place at least once and sometimes twice a week to visit the children and her. She says there has never been a harsh word between him and the children or between him and her. She further stated that he was not a close father, that he had been good to the children and to her, but he had never been a real close friend of the children. While talking to Ethel Oveross Daniel James Gilham and Colene Oveross came into the house. Deputy Zabinski questioned this subject as to his going to eastern Oregon on a hunting trip last fall with Casper Oveross and Bill Sprick. Gilham stated that he had gone on the hunting trip. When Deputy Zabinski asked what type of gun Casper Oveross used and owned Gilham stated that he did not have to answer that question and that he would not answer that question. At this time the writer observed Gilham very carefully. Gilham became very white, very nervous and a surge of anger seemed to appear on the man. He sat down in a chair momentarily. Colene came in from the kitchen and told him that it was time for them to go and he got up and left in a 1950 Ford, dark green in color, Oregon 647-134. Ethel Oveross was questioned relative to Gilham’s attitude and why he had become so nervous. She stated that she had no idea why he became nervous and why he was taking the attitude that he had taken. She said that she felt that it was possible that he is just a boy and is quite flighty. She stated that he has always been high strung and very hot tempered.

Deptuy Zabinski and this officer then contacted CARL SPRICK, Route 1, Silverton, which is on the Marquam road cutoff to Mt. Angel. Carl Sprick stated that he had known Casper Oveross for several years, that he had never been a close friend of Casper Oveross because of the age difference; however, he did state that his brother, Bill Sprick, was quite friendly with Casper Oveross, that they had hunted together in eastern Oregon for ten or eleven years, that Bill would accompany Oveross when he took small trips and that Oveross would go to the Bill Sprick residence to observe television. Bill Sprick was then contacted relative to his activities and his knowledge of Casper Oveross. Bill Sprick stated that he has known Casper Oveross for twelve or thirteen years and that he has hunted with him almost every year for eleven years. When questioned as to what type of gun Oveross has Strick stated that he knew Oveross had a gun but he did not know what kind or the type it was. He was questioned relative to the gun being a lever action, bolt action, or a slide or pump gun. He stated that he had never noticed the gun, that it was Casper’s gun and he did not bother with the gun. He was questioned as to whether he knew if the gun was actually Casper Oveross’ or if it were a borrowed gun. He stated that he did not know this, that Casper had never told him and he had never asked. He was questioned as to whether Casper had used the same gun every year or if he had a new gun in the last year or so. He again stated that he paid no attention to the guns, that he just went hunting with him and he did not look at the gun, had never picked it up, admired it, or paid any attention to it in any way.

Information was then received that on the morning of February 17, 1955 Casper Oveross had done some shooting at a lumber yard just south of Silverton. This lumber yard was contacted by Deputy Zabinski and this officer. A “Rusty” Huddleson, operator of the yard, was contacted relative to Casper Oveross and his shooting a gun at the yard that morning. “Rusty” Huddleson stated that at approximately 9:30 or 9:45 Casper Oveross came to the lumber yard with a bill of lumber. He stated that he had taken a contract to finish the interior of a house and that he desired to have this bill of lumber figured before he gave a final figure on his completion of the project. Huddleson further stated that while they were in the office talking Casper noticed a gun on the counter. Huddleson told Casper that he worked on guns and repaired them, more or less as a hobby, and that he had been fixing this 30-30 for a fellow and he asked Casper if he would like to shoot a few test shots from it. Casper took the gun outside and shot four shots into a pile of lumber. The gun was brought back to the office, set in a corner and a 2×4 placed in front of the gun. “Rusty” Huddleson stated that the gun stayed in that place and was there on the morning of February 18 when he returned to the office, that he is sure that Casper Oveross could not have gotten into the office and taken this gun out and then returned it.

In effort to establish some time and location of the victim, Ervin Kaser, Deputy Zabinski and this officer checked the various grocery stores in the Silverton area for information as to his buying a sack of groceries which was found in the back of his car. Articles in the sack were those sold by the Safeway Store in Silverton, such as the Miss Wright bread which is only handled by Safeway. Safeway stores were contacted and they stated that they had stayed open until 9:00 P.M. On February 17, 1954. The two clerks on duty at the Safeway store that evening stated that they did not know Ervin Kaser and they were unable to state whether M. Kaser had purchased groceries at the Safeway store in Silverton or not.

Deputy Sheriff Shaw and this officer got together at the Silverton city police station at 5:30 P.M. On February 18, 1955 and compared notes and information previously obtained. At this time it was decided that George Hopkins who lived in the adjoining cabin to Casper Oveross would be the next subject to contact relative to any guns or ammunition owned by Casper Oveross. The Hopkins cabin was contacted and it was learned that Mr. Hopkins had not returned from work; however, Mrs. Hopkins related the information that some time shortly after 9:00 P.M. On February 17, 1955 she heard a vehicle drive up at the Oveross apartment. A man got out and went in the apartment, stayed for a short time, came out and got in his car and left. Mrs. Hopkins stated that she was unable to state whether this man was Casper Oveross or some other man. Mrs. Hopkins stayed up quite late that evening and she stated that she did not hear anybody return to the apartment before she went to bed near midnight. Deputy Shaw and the writer then proceeded to the area near the Daniel James Gilham residence, Rt. 5, Box 417, Salem, Oregon, Waldo Hills area.

At the entrance to the lane leading to the Gilham residence a Mr. Frank Sexton, Rt. 5, Box 418 was contacted. Mr. Sexton’s house sets at the intersection of the Gilham lane and the extension of State Street adjoining the Silverton Road. Mr. Sexton stated that he had gone to bed shortly after ten o’clock on the evening of February 17, 1955 and that he was not definitely sure of the time but he would state approximately 45 minutes later he heard the Gilham boy’s car turn from the main highway into the lane and go to the Gilham home. Mr. Sexton was questioned relative to if there were one or two vehicles and the manner in which the vehicles proceeded up the lane. Mr. Sexton stated there was only one car and that it had driven quite rapidly, but that was not unusual as the Gilham boy normally drove quite fast. He stated that he knew little of the Gilham family, that they had lived in this place for several years and that the boy had a step-mother as his mother had died several years ago. Mr. Sexton stated that Mr. Gilham was quite a respectable gentleman but he had never met or talked with the Gilham boy or Mr. Gilham’s wife.

Deputy Shaw and the writer then contact J. W. Gilham, father of Daniel James Gilham. Mr. Gilham was quite cooperative and stated that he did not know whether his son was implicated in this matter or not. He said that he knew that his boy was going with Colene Oveross and had gone with her for quite some time. He stated that he and his wife went to bed about 9:30 on the evening of February 17, 1955 and at that time his boy had not returned home. Some time after 9:30, exact time unknown, Mr. Gilham stated he was awakened by the sound of his boy entering the house. He stated that the boy came into the house and went to his room and went to bed, but he could hear nothing unusual and there appeared to be nothing unusual about his activity. However, he had not seen the boy or talked to him at the time he returned home. Mr. Gilham further stated that his boy owned a 30-30 rifle and to the best of his knowledge the rifle was in the house some place. He was asked if he would let us officers have this rifle so a ballistics test could be made of the gun. Mr. Gilham agreed that he would let the officers have the boy’s rifle; however, he would have to get the rifle and give it to the officers at a time when the boy was not at home. During the time Deputy Shaw and this officer were talking to Mr. Gilham the boy interrupted the conversation several times, calling his father out for telephone calls, and his wife, Mrs. Gilham, interrupted once stating they should be on their way to a grange meeting. At the same time Mr. Gilham was contacted Daniel James Gilham came to the door and acted very belligerent about the entire situation. He was at that time accompanied by Colene Oveross. They together, Daniel Gilham and Colene Oveross, stated that they had nothing further to say, that they were sick and tired of the officers pushing their weight around and that they felt we were taking advantage of them and accusing him wrongly. They stated that they had contacted their attorney, Bruce Williams, and had been advised by Mr. Williams to say nothing to any officer. This officer attempted to explain to Mr. Gilham that he had not been accused and that he was in no way attempting to be questioned by this officer. The only purpose for the presence of the officers was to determine if Mr. Oveross had borrowed a gun or whether Danny Gilham knew what type of weapon Mr. Oveross had. To this the Oveross girl spoke up and ordered this officer to leave the property and stated that if he did not they would contact their attorney, Bruce Williams, and have him come over and order us off of the property. Danny Gilham concurred with her statement, that he wanted us to leave the property; however, the owner of the property, Mr. Gilham, made no statements or gave no indication that he desired the officers to leave. However, the situation had developed with the conflict between the father and son and it was evident that no information could be obtained. These officers left with the understanding that they would contact Mr. Gilham at some time when his son was not at home and he would produce the rifle if it could be located.

Deputy Shaw and this officer returned to Silverton and contacted Silverton City Police Painter relative to information he had obtained on gunsmiths in the Silverton area. Painter stated that a I. A. Foster was the only recognized gunsmith in the Silverton area and it was possible that Mr. Foster may have worked on a gun for Oveross. Mr. Foster was contacted and he stated that he had never worked on a gun for Oveross and that to the best of his knowledge he had never seen or heard of Oveross having a gun; howebver, he would not say that Oveross did not have a gun. Several other people in the Silverton area, Mr. Bill Jones, Mr. Edgar Hobert, Mr. Hank Davenport were contacted relative to any information about Oveross of any guns he might own. These subjects admitted that they had hunted with Oveross but they had no knowledge as to what type of gun, size, make or description of gun used by Oveross.

Deputy Shaw and this officer next contacted Rodney Oster, 115 N. James St., Silverton. Mr. Oster stated that he had known Casper Ovross for his entire life. He further stated that he saw Casper Oveross between 9:50 and 10:00 P.M. On February 19, 1955. [EK_note: this date is incorrect; the actual date they're discussing was Feb 17; this report was being written on Feb 19] Mr. Oster stated that he had gone to Shorty’s Tavern to wait for his wife who was bowling in the adjoining building. While at Shorty’s Tavern he had talked with Casper Oveross for a period of approximately ten minutes, this being between 9:50 and 10:00 P.M. During the conversation with Casper Oveross Oveross made the following statement: “My wife should be at a lodge meeting tonight but I suppose they are out together again.” “I have a friend in the state pen who is doing 99 years for killing his wife and her lover and I visited him just a few days ago.” Mr. Oster stated that shortly after this Casper Oveross left Shorty’s Tavern and at about approximately 10:30 P.M. Mr. Oster’s wife came into Shorty’s and they left together, going directly to the Town House and into the bar section. He stated they remained at the Town House until 1:30 A.M. On February 18, 1955. Several times while they were at the bar they were the only people in the tavern section. They stated that at no time between 10:30 and 1:30 did Casper Oveross come into the bar section of the Town Tavern. Mrs. Oster further stated that during between 10:30 and 1:30 she had to go to the restroom twice. In order to get to the ladies restroom it was necessary that she go through the restaurant section of the Town Tavern. The first time she went she observed two girls and a boy and girl sitting at opposite ends of the counter in the restaurant section. She stated that the girl was in her teens, the boy was approximately 6′ tall and a heavy dark complexioned fellow. She stated that she doubted if she could definitely identify either of these persons, boy or girl, again, but she stated that at that time Casper Oveross was not in the restaurant section. A the second time she went through the restaurant section Casper Oveross was not in the restaurant at that time, and it was very doubtful to both Mr. and Mrs. Oster that Casper Oveross had ever returned to the Town House tavern or restaurant section.

