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 be 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.