This is Post #3 in the new Series “Going to Afghanistan”.

Fred’s birthday was on the 20th.  He had just turned 45.  Two days before he was still living in Washington D.C. going through briefings and finishing preparations for his transfer to Afghanistan.  Lloydine had returned to Carson City two weeks earlier for the start of school for the kids (actually we were never called “kids” by our parents, kids properly speaking were baby goats); but whatever way one says it “Don and Ken” were again enrolled in school in Carson City, capital of Nevada (Ormsby County then, for the record).

Kenneth had spent the summer bucking hay bales.  I had spent the summer slowly moving north from southern California starting with Los Angeles, staying with relatives about two weeks at a time.  Los Angeles in July, Coalinga in August, Los Altos in August, Reno and Donner Lake as summer turned to fall which September was fall in Nevada based on the Memorial Day to Labor Day summer vacation schedule and the Labor Day to Memorial Day school schedule.  I started Fifth Grade in the old west side two-story school house built with hand hewn blocks from prison labor from the Nevada State Prison somewhere well after the territorial days, but before modern times as Nevada remembered history.  The daughter of Nevada’s new Governor Grant Sawyer was in my class, otherwise it was mostly just the same old Carson City faces.

Nevada was a part of the Old West, but Nevada was not as a populated area “old”.  Sure there were the Washo and the Shoshone and Piutes out near Pyramid Lake, but they were “Indians” (for most historians easily forgotten or vilified) not unlike the real Indians from India.  I was going to Afghanistan where real Indians lived nearby, my perspective on things was changing.  But I protest too much.  Carson City also had Stewart, an “Indian Boarding School” where people my age and younger and older were sent from Colorado or New Mexico or Arizona sometimes to be “westernized” and to learn how to play basketball and eat with knives and forks and not ones hands and learn that the old ways were bad and primitive and that the new America offered more than the cigar store Indian on Carson Street that seemed to offer just smokes and peeling paint even a hundred years after the end to fighting.  And there really still was a cigar store wooden Indian on Carson Street in 1958 and it had only been a year or two since Indians could legally be downtown on Saturday night and there were other problems too, but Carson City certainly wasn’t a bad place.  At least it didn’t seem a bad place at the time.

Afghanistan of course (as a populated area) WAS “old”.  Afghanistan did not “start” in 1864, or 1861, or 1846, or 1776, or 1506 or something in time rather recent.  There were cities in Afghanistan before America was even a dream, poetry beyond imagining, “the Persian poets” among others.  Rulers debated the freedoms of men, passed laws to ensure freedom of religion, set up places of learning for the arts and the development of crafts and for better ways to heat the houses.  From Bamiyan went missionaries to the Emperor of China and from China went ships to discover America and to take Afghans to the Yucatan (in Mexico) and they brought back the record and you say it is the Americans that will teach and the Afghans that must learn?

Fred’s birthday was celebrated in Reno with a dinner with Lloydine and Paul and Jo Garwood.  They ate at Eugene’s on south Virginia Street.  Everyone ate in those days at Eugene’s in Reno for special occasions.  They always had a photographer at Eugene’s, a few dollars for a snap.  Everyone smiled and looked well fed.  The conversation centered on Afghanistan and telephones.  Paul was the President of Bell of Nevada, part of the Bell System that made America the greatest country on earth, or so said the Bell System ads.  I liked Paul Garwood, spent a lot of time at his home in Reno when my parents would visit them, usually on Sundays, and talk over regulatory issues about how to grow Nevada and to grow Nevada Bell and to make industry and government work together for the common cause.  My father was on the Nevada Regulatory Commission then; so I guess Paul’s input was important.

“Yes, they have telephones in Afghanistan”, Paul of course knew that and so did Fred, but they were Siemens phones mostly, German made, a German system - worked pretty well.  “Did you know that the Germans think THEY invented the telephone?”  The conversation drifted on.  Toasts were made.  “They’re Moslem, right; they don’t drink do they?”  “Here’s a toast to your last toast, Fred”.

“And tell us once again exactly WHY you are going to Afghanistan and what you REALLY expect to accomplish.”  “Lloydine, you are so patient.”  “Fred, how long again will you be gone?”