This ends the day of February 18, 1955.

The following information was obtained after midnight and on the 19th of February 1955:

This officer and Officer Shaw contacted the Gilham residence again. The Gilham boy was at home, his car was in the driveway, and no attempt was made to contact Mr. Gilham relative to the gun owned by Daniel James Gilham.

A check was then made with the Phillippi Motor Co. in Stayton in an effort to contact Ethel Oveross, who is a bookkeeper and office clerk for this motor company. It was learned that she had not worked since the morning of the incident and it was not known as to when she would return to work. The residence of Ethel Oveross was then contacted. Her daughter, Colene Oveross, stated that her mother had gone to Salem to purchase a new coat and it was doubtful if she would be back to Silverton before 3:30 or 4:00 P.M. that date.

Information was then obtained that Casper Oveross had moved to the home of his brother, Henry Oveross, at 315 South Water Street, Silverton. The moving of Oveross and his clothing from his apartment had been assisted by Roy Brown. It can not be determined as to what Roy Brown had actually done in the moving and as to how close a friend or what connection Roy Brown had with Casper Oveross. The best information that could be obtained revealed that Oveross had moved to his brother’s place approximately 7:00 P.M. On the evening of February 18, 1955. Continued checks were made throught the area in effort to obtain information relative to Cap Oveross and the gun or type of gun that he may use.

Information was then obtained from Sheriff’s Reserve Frank Shepard that he had learned that some time previous to this incident Ervin Kaser had forced himself upon a Marilyn Schaar, who lived near the Central Howell School, and that he had also contacted a man by the name of John Seems and attempted to sell his farm equipment to Mr. Seems. An effort to contact Marilyn Schaar was made, but no results. Schaar had not returned to her home late Saturday evening. John Seems was contacted and he revealed that about two or three weeks ago Ervin Kaser had contacted him offering to sell his tractor and farm equipment. When Seems had questioned Kaser as to why he desired to sell his equipment, Kaser stated that he was unable to make a living on the small place that he owned. Seems asked him what he intended to do if he sold his farm equipment. Kaser stated that he had no idea but would possibly leave the country. While talking to John Seems a Doctor Simmons and a Dick Carter were also contacted at the Seems residence. Carter is a member of the Sheriff’s Reserve in the Silverton area. Carter wrote a name on a piece of paper and handed to Deputy Shaw stating to him that if you will contact a man whose name is on the paper you may possibly obtain some information of interest. Deputy Shaw then showed the paper to this officer. The name written on the paper was Charles Hopkins. It was learned that Mr. Hopkins was a businessman in the Silverton area and had one time been the owner of the Marshall-Wells Store and had had considerable business dealings with Casper Oveross. Mr. Carter explained that he and Charles Hopkins were both businessmen in the Silverton area and that the general sentiment throughout the Silverton area was in favor of Casper Oveross and that any information or cooperation that they would be able to give us would have to be kept in the strictest of secrecy and they would desire any contacts be made after dark in a place other than their own residence if possible. Mr. Carter advised that he would attempt to arrange for a meeting with Charles Hopkins some time that evening. At this time Sheriff’s Reserve Frank Shepard was with us and he agreed to be the between man between Deputy Shaw and the writer and Mr. Carter and Charles Hopkins.

At approximately 6:00 P.M., 19 February, 1955, a meeting was arranged between Charles Hopkins, Dick Carter, the writer and Deputy Shaw. The meeting was arranged by Frank Shepard and it was to be at Dick Carter’s residence at 7:45. At 7:45 Deputy Shaw and the writer went to the Carter residence and contacted Dick Carter, Charles Hopkins and a Mr. Hanson. They stated that they realized that the police officers were having it difficult in the Silverton area to obtain any information and that they would be willing to cooperate as much as possible in locating information and relaying between the officers. Mr. Charles Hopkins stated that he had known Casper Oveross for several years and that Casper Oveross had done considerable business in his store, buying tools, paint, paint brushes and various things in connection with his carpenter work. He stated that approximately the last of September 1954, but just prior to the receiving of his divorce, Casper Oveross had told him that he and another fellow had layed in a field all night and had waited for Ervin Kaser to go to the Oveross home. Oveross stated that he and the other party, whose name was not given, had observed Ervin Kaser come from his home and go into the Oveross home. They stated that Kaser stayed at the Oveross home all night and had left there just before dawn. Casper Oveross at that time stated “I should have shot him right then, but I didn’t, but I still think that I will shoot him.” He also stated that he had a friend who is in the penitentiary for shooting his wife’s lover and that he had sometimes wondered whether it would actually be worth it or not but after thinking it over he believed that he should still shoot Ervin Kaser. At that time Casper Oveross related to Mr. Hopkins that he had a gun. He did not say what type of gun or what caliber but he did state that he had a gun. Mr. Hopkins stated that he was quite sure that some time during the day of Sunday he would be able to determine the exact type and kind of gun Casper Oveross owned. It was agreed that a meeting would be arranged between Officer Riegel, Deputy Shaw and the three above named gentlemen at a later time after they had had an opportunity to find the information that had been requested by these officers.

Continued checks were made throughout the day at the J. W. Gilham residence in effort to contact Mr. Gilham alone. Daniel Gilham did not leave home all day and it was impossible for these officers to contact Mr. Gilham for additional information or to get the rifle which belongs to Daniel James Gilham.

Continued checks were also made at the Oveross residence and up until 6:00 Mrs. Oveross had not returned home and it was doubtful that she would return home that evening.

The investigation will continue for additional information relative to the activities of Daniel James Gilham, Casper Oveross on the night of February 17, 1955. To date Casper Oveross has a period between 10:00 P.M., 17 February 1955, and 12:45 A.M., 18 February 1955 that cannot be accounted for. Daniel J. Gilham will not talk, will not cooperate with the officers in anyway, and will make no effort to give any explanation for his time or activities on the night of February 17, 1955. The last known place that Daniel James Gilham was was the Oveross residence. He was there sometime between 7:30 and 8:30 P.M., 17 February 1955. After that hour there has been no indication as to where Daniel James Gilham went, what he did, who he contacted or the exact time given as to when he returned to his home.

[That's enough (too much?) for one post.  More to follow...]

Blogically Yours,
Everett

Sorry for the long delay in posting the next piece of the story.  I’m finding it more work and more time-consuming that I’d expected.

A large part of the following sections will be based upon the police reports from the investigation.  They’re far more trustworthy than the newspaper reports, although everything has to be taken with a grain of salt.  Every ‘story’ (or report, etc) is told from SOMEONE’S point of view, with the associated prejudices, opinions, attitudes, etc.  In the case of a police investigation, you have several layers of that: first, the police officer doing the investigation and writing the report, second the person they’re interviewing, third the people around the person being interviewed.  They all have different desires, attitudes, beliefs, pressures (social and otherwise) and fears, and none of them ‘see’ with god-like clarity and all-knowing.  So what is the truth?  It’s not something that can be cleanly conveyed before, during or after the fact.  All we can do is present the available ‘facts’ as best as we can, and let the reader “fill in the blanks” and make up their own mind.

There were a half-dozen primary investigators of the murder, and each of them wrote reports of their activities and findings.  Usually two or three of these investigators would work together, driving here and there, interviewing various people, and as a result there is often two or three different police reports covering the same events and interviews.  These reports would sometimes be written up the same day they occurred, and sometimes they wouldn’t be written up from their notebook until almost a week later.  Sometimes one report would cover one small interview, and sometimes it would cover several days of investigation.

Trying to organize all of that into some more reasonably digestable form was proving problematic for me (the County Sheriff’s file alone is about 240 pages, which includes most of the State Police reports also, but the State Police file has a few additional reports that aren’t included in the Sheriff’s file, so there’s probably closer to 275 pages of police reports to process).  Finally, I realized that I really needed to have all of the police reports in a text format that was easily manipulated, rather than just as photocopies and JPG scans of those photocopies.  OCR software was no use.  On some reports it generated reasonably good scans, but still with many, MANY OCR errors.  On other reports the original (or photocopy thereof) was so poor that the OCR software could get NOTHING but gibberish.

So, I decided that the best thing to do was to re-type all of the reports into a text editor.  Sigh.  Once that’s done, then I’ll be able to “pick apart” the reports, putting the various pieces together into a more chronological order and placing together the reports from different investigators of the same event.  Frequently each investigator will include something in their report that none of the others did, giving a better perspective on what happened, what was seen or said. This will also allow me to build a better time-line of exactly who was doing what and when and where and with whom.  And that will then let me proceed more smoothly and easily with the telling of the story in a more organized fashion.

Unfortunately, that won’t happen terribly quickly.  It’s a slow process.  So far, in the past three weeks or so, I’ve typed in just over 100 pages, probably a little over a third of the total (vacations, canning peaches and applesauce, life, all have interfered and reduced productivity to a snail’s pace).  However, that’s enough to let me get started on organizing the events of the murder and the first week  or two of the investigation.  But things are going to slow down even further, as it’s time for me to get to work on my real job, writing puzzle games.  It’s been a nice summer break, but sooner or later, we all have to earn a living.

So, please be patient, and have faith that I will finish this story that I’ve started. It’s just going to take a while…

This is the third and final part about Ervin’s life and working on the hop farm.  Next time: The Night of the Murder.

Calvin Kaser remembers:

Ervin was married to a Lucille Dixon in about ’33 or ’34. It didn’t last very long, I think it only lasted a few months. I think they were living at his place then. And then it wasn’t very long and she moved out, and then this Marian moved in, and she was there for maybe a year, then she moved out, and then he married Mary Callavan or Huntley.

Ervin was grumpy. Any little thing didn’t go right and, “Goddammit, don’t ya know what the hell you’re doin’?” and he’d cuss at the people, even the workers that were working for him. I remember, Brian Potter, was working for him in the hop yard putting irrigation pipes together. Of course, it was pipes that Ervin had made, and he got on Brian’s ass for not being able to get them together. Brian told me about it later.  He said, “Well if you know so much about it, why don’t you come and fit this son of a bitch together!” Well, there was something about the rubber on the inside that wasn’t working right, it hadn’t fit into this shell that Ervin had made so it’d seal the water. Well, Ervin couldn’t get it together either, but that’s the way he was, he was quick tempered. Ervin and Melvin were similar in that respect. But Ervin, if he wanted something, it was nothing but pure milk and honey.

Sarah Frauhiger (Kaser) – age 20

Very seldom did she do this, but when Mom made up her mind that enough was enough, by god Dad knew it. And when she said, “Enough is enough,” by god it was enough, there was just no two ways about it. She never swore very much, she might say ‘damn’ once in a while, or when she was referring to someone who was a dead-beat, she might say, ‘shit-ass’, I can remember her saying that once in while, but not very often.

