After reading our selection Music on the Move Out West, I was curious about the preceding selection (named above) and got it from our mail order. It was much shorter, and strictly about that December in Portland, in 1968, in their "Overlook neighborhood" with the record snowfalls. Again, mostly a trip down Matthew Gonder's memory lane, but filled in some 'holes" we wondered about:
"Our family, however, was not patterned after tender and traditional Norman Rockwell images...our Mom had passed away from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1962, leaving Dad alone to raise five children between the ages of one to six. It wasn't easy. Dad fought the courts to keep us, as back then in Washington state a widower didn't have custody rights to his own children. In order for us to remain together within the law, we lived for three years with a foster family, followed by two more with Dad's brothers in Spokane and did a short stint in an orphanage before we moved to Chehalis and Aunt Mary joined our circus."
Yes, makes me grateful for the situation in which I was raised, and my own children in comparison, but still emphasizing with that man who wanted to keep his family together. Just wanted to share.
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