The next day, the 21st, was a Sunday that year.  For Sunday morning breakfast, on special Sundays, my mother would bake biscuits.  My father would fry bacon.  We ate the powder milk type biscuits with syrup or jelly and ate bacon and then ate more biscuits.  It was a ritual from days of yore going back at least a generation (maybe), or maybe my mother started the whole thing but in either case these Sunday morning biscuits turned into the occasional Sunday morning buffet; which was like a dinner; but was really breakfast.  Guests would be invited, friends and relatives and sometimes people we hardly knew would show up, or at least a lot of people that I didn’t know seemed to show up.  Fred and Lloydine had a lot of friends.

September 21st was the day for another one of these breakfasts.  All the relatives came in from various Nevada points and points in California to wish Fred a Bon Voyage and to say “Goodbye” and to ask one more time when he planned to come back and to say once again that, “I am so glad Lloydine and the boys aren’t going”.  “Afghanistan is no place for a family Fred, I may know nothing about Afghanistan, but I know it is no place for a family.”

The Burma Trip had just about been the  end of things for Fred’s relatives; his mother and his sisters mostly.  They worried.  They worried that he would not come back alive, that the water was deadly, that the telephones wouldn’t work.  They worried about the mail and about medicines (they were against the required shots being good Christian Scientists) and about the food being foreign and the foreigners not being American enough.  They were good hearted folks, believed in helping people, the “right” people maybe, but, “Fred, why do YOU have to do it?”  “Can’t someone else go?”  There are so many jobs right here in America, with all your contacts I am sure you could find one.”  “Pass the biscuits, please.”

Going to Afghanistan is perhaps a bit like dieing.  The question is about who it is harder on, those leaving or those left behind.  Fred did not die in Afghanistan; but his mother died while he was gone.  Also his favorite brother-in-law died, Charlie Dean, husband of Deanie died.  This was the last meal that they would share.

Clara May Boomhower, “Caddie” to her sisters and friends was born in Hollister, California on January 16th 1875.  She now lived in Los Altos, California in a small (then yellow) cottage on Orange Avenue a block away from the Christian Science Church and two blocks from the S&P train tracks that then went through the center of Los Altos.  Her husband (Fred’s Dad) had died in 1950.  Fred went to Burma just a year after his death.  Under the circumstances she was not ready to let Fred go.  Nearly a decade later things were different, there was an acceptance and a resignation regarding Fred’s lifetime work, to be an engineer and to let engineering take him where he somehow needed to go.

She took the United Airlines DC 6 from Reno down to San Francisco with him.  This was the first leg of the flight to Afghanistan, so in a way she was leaving for Afghanistan too.  They talked most of the way; but not when flying over the crest of the Sierras; they paused to look once more as they had so many times before at the mountaintops.  An hour later the plane landed at SFO after a stop in Sacramento; she took the train to Los Altos and Orange Avenue.  He caught a flight to Shemya.

Note:  The least known part of Afghan history is the story of the Bamian missionaries going to China and the subsequent Chinese voyage (perhaps voyages) to America long before even the Vikings arrival.  The history was well documented.  Unfortunately, the greatest records were on deposit in the Imperial library in Peking and somehow were destroyed by a fire that somehow involved the British involvement during the Taiping Revolt. The story is further complicated by diverse spellings of the participants names and the historical conflict between emphasis on Chinese or Afghan leadership.  Further, while the Moslem King of Afghanistan acknowledged the event, it was a Buddhist achievement, not a Moslem one; making the whole subject difficult at best.  Needless to say neither the Americans nor the British are fond of the story.  The Italians and Spanish have much to lose and the Catholics seemingly have everything to lose.  Even the Scandinavians are on the wrong side of this one.  So now you know why Afghanistan isn’t included in ones Third Grade instruction about “explorers”.

The “open house” was on Friday, Fred’s birthday was on Saturday, the relatives ate breakfast on Sunday and by early afternoon Fred was in the air leaving Reno.

The strength of America was its locally owned community newspapers.  They were fiercely independent, were well written, and they created an important sense of community.  Now they are almost no more.

Eugene’s on South Virginia Street in Reno, Nevada had their own in-house photographer.  Fred turned 45 on the date of this picture - September 20, 1958 - the day before he left for Afghanistan.

Pictured are (left to right):  Fred W. Clayton, Lloydine M. Clayton, Jo Garwood, Paul Garwood, President of Bell Telephone Company of Nevada.

[First posted:  2010.02.26 / Friday - Leaving for Afghanistan]