I remember when I was a teenager [latter half of the 1930s], working in the hop yards at home, and Ervin had rented this hop-yard up in Jordan Valley, up around Scio, it was 30 acres up there. And that was another time that Ervin came back and Dad welcomed him with open arms, and it didn’t matter how many times Ervin shit on the folks, Dad always took him back, well, Mom, too. Well, he came back, and he could rent this hop yard up there, and it was a fruggles yard, it was the early hops, and it wouldn’t be any trouble getting them picked, and they came on early, and it would be an inducement to get the pickers to come early, they’d pick longer, they’d have early hops to pick. Well, that was a damn long drive, a good hour’s drive up there. And you drove down into this valley and you drove down and pretty soon this neck kind of opened up and here was this hop yard. It was in the spring of the year, and Ervin had loaded the tractor up. At that time, we had that one Case tractor, and neither Orval nor Harvey had a tractor. So there was Orval’s hops, he had 40 acres up there [on Finlay Road, the old Golf Course Road], and Harvey had 20 [on Evergreen Road]. And we had the home place, which was Dad’s 27 and Ervin’s 14 or 15, and that one tractor had to do all that work.

Well, Ervin loaded the tractor up and took it up to Jordan Valley. But it was too wet up there, he couldn’t work. And the weeds were coming up in our hop yards, and they needed working in the worst way. Our ground was ready, and it could be worked. And I remember this one morning, Dad was at the table and Mom was washing dishes, we’d just gotten through eating breakfast. And Dad asked Ervin, “When are you going to get that tractor home, we need to work this ground around here?” And Ervin said, “Well, it’s going to be another two or three days, at least, before we can get in.” And they bantered back and forth, and Mom didn’t say a word. And pretty soon she turned around and said, “I want that goddamned tractor home tomorrow morning, and it had better be home!” And Dad and Ervin both started to say something, and she slammed her fist down and said, “That godddamned tractor is coming home. Now!” Well, I’ll tell you he got in the truck and that tractor came home that day, and the next day it went to work in our hop yard. I was probably 15, 16, so I suppose it was the late ’30s somewhere. Ervin could shit on Dad, and everything would be forgiven. Mom went to a point with him, she loved all of her children very dearly, and she didn’t want to do anything to upset or hurt the kids, but only up to a point. But when it got to that point… and that’s one of only two or three times that I can remember her getting hostile or up in the air or anything, but she had just had enough. And that’s probably the only time I ever heard her say ‘goddamn’. She’d say ‘damn’, or if she was really P.O.’d she’d say ‘shit!’. She swore very little.  Something I remember her saying about children was, “When they’re small, they step on your toes.  When they’re big, they step on your heart.”

We never played any games at home to speak of, other than Pinochle once in a while, or a little checkers. That was about the only game Dad and I played, was checkers. Mom, she was either quilting or making a quilt, or of an evening she was sewing, that’s all she did was sew in her idle and spare time. She never knitted, but she crocheted. She’d make dish towels or pillow cases and crochet a trimming around them. Make them out of flour sacks. Bleach the printing out of the flour sacks, and bind the edges of them, and crochet a fringe around the edge of them. She’d buy a pattern, and use a hot iron to make the imprint on them, then embroider those. She never made us clothes, but she mended clothes all the times. She made herself clothes, but never anyone else. But mend clothes, my god, that women would patch and patch and patch. If your pants got so bad that there was no more use in them, then she’d cut the good parts out and use them to mend other pants.

Fred and Sarah Kaser – 1952

Dad died in ’53 [from a heart attack, but he was also close to dying from prostate cancer that had matastasized], and Mom couldn’t hardly handle that. Then Ervin getting shot… she was a basket case, absolutely a basket case. She was a wonderful woman, my mother was. Never had much education. Matter of fact, the education she got, she got from her kids. She never finished the third grade in school, in Indiana, she had to go to work. So, her education was what us kids went to school and come home and taught her, that was her education as far as writing and arithmetic and this kind of thing. As far as cooking, the woman was a wonderful cook, a wonderful cook. When we got married, it used to make Wilma so mad. She’d go down and ask, “What did you put in it?” and Mom would answer,“Oh, just a little of this and a little of that.” “Well, how much?” “Oh, just a little of this, a little of that.”

Summer 1955 – Sarah Kaser and her grandson Everett Kaser (age 2 1/2). This was the last picture taken of her, about two weeks before a devastating series of strokes.

After Dad died, we had to take her down to the bank and teach her how to write a check. Mom had beautiful handwriting. She wrote very slow, but she had a beautiful hand. But she didn’t know how to fill out a check. Because dad filled out all of the checks up until about the time I got to be 16 or 17, and then I started doing the bookwork for him. I kept track of the people’s hours, and I’d write the checks out, and Dad would sign them. At 25 cents an hour, that’s what he paid for hop yard help at that time. So if you worked a full six days, you got $12, at that time a pretty damn good pay check, $12, bought a lot of groceries. Bread was 10 cents a loaf, sometimes on sale 8 or 9 cents a loaf. We never deducted Social Security, the only thing we withheld was Worker’s Compensation. Social Security was non-existent at the time, as far as we were concerned on the farm. I can remember having that payroll book with everybody’s name in it, and how many days they worked, and how many hours they worked, and Saturday was payday. I’d go in about 3:00 o’clock and figure out what they had coming for the week, and when they came in at 5:00 o’clock, off work, I handed them the checks and dad would sign them. Dad died in August 1953.

Sometime after Dad’s hop yard was pulled out, the place was sewed to grain. I know that’s what Ervin and Harvey got into a fight about, because they had somebody come harvest Mom’s grain, and Ervin took Mom’s grain down to the Wilco… well, it was Valley Co-op at that time, and the elevator was still there, and he put her grain in his name. That’s what he and Harvey got into it about, and that’s when Harvey poked him. Then Harvey went down and straightened it out and put that grain back in her name. That would have had to have been about ’53 or ’54.

Ervin never paid much attention to Phyllis, Mary’s daughter from a previous marriage. So as far as him wanting to have kids, he didn’t, other than teasing them once in a while, that’s all he done with kids is tease the hell out of them. I’m trying to think back to when Ervin and Mary were married, and Phyllis was just a little girl then, somewhere between 4 and 6 years old. They would come to family get-togethers once in a while, but thinking back on these family gatherings, Ervin never mixed in with the rest of us so much, he was more or less back by himself. So far as playing cards, that’s pretty much all we did when we got together was play cards, he just didn’t. Mary got along pretty well, I liked Mary, I never had any problems with Mary, but she stopped socializing with the family after Ervin was shot.

I wasn’t proud of Ervin as a brother, not one damn bit. I give him credit for what he could do. He was a hell of a mechanic, and he had a lot of ideas of making things, machinery. If he was in today’s day and age, he’d probably command a pretty damn good job. Because he was smart, in that sense. There wasn’t much of anything that the guy couldn’t make. Mechanically, he was brilliant, but as a person he was a plain horse’s ass. He caused the folks more problems, they spent more money on him than all the rest of us put together. Ervin didn’t really get along with anybody. Ervin was a womanizer. He was a bastard and a prick to work for, he was hot-headed. I don’t know how many times he left home and left the folks holding the bag to pay the mortgage on the farm that they bought for him. Even when they came to family gatherings and Ervin was married to Mary, I can remember him sitting on the… At home, the only heat they had was a furnace in the basement, and it had one big register about three feet square, in the living room. And I can still see him sitting there on his haunches, with his face in his hands like this. He just didn’t communicate with us. Usually when we got together, we played pinochle, Harvey and Orval and Melvin and I. We just threw cards out and the first two of whatever was partners, we had no definite partners. And we played a LOT of pinochle when we got together, and I can’t remember Ervin ever playing. Dad played with us sometimes, but Ervin never played, never. He was not a card player, he wasn’t into socializing, he was a womanizer. He’d screw anything that would spread her legs for him. That’s the way he was.

Cloreta, Melvin Kaser’s wife, said:

None of them [Ervin's brothers and sister] got along with Ervin. You know, sometimes a lot of people think about other people and think they’re just great, and then all of a sudden something happens, like Ervin being killed, and that was so uncalled for, where jealousy takes hold of you. But I don’t think too many of the boys got along with Ervin. After Ervin was killed, it seemed like no one could get along very well with Harvey. Then, of course, Ervin being shot, that just mixed the whole family up. Melvin and I, we thought it had something to do with Harvey. Of course, it had to do with Harvey because it went through Edith and into Ethel.  But I got along with all of them. But I know Melvin and Ervin didn’t get along. They were running the hop yard for a while, the two of them together. When Steven was born in August, it was so hot, and he was such a big baby. I worked on the hop machine at night, not when I was pregnant. Melvin worked nights, too, but he was at the hospital with me, and Ervin told him, “I wish t’hell you’d do your foolin’ around so it didn’t fall at hop picking time!” And he wasn’t even a father, I don’t know why he’d say that. Melvin said, “I just turned my back on him.”

Edith, Harvey Kaser’s wife, said:

Harvey got along okay with his family. Of course, Ervin was always a little hard to get along with, but I think just as good as any family perhaps. It always appeared to me that with Ervin, his folks were always kind of afraid of him, afraid he’d do something that would shame them, not physically afraid, you know. I think he had a hold on them somehow that the other boys didn’t have. But then, he had a beautiful personality when he wanted to turn it on, a wonderful personality. Then, when he didn’t want to, not that he was mean, just that he was unpleasant to be around. I think in all families, if they stayed at home until they got married, a lot of them wouldn’t get along either. With all that family and only one bathroom, well, you know, there was no dilly-dallying around the bathroom. Lucky they only had one girl, I guess. But Veneta was a hard-working woman, helped her mother terrifically. She always felt that the boys were favored over her. Veneta always thought that, but I don’t know that they were. But in terms of the housework, with that many boys, that was a big burden for Veneta to help to do all that, but somebody had to help, and since Veneta was there, she had to help.

Bluffton, Indiana – Mary Klopfenstein Frauhiger and children (clockwise from front-left) John, Jake, Irma, Sarah and Dell. Around 1890, give or take a couple of years.

But Harvey’s mother [Sarah Frauhiger Kaser] had a very hard childhood. Her father died when she was very small, and her grandfather Klopfenstein took her in, and she was living with and working for this Klopfenstein family which owned a distillery. She only got to the third grade in school. She worked out with the hogs shoveling manure, and she worked in the house. After she got married, she never left the house unless the dishes were done, never. Because she remembered, when she was coming home from school, at the distillery they hired a lot of hired men, and they fed them in the house, and they left all the dishes for her to do, and I don’t suppose they had running water neither. So, when she came home from school, here was all of these dishes to be done, and she made up her mind that when she had her own house, that she would never go out of that house and leave dirty dishes for somebody else to wash, and I think it might have been very rare that she ever did. The mash from the distillery, they fed to the pigs, and she said the pigs were always drunk.

Emma Kaser’s wedding day, all are cousins except the Kaufman brothers.
Front (left to right): Martha Krug, Nova Baumgartner, Ervin Kaser, Rita Kaser,
Edna Klopfenstein
Back (left to right): George Kaufman, Alvin Krug, Leona Baumgartner, Ben
Kaufman, Emma Kaser, Veneta Kaser, Minnie Krug

Lynn Kuenzi, first cousin to Ervin, and youngest son of Ervin’s aunt Emma Kaser Kuenzi, said:

All I can remember, growing up, is that Mom [Emma Kuenzi] had a tremendous respect for Ervin, and she loved him. But I remember her saying how he never would smoke in front of her, and she took that as a sign of respect. My brother Glen has told me over and over that, without Ervin, his hop operation would not have been as successful. Ervin used to come up and check the hops for him, to see when he needed to spray and that type of thing. Glen had three or four acres of hops, pretty insignificant, but Ervin took time to do that. So, why Mom was so connected with Ervin, I really don’t know, other than he was one of the older nephews, only about six years younger than her. Mom knew all about his life, but I don’t remember Mom ever going there, about his life. As far as she was concerned, he was her nephew and he respected her, and he was always respectful of her. But I remember that morning, good grief, Mom was a basket case. We kids were just about to leave for school, to walk to school, and that was hard on Mom, really hard on her. But I don’t remember personally Ervin coming to our house, so obviously he must have stopped by in prior years more, when she and Dad were first married. It wouldn’t have been at reunions. Maybe the times she went over to visit Uncle Fred, if Ervin would happen to come over, but she never did say that. I think he just stopped at our place and would visit with her, and maybe he had some mutual respect for her, some memory. But I always remembered that Mom thought so highly of him, because he respected her enough that he wouldn’t smoke in front of her. He was, not a recluse, but he was a little bit removed.

Lee [Lynn's second-oldest brother] had the hops first, and then when Glen took over, they put them up for machine picking. And, you know what, I’m quite sure that Ervin picked them. In our family, he was looked at with a real positive image. I’m sure that Mom knew his problems of life. You have to remember that Mom’s family couldn’t do too much bad in her eyes, she had a real love for the Kaser family, and it was very easy for her to forgive any problems. You know about Veneta, she could be outspoken, but to Mom she was like a sister, because they were almost the same age. So, Veneta and Ervin, and Edna, those were like sisters to Mom, because they were so close in age, so Mom had a tremendous love for those kids. Many of Mom’s siblings were much older than her and gone. Mom never really connected with Lizzie until later years when she came back to Silverton. Aunt Bertha was gone, and Aunt Lydia was in Portland, so these nieces and nephews were pretty vital.

It was definitely a different time back then, and while people are basically the same in every time and place, life’s experiences change drastically through the years as culture and technologies change.  Life on a farm 75 to 100 years ago was unending work, hard work, mostly manual labor.  That was Ervin’s life.

This is the second of three parts on what Ervin’s life was like on the farm and what Ervin himself was like. After part 3, we’ll explore the events surrounding and after the murder.

Evergreen Schoolhouse around 1914, give or take a year. Veneta is the 2nd girl from the left in the front row, Ervin is the 3rd boy from the right in the front row (see below)

Veneta and Ervin Kaser

The local school was right next door to the Kaser home.  In the picture above, the rail fence that you can just make out in the background on the left side was between the school and the Kaser house.  All of the children went to school there through the 8th grade.  The boys then worked on the farm full-time.  Veneta went on to two years of high school and then two years of Normal School to become a teacher, and she then taught at the Evergreen school for one or two years.  The schoolhouse was the “social center” for the farming community, a place where picnics, meetings and other types of gatherings were held.  This school building was replaced in the 1940s by a new building.

(back) Veneta and Ervin
(front) Orval and Harvey
Probably mid-1914, give-or-take

My father, Calvin Kaser, the youngest of Ervin’s siblings, continues his memories [in somewhat edited form, of course]:

The hop training sled was probably about seven feet tall, because those wires were ten feet in the air, and when you were training, standing on the training sled, they’d be out just about like this, about hip high. You started training them when the hops were about two foot over the wire, or maybe even a little sooner than that, because at that time of the year those hops grew fast. You gave about two or three good wraps right where they hit the wire, and that would hold the vine up on the wire. From then on, you just kind of looped them over the wire, the first two or three wraps is what held the vine up there, because the string wouldn’t hold the vine after it got hops on it, after it started getting heavy, it’d break that string.

We used a horse to pull the training sled instead of a tractor, because you’d only go about the length of that training sled, about six or seven feet, it’d be stop and go, stop and go, stop and go. Orval, he had his training sled rigged up with the tractor on it, up at the golf course. But the thing of it is, if you weren’t absolutely on the level, you’d stop and that tractor would roll. I don’t know how Orval had it rigged up, but he could run the throttle from up on the training platform but not the brakes. But the horse, old Shorty, that old devil, you couldn’t have found a better hop yard horse than old Shorty. When he got hooked to a training sled, after about a half a day, “Shorty, whoa.” “Shorty, whoa.” That old devil, he jerked Alvis and me off the back of that sled more than once. We’d tell him to whoa, and he wouldn’t stop quite long enough… we got smart then, we’d train those at the back of the sled first, where maybe we had to hang over and reach, and then we’d train towards the front of the sled, because he’d stay there just about so long, and then he’d move. He’d learned the rhythm of it, and a lot of those horses, you’d say, “Whoa!” and they’d stop and then back up so the tugs would be slack. You’d say, “Go!” and they’d hit those tugs and that goddamned sled would jerk, every time. You’d better be prepared, you’d better brace your legs, because they’d stop and they’d back up to take the strain off the tugs. Old Shorty, he’d go, and he’d maybe have one foot raised out here in front, and he was halfway leaning into those tugs. And you told him to “Go!” and it was just a smooth start, and he went about so far and he’d stop, whether you told him to or not, he’d stop. He’d stand there about so long, and then he’d go again.

Then, when we plowed the hops, Alvis would have to take a number 10 plow, it was a small plow, and hook one horse to it, it was a one-horse plow, and he’d plow the ground away from the hills, you could plow closer than what you would with a tractor. Well, he’d go down one side of the row, then turn right around and come back down the other side of the row. That goddamned old horse… Alvis said many times, “I don’t need the reins on him.” Because he knew exactly what he was going to do, he’d get to the end of the row, and he go up and turn around, and he’d go right back into the furrow where he was supposed to go. The only time that he’d maybe be a problem, it’d get to be about quarter to twelve, twenty to twelve, get to the end of the row… the row went up on the side road by Klopfenstein’s… you’d get to the end of the row, and old Shorty would turn to the right, to hell with this turning to the left and going back and making another round, he wanted to go to the barn! And when Alvis would get to the end of the row, he’d unhook him and put the reins up, and, “Okay, Shorty!” and old Shorty, he’d just kind of lope or trot down to the barn and around to the watering trough, get himself a drink and go into the barn and into his stall, and, “Nhahahha! Nhahaha!” He was waiting for his oats and his hay. He got old, though, and Dad had to have him put down. He was quite a horse, old Shorty was.

1933: Ervin on new tractor as the young hops are sprayed

In the 1933 Case tractor picture, Ervin is on the tractor, Harvey is on the right in the background and Orval is on the left. They were spraying with sulfer chips and whale oil soap, and then they got to putting Black Leaf 40 in it, which was nothing but a strong nicotine, which the guys got sick on nearly every time they sprayed hops. They wore wet handerchiefs over their face, but that didn’t help much. Oh, they got sick. They’d get sick and puke and puke and puke. It’s a wonder they didn’t die, that Black Leaf 40 was a deadly poison. But it got to where the sulfer chips and whale oil soap didn’t kill them, the aphids. Them aphids would get on there so thick you couldn’t put another one on a leaf. We sprayed at least two times, sometimes three times, usually before the hops came out, but sometimes even as the hops were just forming. The tractor is pulling a sprayer that Ervin made. It ran off the power take-off on the tractor. It was a closed tank with a pump that pumped the liquid out of the tank and into the hoses they sprayed with. I look at those steel rims on the front of that tractor and oh, those were damned hard turning. When it was sitting still you couldn’t budge it.

The old Fordsen tractor, we only had for about a year, in ’32, it was the first tractor Dad bought, and it had a habit of tipping backwards. They only had that Fordsen for about a year. Ervin was at home then yet, and Ervin and Dad would go out to start the tractor in the morning, and maybe they might give two pulls on the crank and the tractor would take right off. So, they’d go out and run the tractor until noon, come in, shut it off, have dinner, go back out, and it might be 3:00-3:30 in the afternoon before they got that S.O.B started. The next morning they’d go out, it might be 10:30-11:00 before they got the damned thing started to go out. Then come in at noon, go back out, and it’d start right up. So, you never new what the damned thing was going to do. Oh, it was a temperamental monstrosity of a thing. I can still hear Dad and Ervin cussing that damned tractor. And of course, Ervin was a mechanic, and he’d try to get it started, and he’d crank and crank and crank and crank, and maybe it would go PRRRRT! and stop, and they’d crank some more, and then it would go PRRRRT! But that old ’33 Case tractor there, I’ll tell you, that was as dependable as anything could possibly be. We’d take it up and put in the hop house through the winter when it wasn’t being used at all, and it would sit there for two or three months and never turned over. You go up and put fresh gas in it, and there was a wire along side of the crank that set the choke, you put this crank down at the bottom, and put this choke out and you give a pull, let the choke go, put it down again, give another pull, and it started. It’d sit up there all winter, and you’d go up and put fresh gas in it, give it two pulls, and it was going. It didn’t matter, you’d run it all morning, go out in the afternoon, give it one pull. The crank was permanently attached on the ’33 Case. On the ’40 Case, there was a hole for a crank, in case the battery went dead, but the ’40 Case had a starter on it.

1940: Calvin Kaser on the new Case tractor, pulling a sled to break up dirt clods

The first year we irrigated, around 1941 probably, was not with pipes, we hauled water, just to see what it would do. We took the bed off of the truck, and we used a tank, and we added some boards on top, and I think we made a 1200 gallon tank out of that thing, and we put that tank on the back of the truck. Dad borrowed a pump from somebody, and we used Harvey’s Oliver tractor. We went over to where Werner Kellerhals used to live by the Drift Creek bridge on Hibbard Road. Just before you get to the bridge, there’s a house back up there on the hill across the creek. We’d turn in that driveway, and right there was just a little bit of a hole in the creek, a little pool gathered there. We got permission from Werner, and we set the pump up there and put Harvey’s tractor on it, and that pump would pump 200 gallons per minute. Alvis and I would haul water. When we went over there one time, the hose was all goofed up, and the belt was off of the tractor, and it just looked like the act of some kid doing it. Well, Harvey went with us one trip, went over ’cause that Oliver was a little bit temperamental to start, too, and I was having a little trouble with it, so he went over with us. We got over there and here’s this Clarence Kuenzi… we called him Dempsey, he was the one that died early, in grade school… well, here he was down there farting around with the tractor and that pump. So we went down, and he started to run, and Harvey ran and caught him. So they came back, and we got the belt put back on the tractor, and Harvey said, “Okay, start it up.” So, we started it up, and Alvis was up on top of the tank with this hose, 200 gallons per minute, so Harvey unfastened Clarence’s belt and stuck this hose down the back of his pants. 200 gallons a minute, and of course, his legs just ballooned up like this, and oh, god, that water was just pouring out of the bottom of his pants, and the kid was screaming and a hollering, but Harvey held onto that hose and then motioned for me to shut the tractor off, so I shut it down, and he let the kid go, and he headed back up the road to Herman Kuenzi’s place there on the corner, he headed for home, and that was the end of it, no more pranks!

But then, I don’t know how many loads a day we’d haul. But I took what we called the spring-tooth, and I went down the row with the tractor with that spring-tooth down, and that made little furrows. Then at the end of the row, Dad would sit there and guide the water from the truck so it would run down these furrows, and it would go clear to the end of the row, and it would be wet, it would wet it down. We didn’t get the whole hop yard watered, but we watered a goodly portion of it, and that’s the way we did it. Then Ervin started making irrigation pipe that winter, and Frank Eberhart was going to help, he wanted irrigation pipe, too, but he fizzled out.

Mannie Kellerhals and Ervin went ‘coon hunting, and Mannie also hunted skunks, trapped skunks through the wintertime. He’d skin ‘em and sell the pelts, and then he’d throw the carcasses over in Dad’s hop yard. He’d done it all winter and they were so damned rotten and stinking. Oh, god, what a mess that was!

Ervin had a disc that he pulled with his little Allis Chalmers tractor. It didn’t have power enough to pull the big disc that we used, we had a 5-foot disc that pulled a packer behind it. And then he also used our tractor to pull what we called a digger, it had seven teeth on the back of it, and it had a tripper on it, and when you got to the end you could trip it and it would pull them out of the ground, ’cause you couldn’t make the turn without pulling it out of the ground. And we also pulled a roller behind it. And he couldn’t do it with his little tractor, so he used Dad’s tractor for that, the 1940 Case. And we had that digger with the old ’33 Case, too.

The troublesome hop-picking machine

Melvin and Ervin and Dad bought an early hop picking machine in ’48, I think. Either ’48 or ’49, I don’t remember which. That isn’t the Case tractor pulling it, that looks like a Ford tractor, but I don’t know who’s tractor that is. That looks like it could be some Kuenzis, it almost looks like Ralph Kuenzi. Glen was the only Kuenzi raising hops. It’s not Alvis driving the tractor, he never drove a tractor in his life. The only time I seen it, Alvis was on the back sacking the hops. They had it until ’51. In ’52 the yards came out. ’52 was the year Mom and I came home from the coast, and that’s the year I helped Ervin pull Dad’s yard out. What they grew in ’52, I don’t remember. We came back in March or February of ’52, and Ervin was pulling the poles out then, it would have been too late to plant anything then. I was helping Ervin, and he had a lift rigged up on the front of his Allis Chalmers tractor, he was always inventing some damned thing. Well, he was pretty good at it, some of the things he made. I’d hook the chains on the post, and he’d run the lift to pull the post out, and it would flop onto the ground, and I’d unhook the chain, and we’d go to the next one. I helped him for a day or two, not very long, ’cause I had to have a job, and I went to work up at Detroid Dam at the power house. I think Melvin had gone to logging. He must have been logging in ’51, after they got the last crop picked. Because we got a letter over at the coast from Cloreta, and Melvin had been limbing trees in the woods with an ax, and a chip flew up and hit him in the right eye and he lost the sight in his right eye, and that happened while we were over at the coast, so he must have went to logging that winter. Then eventually he went to work at the cannery. Ervin kept farming his place, raising grain on it. I’m not sure who was farming Mom’s place, because Harvey saw to getting the combining done. We came back from the coast in early ’52. I worked on the building the power house at Detroit Dam for 4-5 months, then I went to work at the cannery in Salem, then I worked on the police force for six months, and I was done with the police force in February of ’53. Then I went to work for S&M Trucking, and I think it was ’54 that they bought that new 35-foot trailer, and he sent me out to the hop house to haul a load of hops for Ervin into Salem. It had been raining off and on, and he didn’t want to haul them in an open truck, so we went with that 35-foot van.

Kaser hop house – May 2005 (about to be burned down)
The two driers (kilns) were on the right end, the left end was storage bins.
This picture is taken from what would have been Ervin’s 20 acre farm, with Evergreen Road going down on the left towards the Cascade Highway and the newer Evergreen School just visible on the left. The land the hop house is sitting on and all of the land down to the highway in front of the school was the Fred Kaser farm. The Kaser house is to the right of the school, hidden behind the hop house, and the steel barn on the right is on the farm where Mannie Kellerhals lived. Ervin’s house, where he was shot, is just off the right side of the picture, across the Cascade Highway from Mannie Kellerhals’s house.

Some time around 1940, Orval, and Ervin, and Mannie Kellerhauls, and I don’t know who all was there, they were going to have a chicken feed that night. So, they invited John Hanna [the husband of Calvin's first cousin Ruth Kaser Hanna] over for the chicken feed. John was raising fryers, and he made moonshine, too, and had brought some moonshine along with him, and he was getting to feel pretty good. And while John was visiting with the rest of them, some of these guys, Mannie Kellerhals and Ervin and Orval, and I don’t know who all, they jumped in the car and went over to John’s place and got a bunch of chickens, stole his chickens from him and took them down and butchered them. Of course, John was commenting that, “I don’t know where you got these chickens, but damn, these are good chickens!” The next morning he goes home, sobers up, and goes down to the chicken house, and he’s short 35 or 40 chickens. Oh, he was mad! Of course, everybody laughed at him, for years later they talked about it. Then John, he’d laugh, and, “Yeah, you sons o’ bitches, you come and stole and fed me my own chickens!”

Cloreta, Melvin Kaser’s wife, remembered the story this way:

When they were drying hops, and I was up there one night, and Melvin says, “Do you want to come out and have a chicken dinner?” I thought he was going to take me to his house, and I said, “Sure.” He said, “Well, it’s up at the hop house.” I said, “Oh, how are you going to cook the chicken up there?” He said, “Over the heat from the burner.” I said, “Well, that ought to be interesting.” He had the Meier boys there, and Ted… I can’t remember, but he was the one they were going to pick up the chickens from. So, everyone enjoyed the chicken, and they had baked potatoes, and stuff like that, and my, the chicken was good. Anyway, this guy that they’d got the chickens from, he was invited and he was there, and he said, “That’s mighty fine chicken!” They went and stole the chickens, and then invited him to come over. And they had their beer, of course, whenever the Kaser boys and the Meier boys got together.

And about working in the hop yard, Cloreta said:

But I hated those hops, picking them or working in them, I just hated that. They never filled up the basket, they’re just airy, there’s nothing to them. If you wanted anything, you had to get your basket about half-full and then push it down, and then it took that much longer to fill it up, and then the vines, they’d scratch your arms. Then I was with Alvis Brunner, and they had the horse-drawn bridge like thing that they used to train the hop vines over the wires, and I was up there helping him day after day, it wasn’t fun. The best part, I didn’t even like that, when the vines got up so high, you took your gloves and you went along and stripped all the leaves off, and then one of the Kaser boys would come along and say, “That one’s higher than these others, you’ve got to strip them all off the same.”

Calvin again:

I can remember as a kid, a very small kid, maybe four or five years old is all [1926-27], and I remember Ervin bringing home this box, I remember it was a pretty good sized box. It had all this copper stuff, real shiny copper stuff inside this box, and he had wires going all directions, and that was the first radio that the folks had. He had to run this wire outside the window in the front room, for an antenna or ariel. It’s laughable today, it was a cobbled-together radio. The one radio I remember the most, and the folks had it when both Dad and Mom died, they had a Zenith, it was a top-of-the-line radio at that time. It had six buttons on each side. You’d press these buttons and that would change the tone of it, and you pressed these other six buttons and they were programmed, that would change the channel. They never had a television set. Dad wanted one, but Mom said, “No.” There was no toilet upstairs, but we had a toilet downstairs, running water, and a bathtub. We had a regular porcelain bathtub. I can remember taking a bath at home when there were three or four ahead of me, and I was the last one, and we all used the same water, and you can imagine what that was like! We’d take a bath once a week, Saturday night, and there was always two or three ahead of me.

All of us kids got along pretty well, except for Ervin. Of course, they were all so much older than me. We all were home at one time together, except Veneta. I don’t remember her being home with the boys, although she was for a while when I was small, as a real small kid I can remember a little bit about her. She had her own room upstairs, and if I remember right, when Ervin was home, he and Orval slept in one room, and Harvey, Melvin and I slept in another. There were three rooms upstairs, they were pretty good sized bedrooms.

But nobody got into any fights, except Ervin had this damned habit of teasing me. I was probably four or five. He’d walk behind me and he’d get hold of this hair at the back of my neck and give it a jerk, and of course, I’d holler. Didn’t matter how many times a day he walked behind me, he’d get hold of that hair on the back of my head and give it a pull. Mom and Dad both kept telling him, “Ervin, cut that out, leave that kid alone!” Well, this went on and went on and went on, for quite some time, and they kept saying, “Leave that kid alone!” And Mom, she never raised her voice much at us, she just didn’t. Dad did, once in a while. I don’t know if Dad was in a bad mood that day or what, but I was sitting right beside Dad. Dad was sitting at the head of the table with his back to the kitchen and I was to his right. We were having strawberry stoorum. It’s dried bread, and you put fresh strawberries on it, and then you put separated cream on top of it, and oh, damn, it’s good, I’ll tell you! And anyway, for some reason Ervin had been out in the kitchen, and he come by and he give my hair a pull. Well, I hollered, and Dad, he just shoved his chair back from the table, and he stood up, and he said, “Goddamn it, if you ever touch that kid again, I’ll beat the livin’ shit out of you! Now knock it off!” And Ervin just stopped and stared at him, and Dad said, “Goddamn it, I mean it, leave that kid alone!” Nobody said a word, but Ervin never bothered me again neither.

Ervin was in and out of the house, he’d be living at home, and then he’d be gone, then he’d be living at home, and then he’d be gone. He was a mechanic, he was a good mechanic. He worked for Allen Brothers Garage there in Silverton, which sold Chrysler-Plymouths, and through one of his forays he worked up at Jefferson. That’s where Dad found out about that truck that he bought in ’35, ’cause Dad needed a truck in the hop yard. There was a guy about to lose it, and I think the truck was only about two or three years old. Ervin told Dad about it, and Dad went up and dickered with the guy and he bought it. But Ervin was working at Jefferson at that time.

Dad and Ervin bought that place up there [above the family farm, on Evergreen Road] probably in the late ’20s, ’cause he was born in ’05, so that would have made him 21 in 1926, so they bought that Hari place, which was adjoining to the folks’. But Ervin, he had zipper problems. He would screw… he was after anything. He had a woman by the name of Marian, from Molalla, and she moved in with him up there. Mom must have thought quite a lot of her, because they broke up, and he kicked her out, and he come back to living at the house, ’cause he didn’t have nobody to cook for him. He and Mom got into an argument about something, about how he should have treated her better or something like that. And Ervin said, “Well, goddamn it, you never got a dose of the clap from her, either!” I can still remember that. But he was in and out of the place. He’d leave, and then Dad and us boys would run it, and then he’d come back, and Dad would let him go back to running it, and then he’d get tired of running it, and he’d leave again. I don’t know how many times that took place. But the rest of us kids got along pretty well, played a lot of cards. In the winter time we made a lot of wood, we made hop poles. Mom and Dad played cards. Mom learned how to play pinochle, learned how to count a little, even though she never finished the third grade. What she learned she learned from us kids. But she learned how to play pinochle and 500. We played a lot of 500, we had a lot of 500 card parties back then in the winter time, we’d go to different people’s houses and play 500.

Part 3 (and final part for this section) coming later this week…

Blogically Yours,
Everett

This chapter will come in bits and pieces, and not necessarily in the proper order.  It’s going to be way longer than what would be good for a blog post, so I’ll break it up into pieces that seem to somewhat cohesive.  It’s far from all written, so you’ll be getting “first draft” material.  The purpose of this chapter is to show what Ervin’s life was like, what his family life was like, essentially the ‘environment’ in which he lived his life.

Blogically Yours,
Everett

–

Wedding: Ervin’s parent’s Sarah and Fred

Ervin Kaser’s parents, Fred Kaser Jr. and Sarah Frauhiger, were married February 7, 1905. Ervin Oren Kaser was born on their farm November 16, 1905. A daughter, Velma, was born November 17, 1906, but died three days later. She was followed by a daughter Veneta (1907) and sons Orval (1911), Harvey (1913), Melvin (1916) and Calvin (1922). Calvin was a “late in life surprise,” born six years after Melvin when their mother was nearly 42, and I’m the youngest of his four children, so I’m lucky to be here to tell this story. Much of what’s in this chapter comes from my father Calvin, a natural story-teller himself, for which I’m deeply grateful. (According to him, it was only after he was born that she realized, when someone pointed it out, that every one of her children had a first name containing the letter V.)

The Kaser family home

In August 1914, Fred entered into a contract to purchase a little over 21 acres on the corner of the Silverton-Stayton Highway (today called the Cascade Highway) and Evergreen Road, and the property was paid off and the deed transfer recorded March 24, 1920. They built a new house on the property in 1921 (shown here), which is where Calvin was born.  Fred sold to the local school district about an acre on the corner of his farm, which is where the Evergreen School stands today (additional land was acquired by the school district in following years to expand the school grounds). Fred and Sarah lived on this farm for the rest of their lives. They bought another 7 acres on the back-end (west side) of their farm, recorded in 1942, although the private purchase probably happened much earlier.

Much patched farm clothes: Melvin, Orval, Calvin and Harvey (1927)

Fred was a hop farmer, as his father had been before him. Fred grew up farming hops, and that was pretty much all he farmed his entire life, other than the usual chickens, pigs, cows and horses necessary to life on a farm in those days. All of the boys helped run the farm with their father. Fred told the boys that if they worked on the farm without wages, then when they turned 21, he would either give them $1000 to spend however they wanted, or he’d help them buy their own farms. At some point in the late 1920s or early 1930s, Fred bought 20 acres immediately west of their farm (behind it on Evergreen Road), and those 20 acres would eventually be transferred to Ervin and Mary Kaser on November 24, 1941. Ervin lived in an old run-down house on that place off and on throughout the 1930s.

The family farm wasn’t large. They usually had two or three cows for milk, cream and meat, along with hogs and chickens.  They did all their own butchering, made sausages from pig intestines and beef and pork meat, made sauerkraut from cabbage they grew, and besides large sacks of flour and sugar, grew most of what they ate.  At one time the farm had been covered in large fir trees which had already been logged off by the time Fred and Sarah bought the property, covered in tree stumps. Fred cleared the land using dynamite, ax, shovel and horses. The last stumps, on the lower part of the property, were cleared when Calvin was 4-5 years old, around 1926. Fred used horses to drag the stumps into piles for burning.

The family in 1930 (left to right)
Orval, Fred, Harvey, Veneta (back), Calvin (front), Melvin, Sarah, Ervin

The following is Calvin’s description of working in the hop yard, told to me verbally, and I’ve cleaned it up some for readability, but otherwise the words are his:

I started working full time on the farm when I was 13, right out of grade school that June, and went right to work in the hop yard, and never let up. Anytime it was nice, you were working in the hop yard, or you were making poles or hop stakes, that was quite a job. There were 100 hills to a row, and I forget how many rows there were, but you had to have a stake for every hill, maybe 20,000 of those every winter. You pounded the stake in by the hill, and then tied the string from the wire down to that stake, and they had to be replaced every year.

You’d go out and get a fir tree that looked like it would split pretty good, and cut it into 16 inch lengths. I sometimes made them with a fro, a piece of iron about a foot long by 2 inches wide, with a sharp edge on it, and it has a ring on one end with a handle. And then you’d put the fro on there and hit it with a wooden mallet and split the wood off. I didn’t use the fro much, I used an ax. And you just took a block of wood and cut it down into chunks the width of a double-bladed ax, and you’d slab these off into ½ or ¾ inch slabs, and when you got them cut off into slabs, then you turn the slabs around and hit them the other way, and the stakes would fall down, because you were always sitting at a chopping block. You had a box made there, and that box about level-full would be about 200 stakes. We didn’t count them, but we counted the first one, just to know about how full to fill this box. Then you just lay a piece of binder twine down in the bottom of this box, and then lay these stakes down in there nice and straight.  When it was full enough, you tied the bundle off and stacked them up.

Then in the spring, you’d put a bundle of stakes in a bucket and take them out and drive them in the ground by each hop hill after the hops had been cleaned out and hoed, one stake by each hill. Very rarely would a stake last two years, drive them in in the spring and by the next year they’d be rotted and broken off. After the hops were picked, you’d go out with a butcher knife in your hand, and you’d grab this vine and cut it off about this high off the ground, and then you’d drag it along as far as you could hold a big hand full, and then drop them on the ground, and that was how a lot of these stakes got broke off. It was nothing but back-breaking work, working in the hop yard, everything you did was stooping over, everything but tying the strings up on the wires. As soon as the vine got up to the wire, you went through and ran your hand down over the bottom 3 feet of the vine and stripped all the leaves and the arms off, because it didn’t produce much hops down there, and that way the plant didn’t waste energy on those leaves, and they could get wind-whipped and tear the plant down.

Usually, in January or February, we’d get two to four weeks of cold weather. At night it would freeze, and then during the day it would warm up and you’d be out there working in your shirt sleeves and getting a sweat up. And at night, it would get cold and freeze up again. And, when we were making hop poles and that kind of stuff, when the ground was frozen in the morning, that’s when we’d go and load up the hop poles we’d made the day before and haul them out, because by ten o’clock, the ground would be starting to thaw, and the damn truck wouldn’t go, you’d slip in the mud.

Usually the trees we made into hop poles were 6-8 inches in diameter. Of course, they went up there a long ways, and we’d usually get two 12 foot poles out of one tree. At that time, there was still a lot of timber around here, and the trees would come up thicker than the hair on a dog, and hardly any limbs on them, and rather than cut them down with a saw, I’d cut them down with an axe. I got pretty damn good with an axe, it didn’t take too many blows with an axe to knock a tree over. The anchor poles, that’s a different story, they’d have a 10-14 inch top on them. We used a small post for the center posts, and a lot of times we’d cut a 12-foot pole and split it with wedges.

I think of all the timber we sawed up back then, for wood and for poles. My god, I can remember some of them big old growth firs we’d fall down, use them for furnace wood. Some of them damn things would be 4 and 5 foot through. I can remember Ervin bought that drag saw, first time I’d ever seen one, and we thought that was the cat’s meow. Most of them old growth were full of pitch, and you’d try to do it with an old bull fiddle, and the pitch would get on there, and you’d just pull on it. And you had a bottle there with oil and kerosene mixed together and you’d pour that on there. And of course, some of them had so much pitch in them it would just run out of there, my god, you wouldn’t believe how the pitch would run out of there. With the drag saw, you just set it up there and when it started hitting the pitch, you’d just pour the oil and kerosene on. But the grain would be so fine, that you’d stand up there on top of those 4 foot wide blocks and drive two wedges in opposite each other and split it, get it broken in half, 16 inch thick blocks, and most of the time you could take an axe and just peel pieces off all the way around. Oh we made hundreds of cords out of prime timber. Of course, at the time, they wouldn’t have taken those that were full of pitch. And some of the time, the tree might be dying, but today, even if the heart was goady, as we called it, dry rot, there’d be that much meat around the outside of it, and that’s what we used to make our hop stakes out of.

But the poles, 14 inches was about the biggest. You’d set them in the ground about 3 feet. And we always peeled them, take three strips, peel the bark. In the summer time then, when it started to dry out and the top of this 9 foot that was out of the ground would start to get hard, and with this wire around the top choking them, and in the winter after 2-3 years with the rain coming down, it would rot the top and the top would come off, and we’d have to replace them. After they rotted off at the ground, we’d saw them up and use them as wood for the hop dryer.

1930: Ervin on new tractor as the young hops are sprayed

But you didn’t want the post too big, because you had an eight foot row, eight foot apart. Now, if you put a 12 inch post in, you’re down to a seven foot row to get the machinery in there to work the ground. So that’s why we were so particular when people were hoeing the hops, to keep shoots from coming up further out into the row, or pretty soon you couldn’t get the machinery down through there. There’d be a few hills would die out each year, but usually it was from injury, and most of the injury was from people hoeing hops. Because as this vine came up, after you picked the hops, you cut the vine down off of the wire. And usually right after hop picking, before the sap got out of the vine and they got too dry, we’d go along with a corn knife, and in later years something like a butcher knife, same knife we used for suckering the hops, cutting the suckers off, we’d go along and grab this vine and cut it off at the ground, and leave a stub. And we’d hold these vines until you got a hand full and then you’d drop them. And when you got through, you’d have these rows of piles, and you’d roll them all together and then burn them.

In the spring when the guys were hoeing, it was real easy… you’d have a stick about that wide, where your hop hill was… and you’d plow the hops, take a horse with a 10” plow… and I’d go through with the tractor and have two #12 bottom-plows on it, and plow the ground to the center of the row, go down and come back, plow the ground away from these rows. And then Alvis [Alvis Brunner, first cousin to Calvin's father Fred] would take the horse with this small plow and he’d go down and plow the ground away from these hills, as close as he could. And then the hoers would come along, and they’d pull all this ground away from this hill, to get the grass and stuff out of the hill, and also to cut this dead vine off from the year before. We’d tell them to take their knife and cut that off, but if you weren’t watching the bastards, there’d always be one or two that would take his hoe and chop it off. Well, then when you got the ground all cleaned out from the hill, and you’ve got all the new sprouts coming out, you covered the hill back up, and then you couldn’t see. But then the next year, you could tell where this bastard had been hoeing, because that row had a hell of a bunch of dead hills in it. They’d cut down into the crown and it would rot.

Row of 20 shacks for the migrant hop pickers and workers to stay in.

So we really had to watch those guys. Of course, we’d tell them maybe twice, and the next time it was, “Go on down to the house and collect your pay!” But they just couldn’t understand why they couldn’t do that. I fired several guys. I was just a kid, and I know they didn’t like it, to take orders from a 16-, 17-year old kid, but Dad couldn’t be out there to look after it, so it was my job to look after it.

Calvin Kaser, about 18 years old, with pole for lowering and raising the hop wires.
The hop wires have been lowered for the pickers to pick the hops into baskets.

It would be the same way when they’d sucker. When you trained these vines up, you’d usually take four vines, you’d have two strings coming down and you’d train two vines up each string from each hill. Then you had a whole bunch of other vines around here, and you didn’t want that, it would take strength from the plant. So now you’d cut these off. Well, a lot of them, you had these four vines coming up and you’d have some around here and you’d take a slice off here and a slice off here. You always took the four strongest vines, and you’d have some coming up in the middle, and what you were supposed to do was get in here and cut these back right to the crown of the plant, but not into the crown. Well, what they’d do is leave a stub about this long. And if you left a stub, with a joint, out would come two more arms immediately, and pretty soon instead of having a clean plant, pretty soon you’d have a bush about this big around. Then, too, you had to be careful with cutting those, or you’d cut off the vine that you had trained up. And there’d be some, you’d get on their ass about leaving these too long, and then they’d just go like this around, and man they were keeping up and moving right along, and after about 20 minutes, you’d look back and here the vine was looking like this. A hop vine, you damage it, and it wilts right away. Then you’d take them back and show them what they were doing, and some of those guys would get pissed off, oh, they’d get pissed off. The women that worked in the hop yard doing the training and the suckering, they were the best. They couldn’t do the hoeing, it was too hard of work, but the women that did the training and suckering, I never had any trouble with them, never did.

Here’s the first chapter, more of an extended introduction, about how I became aware of Ervin Kaser, his murder, and everything else.  It may be a few weeks before I post further pieces of this, as I’m in the process of going through dozens of audio tapes that I’ve made over the past 10-12 years, looking for pieces that apply to this story, and listening to and transcribing the tapes is a painfully slow process.

–

I have very few clues as to the date of my earliest memory that relates to the murder of my uncle Ervin Kaser. I was probably between six and eight years old, certainly not more than that. My mother, Wilma, barely reached five feet if she was a little sloppy with the yard stick, and in my memory I wasn’t more than two thirds of her height, if that. We were walking north on First Street, between East Main and Oak Street, on the left side of the street. There used to be a dime store along that block, and I think a jewelry store of some sort on the corner of First and Oak. All of those buildings are gone now, replaced by a parking lot for the nearby bank. I remember it being a fairly nice day, so it was probably in the summer. Just as the two of us reached the corner, we encountered a man coming from the other direction, and both he and my mother came to a sudden stop. He smiled, touched the bill of his hat, and said something like, “Good morning, Mrs. Kaser!” My mother didn’t say anything to him, but the tension in her body was obvious as she recoiled from him. She grabbed my hand and said, “Come on!” and pulled me around the corner and down the sidewalk. As I struggled to keep up, I asked, “Who was that?” Her only answer was, “Cap Oveross.”

I was young at the time, but even then, the emotional intensity of that brief encounter was obvious enough to burn those few seconds into my memory forever. I don’t know how or when I became aware of who Cap Oveross was and why my mother had reacted that way. I don’t remember if she explained about my uncle’s murder on that day or not.

We moved into a new house in early 1961, and in the garage there was a pull-down folding ladder that gave access to the attic. A small area had been floored with plywood, and it was used as a cramped storage space. For an eight or ten year old boy, of course, that space was magical, and who knew what fascinating things you might find up there? My folks had an old round-topped trunk up there with a miscellany of items. I can imagine the kinds of stuff that was probably in that trunk, but the only things I remember for sure were a large dime-store scrapbook and a paper sack with three old magazines. I’m pretty sure that it was my discovery of those, and the questions that followed, that were the real beginning of my awareness of the murder of an uncle I never knew.

The scrapbook contained many, many newspaper clippings from the Capital Journal and the Oregon Statesman, both Salem newspapers, from the Portland newspaper The Oregonian, and from the local weekly Silverton Appeal-Tribune. They covered the entire run of events, as reported in the newspapers, from the killing of Ervin Kaser through the trial of Casper “Cap” Oveross, his acquittal, and a few brief mentions afterwards.

The paper sack contained three magazines, the August 1955 issue of Real Detective (“Whodunit?”), the October 1955 issue of True Police Cases (“To Love, To Die – Never cheat at the game of love”), and the August 1955 issue of Official Detective Stories (“Me, I Shoot. Anything Wrong with That?”). These magazines were the typical sensationalistic nonsense that graced the news stands of the day, a hybrid of Great Depression era pulp detective fiction magazines and actual news reporting. All of the stories were sensationalized to one degree or another. In one, everyone’s given a short nickname: Ervin is Erv, Emanuel (Mannie) is Em, Melvin is Mel, and nowhere is Cap’s actual name of Casper even mentioned. I’m being generous when I say the prose was florid:

The news of what had happened started coming over the telephone wires strung through the big Oregon firs within an hour of his arrest, and they couldn’t believe it. Some of them slipped into their fur-lined windbreakers or big red-plaided lumber jackets and drove into town to talk it over.

Another reports a host of conversations that couldn’t have possibly have been known by the writer, between the police and witnesses, the police and the District Attorney, between the police and the suspect Casper Oveross, although they seem reasonable based upon the bulk of the police reports.

I took the magazines and the scrapbook down out of the attic and started asking my parents about it, and they answered what questions they could. I was always fortunate that my parents had little reticence to talk about pretty much anything I asked. Unfortunately, as I grew up and moved away from home, got married, had kids … life happened. By the time I thought about digging deeper into it, most of my aunts and uncles had passed away. However, they probably wouldn’t have told me any more than what they’d already told the police and was in the police reports, and some of them probably wouldn’t have wanted to talk about it anyway. So, I can only tell this story from the information available. Police reports, newspaper articles, sensationalized magazine stories, a few verbal memories, a few court records. There are no transcripts of the trial itself. Because the verdict was “not guilty,” there was never any possibility of a re-trial or appeal, so the court recorder’s records were never transcribed and appear to be long gone. And yet, a reasonably complete story can be pieced together, and that’s what I’ll try to do throughout the rest of this book.

Some years ago, my father had a friend who was a Deputy with the Marion County Sheriff’s office, and he made a photocopy of the County Sheriff’s file on the case. After reading through it, his comment to my father was, “You know, that was the worst miscarriage of justice I have ever witnessed or heard about in my life!” A few years after that, I applied for and received a scanned copy of the Oregon State Police case file which was a close duplicate of the County Sheriff’s (they sent copies of reports to each other), but it had a few extra pages and a few crime scene photographs that were not in the copy from the County Sheriff’s office. Also, the State file had been somewhat redacted: the names of people who had been minors at the time were blacked out, as well as one person who had asked to be treated as a confidential informant, and one instance of medical information regarding Ervin’s wife Mary. But even without the non-redacted County Sheriff’s reports, it would have been relatively easy to replace the names that had been redacted, as it was pretty obvious who was speaking or being spoken about, as most of them were well-known family members and neighbors.

Reading those police reports and newspaper articles transports me back to a different time, a different world. Modern forensic science was just beginning and was quite primitive compared to today’s standards. The police were often just average Joes off the street with no particular background in law enforcement, sometimes without even having graduated from high school. My father, Calvin, was an officer on the Silverton police force for about six months in the early 1950s, and his formal education stopped at the end of the 8^th grade, he was needed to help run the farm in the late 1930s. The police reports are often rife with misspellings, and sometimes out-and-out wrong names, and the phrasings used by the writers of the police reports and the newspaper articles sound quaint to our ears today.

But before diving into the details of the murder, the investigation and the trial, who was Ervin Kaser? Where did he grow up? What was his life like? What was he like?

To be continued…

I’ve started work on a book about the murder of my father’s oldest brother, to be called Not Innocent: The Murder of Ervin Oren Kaser.  The book is not intended for general publication, but is something I’m putting together for my family, of which many of the younger members have never even heard of Ervin Kaser or the fact that he was murdered.  The killing was planned, premeditated, and quite fascinating 57 years later.  At the time, it was horrific, frightening and incredibly sensational, in the way that sex and celebrities and everything else is sensational today on “entertainment news” TV shows and tabloid magazines (at least, for 15 minutes…).  Below  is the preliminary Introduction to that book.

Blogically Yours,
Everett

—

In February 1955, Silverton, Oregon was a small town with a population of around 3150, less than a third of today’s population of almost 10,000, surrounded by vast farm lands and mountain forests. This was before the wars in Iraq (both of them) and Afghanistan, before the Twin Towers came down, before Clinton and Monica, before the other Bush and Reagan and Carter and Ford and Nixon and Johnson and Kennedy and Oswald. This was before Vietnam, before race riots and civil rights marches, before the Summer of Love and sex and drugs. Getting into trouble then consisted mostly of drinking too much on a Saturday night and tipping over some farmer’s outhouse, or stealing some chickens and inviting the unknowing owner of the chickens to your barbeque. Television was in its infancy, and even if you had a television, you were lucky if you received two or three stations, channels in today’s vernacular. If a single woman bought or sold property it would say “an unmarried woman” after her name on the deed. If someone was shot on TV (usually in a western), you only knew it because they fell down and stopped moving. Shocking was when a man said goddammit! in public in front of a woman. There were no drive-by shootings and no cable channels with blatant sex scenes, no flood of cop and lawyer shows every hour with splashed-red gory murders.

In February 1955, few couples “lived together outside of wedlock,” having a child outside of marriage was a life-altering scandal. It happened, and people had affairs, too. But the social mores were much stricter, there was a higher social price to pay for breaking the standards of proper behavior. There were no cell phones, your phone was tethered to the wall by its cord, and you couldn’t carry it around the house or across the country side. Most people had “party lines” where 8 to 10 people all shared the same phone line, and you could lift your receiver at any time and listen in on someone else having a ‘private’ conversation if they didn’t hear the click of your receiver coming off the hook. Most men wore a hat, and they weren’t baseball caps or stocking hats. Pretty much every car driven in America was made in America by an American car manufacturer. So were the televisions, radios and just about every other device. “Made in Japan” was synonymous with “trash.”  “Made in China” didn’t exist because China was a communist country and we had no political relations with China, let alone trade relations.  Only in trashy detective novels and magazines and in far-away big cities did people commit murder.

In February 1955, I was just a few months past my second birthday. My life consisted of learning to walk, talk and not make a mess in my pants. I was still too young to know that the world was a little bigger than my mother’s arms. I was just beginning to learn that I was low man on the totem pole with two older brothers and an older sister who would one day take joy in washing my face with a dirty dishrag. I was too young to know my aunts and uncles and cousins, or even what aunt, uncle and cousin meant. I was too young to know the meaning of love and sex and jealousy and rage and murder.

In February 1955, my father’s oldest brother was 49. He sat in his car in the driveway of his home in the farm land south of Silverton, Oregon. It was a cold, clear February night, just before 11pm. A slug from a 30-30 Winchester hunting rifle pierced the steel post of the driver’s door, entered his back, severed his aortic artery and came to rest nestled against his heart. Three more shots quickly smashed into the car, but my uncle was already sprawled on the floorboards and seat of the car, dead, murdered.

In many ways February 1955 was a more innocent time. But no time is truly innocent. The more things change, the more things remain the same. No matter how bad a person may be, there is good in them. No matter how good a person may be, there is bad in them. We’re all guilty of something.

No one is innocent.

Some events are so statistically unlikely, so far-fetched, that we sometimes have to just shake our heads in amazement when they actually happen. The odds of winning the Powerball Lottery is only 1 in over 175 MILLION.  That’s a number that’s hard for us mere humans to REALLY comprehend.  If you worked 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year (ie, no vacations, no holidays), and earned $100 per hour (don’t we wish!), you would work 2,080 hours per year and earn $208,000 per year.  At that rate, you’d have to work 841 years to earn $175 million.  You’d better start when you’re very young, Methuselah.

175 million is MORE than HALF of the population of the United States today.  If you lined up that may people in a single line with each person taking up only 2 feet of space in the line, the line would be over 16,500 MILES long.  That’s 2/3 of the way around the earth’s equator!

And yet, on a regular basis, someone ‘beats’ those long odds.

I’ve been a genealogist (a “family historian” for you unwashed masses) since I was a teenager.  My father was the last of seven children, born when his mother was 42.  I was the last of four children.  I’ve researched my paternal line, which goes back to the Bern Canton of Switzerland around 1870 and stays there clear back to the 1590s (Kaser, or as it was before getting Americanized, Käser, was an occupational surname which meant cheese maker; maybe that’s why I have such a cheesy sense of humor).  It’s quite fascinating to see the long list of your ancestors and their children over the centuries, to see in each generation how many children were lost before reaching adulthood, to see how many times your direct ancestor was the last child in their generation.  It was not uncommon for 3 to 5 children dying young out of a family of 8 to 12.  We often take our mere existence for granted, so I found myself amazed at the simple fact that I was here.  What were the odds?

And yet, someone always has to be the last.

If my parents would’ve had one more child, then that child would have been the amazing final child, and all of the descendants of that child would have been the lucky ones, the ones who just BARELY clung to existence.  Or if I’d not been born, then my sister would have been the lucky one, and her descendents hanging on the bottom rung of the ladder.  But regardless of which position on the familial ladder we each cling to, it’s actually amazingly lucky that any of us are here.  If you take an average generation as 25 years, that’s 4 generations per century, 40 generations per millennium, 40,000 generations per million years, at least! The further back we go, the shorter and shorter the time it takes for the generations to reproduce.  We’re talking hundreds of millions of generations stretching back to our earliest ancestors at the beginning of life on this planet.

And in each generation, our ancestor survived and reproduced while many, many others died with no offspring.

We, as individuals, are so lucky to be here!

Nobody likes bullying except the bullyer, but it’s always been with us (people do it, chimpanzees do it, birds do it), and I can’t see how it will ever go away.  Bleeding heart liberal idealists are always whining about this and that and asking, “Why can’t we just blah, blah, blah?”  Don’t get me wrong, I’m fairly overweight when I step onto the “liberal scale,” but I’m more of a realist than an idealist.  As I look at the world around me, I try to understand how it works, how it’s worked in the past, how it could work in the future (and how it’s unlikely to work in the future), and why.  It’s that understanding of why that seems to separate the realists and the idealists.  Realists use the word why to mean the reason why things are a certain way (and probably will stay that way, or will probably change).  Idealists use the word why as an interrogative complaint about how things are vs. how they wish they would be.  We need both types (even within the same person), because a realist mindset tends to make things work, and an idealist mindset tends to change the way things work.  Both are good, but neither are always appropriate or useful.

The idealist in me has always wanted to get along with everyone, not rock the boat (unless everyone in the boat enjoys having it rocked…).  I grew up mostly in the 1960s, so I was definitely of the “make love not war” religion (but that’s another subject entirely…).  I’ve also always been an independent cuss: I don’t like being told what to do, how to behave, what to believe, or much of anything else.  It’s made for an interesting balancing act: trying to get along and be accepted and getting the approval of others, while at the same time doing my own thing, not following the crowd, standing alone.  In high school, I knew and was friendly with a lot of kids, but I was friends with very few.  I had two or three fairly good friends, and my girlfriend Sharon (now my wife of 37 years) had two or three fairly good friends, but I was friendly with most of the kids in the school.

The ones I was not friendly with were the jerks, the jocks (except some of them) and the bullies.  Mostly we just ignored each other, and I was fine with that.  They weren’t going to change me, and I knew I wasn’t going to change them and had no desire to do so.  But sooner or later, you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time.  I’ve always been what could be generously termed as ‘slender.’  I weighed about 115 as a freshman, and by the time I graduated I was 145 and just a half-inch shy of six feet.  A strong wind could have blown me away if I’d had enough of a cross-section for the wind to get a hold on.  I was on the wrestling team all four years, but mostly because I thought at the time that everyone should do some sport or activity, and I didn’t care for football or basketball, and both of my older brothers had wrestled before me, so why not?  I was wiry, strong for my weight, had quick reflexes, but most of the time you wouldn’t know it just looking at me.

One day Sharon and I were standing in the hall during lunch or between classes.  Suddenly, I found myself shoved up against the lockers with the collar of my shirt being steam-pressed by the fist of a bullying jerk a few inches shorter than me while a couple of his buddies crowded in on either side.  To this day, I have no idea why they chose to pick on me at that moment, and I can’t recall what he said as he pressed me against the lockers.  It was the first and only time I was ever bullied like that, so it took me quite a bit by surprise.  But I knew how to behave.  I don’t know if it was from being the youngest of four kids in my family and having grown up having to defend myself against older siblings, or whether it was from all the books I’d read and all the movies I’d watched, or if it was from the things I’d been taught by my folks and uncles and aunts and teachers, or if I just inherently understood the situation and the “personality dynamics” of the situation.  It wasn’t from watching John Wayne movies, or I’d have shoved back and started swinging.  I didn’t want to fight, but I knew that whining, “Let me go, please, let me go!” was not the right thing to do.  I knew that only strength of will and determination not to be pushed around would end the situation in an acceptable (to me) fashion.  I didn’t think about it in words, I just knew.

I stared straight into the kid’s eyes and, in as steady and commanding of a voice as I could manage, I said, “Let..go..of..my..shirt.”  The kid just held onto my shirt, pushing upwards. I became aware of Sharon standing close by saying, “Don’t fight, don’t fight,” over and over.  I knew that was the wrong behavior, it was like standing around a campfire waving an open jar of gasoline over the flames.  I turned my face towards her and uncharacteristically said, “Sharon. Shut up!” then turned back to the bully, again staring him straight in the eyes and, speaking levelly, slowly and forcefully, said, “Let..go..of..my..shirt.”  After a moment, he let go, shrugged, made some sarcastic remark, and turned and walked away.  He never bothered me again, and that’s the only instance I can remember of ever being a participant in bullying.  I’m not a big fan of macho, but in a moment like that, I’m convinced it was the only appropriate response.  Others might (and frequently do) choose differently.  The idealist in me didn’t want to fight.  But the realist in me knew that cringing was not a good solution either. The me in me found the solution that worked best for me, avoiding the fight while preventing any future continuation of the bullying.

Would I have fought?  Damn right.  But I wasn’t going to take the first swing.  Was I scared?  Probably some, but mostly it was just adrenaline rushing to places that didn’t need it.  Was I brave?  Looking back, I don’t think so. I’m pretty confident that I could have “taken him” if shove had come to push, and I think he realized that he might have grabbed the wrong nerd that time.  Mostly it was just the me in me refusing to be told what to do, how to behave.  I refused to be forced to cringe and whine.  I refused to be forced into starting a fight.

Looking back at my life so far, my two driving personality characteristics have been an overwhelming need to be accepted, approved of, admired, and a burning need for self-control, control of myself both from within and from without.  Those two have set up a sometimes stressful dynamic, as being accepted and approved of can frequently be at odds with being independent from control by others.  And that need for acceptance and approval is kind of like being an alcoholic: every ‘hit’ only lasts for a little bit, and then you need another and another and… Fortunately, with age, I’ve learned to provide myself with most of the approval and acceptance that I need, and not demand it from others quite so much.

Of course, that’s just satisfying my need for self-control.  Some days, you should just stay in bed.

Blogically yours,

Everett
July 1, 2012

No one can accuse me of being behind the times.

Well, okay, they can, and they’d probably be right, but after so many decades I think I’ve earned the right to a little slack, so sue me.  (No, wait…)

Blogging has been around since cave men did things with cave women in caves, but I’ve always kind of thought it was a bit of a narcissistic endeavor, and besides, I’ve had way too many important things on my bucket list.  But as we age beyond the point of moldiness, we inevitably feel the urge to share our wisdom and experience with those who are less well endowed (and usually wish either they were deaf or we were mute).  I’ve also long thought of myself as a creative person, regardless of my medium.  It’s mostly come out in the computer games I’ve created for over 30 years (yes, I am that ancient, but please try to overlook it, okay?)  But I’ve enjoyed writing almost since I learned to read Dick and Jane. “See Dick.  See Dick run.  See Jane.  See Dick see Jane.  See Dick fall down.”  I can remember reading (and loving it) in the fourth grade (“The Boxcar Children”), the fifth grade (“Hardy Boys”), the sixth grade (“Tom Swift Jr”), but it was in the seventh grade when I started reading more adult level books, the Doc Savage books were being reprinted, Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan and John Carter of Mars books, and my first out-and-out science fiction novel, Daniel F. Galouye’s Simulacron Three about a man who realizes that he’s not real, that his world isn’t real, that it’s all a simulation running in a computer, and he manages to “upload” himself into the ‘real’ world, only to realize that it’s also a simulation, a story that still sticks in my mind 46 years later (it was a much cooler idea in the 1960s, when computers were large, remote, mysterious things).  I quickly moved on to the giants of science fiction, all the well-known writers (Heinlein, Asimov, Sturgeon, Tolkien, Lieber, Bradley, McCaffrey, Zelazney, etc).  It’s only been in the last decade that I’ve branched out much into other areas besides science fiction and fantasy, now that we’re actually living in the (sort of) future that we all dreamed about back then. But science fiction is still where my heart lives, even though the field has shrunk drastically and been almost completely subsumed by fantasy and by science fiction TV and movies, most of which is little better than the pulp science fiction stories written in the 1930s.  Why is it so difficult for screenwriters, directors and producers to achieve the quality of content that was reached in print 60-70 years ago?  Of course, I suppose the same could be asked of film and television in general, hmm?

But I drift.  I’ve probably read in excess of 4000-5000 books, and still own many of them.  They loom over me each day as I sit and work, two walls of six-foot tall bookcases crammed full, stacked on top, with seven-foot stacks of books piled up in front of them.  Old friends, difficult to part with.  And like so many avid readers, I always thought, “I could do this.  I could write stories like this.  How hard could it be?  You just dream all this great stuff and then write it down!”  But life rarely takes the freeway, straight and wide.  It likes to travel the back roads, the byways, the unexpected detours and dead-ends.  Life is what happens while you’re making other plans.  I’ve written many computer games (I currently have 31 of them available at www.kaser.com), and will continue to write more.  As long as we suck air in and push it out, we have to suck food in and … uh, push it out, too.  More and more often, I find my fingers and mind itching to type something other than for(i=0; i<MAX_LIMIT; i++), something with a little more ‘heft’ to it.

So, logically, a blog is a good beginning, a place to get into the rhythm of putting words together and then releasing them into the wild.  Soon, I intend to start work on a non-fiction book for my extended family, about the murder of my father’s oldest brother in 1955, and I may share some of that on this blog, we’ll see.  Mostly, I expect the entries here to be an eclectic collection of thoughts, opinions, compositions, diatribes and diuretic discourse.

I hope that you’ll join me from time to time and perhaps even discuss things once in a while.  That way I won’t have to do all the heavy lifting.  (And no, that’s not me in the picture above, I’m not that cute.  That’s our newest grandchild, Kinley.  Think of all the open possibilities that lie before her.  As life passes, our available choices seem to narrow down, from wide-open to tightly-constraining.  But, ’tis not entirely so.  At every point, our lives are ours to choose.  In every moment, choose wisely!  Whenever possible, choose consciously!

Blogically yours,

Everett
June 29, 2012