The Eagle

Anne’s youngest son, Paul, has always been very interested in wildlife – especially birds.  Even today, he spends hours every week hiking around taking pictures of wild birds.  When he was young, Paul was always bringing home injured animals to try and fix up and re-release into the wild.  Their house was practically a zoo…without the five children.

One afternoon, Paul found a bald eagle with an injured wing.  Bald eagles aren’t native to the area, so this bird not only was wounded, but very, very lost.  He somehow managed to get the bird down in the basement to his work table so he could try and splint the wing, but the bird was so large, he couldn’t hold it still and work on the wing at the same time.  So, shutting the basement door, he ran upstairs and asked his mother for help with the bird.  Anne, used to this by now, stopped what she was doing and followed her son downstairs.   Stunned, she looked at the enormous (and angry) animal.  Paul had failed mention what kind of bird it was.  But, not to be daunted, Anne grabbed the two legs so Paul could work on pinioning the wing.

When the bird realized he was trapped, he immediately redoubled his efforts to break free.  He managed to work one foot loose and promptly grabbed onto the nearest object for leverage.  Which happened to be Anne’s right hand.  The bird’s talons went straight through the fatty part of her hand between her thumb and pointer finger.  Between Anne’s screaming and Paul’s yelling and the bird’s screeching, they managed to garner the attention of Anne’s middle son, John.  When he saw what was going on, he had the presence of mind to grab a coat hanger and fashion it into a set of two hooks, which he then used to pry the bird’s talons apart enough for Anne to remove her hand.  As she realized she was going to need to go to the hospital to take care of her wound, Anne promptly decided she was going to drive the extra miles to the hospital further away than the town’s local hospital…just because she was so well known at the local hospital again.  She didn’t want to get the people talking about what “crazy Anne” had done to get herself hurt once again.

Tom and the Doctor

Anne was a nurse who worked for a kindly and prominent doctor in her hometown. He was friends with all of his employees and genuinely cared about them. So when Anne announced she was engaged to this man she’d only met three weeks earlier, he was more than a little concerned. Despite all her reassurances that he was a “good man” the doctor was upset when Anne couldn’t tell him anything about Tom’s work or history. She didn’t know herself. So the doctor hired a private investigator.

As it happens, Tom worked for the government – which at the time had assigned him to work on the top-secret Manhattan Project out at the Hanford Area. So the private investigator was stymied whenever he tried to find out any information on Tom – the government kept him from finding out anything. So the doctors fears were not assuaged. He feared the worst – that Tom was a serial killer or even worse, a spy. He straight up told Anne, “Don’t blame me if he turns out to be a serial killer and I never see you again – I’ve warned you not to marry him!” But Anne did anyway, and afterwards, found out what all the kerfuffle was about.

The Proposal

When Anne and Palma returned from their vacation at the Ellensburg Dude Ranch, Anne was reunited with her boyfriend at the time, Jim Kirke. Jim was from the local military base and had been seeing Anne on and off for a while. So, suffice it to say, Anne was surprised when Tom showed up during her first weekend back home!

Every weekend for three weeks in a row, Tom showed up at the Davis house. Anne wasn’t quite sure what to do, so she showed him around the area, doing her best to explain things to Jim. Her employer was a little disturbed at the sudden appearance of this man.

The third week, as Tom and Anne sat in her front room talking, he got down on one knee and pulled a ring out of his pocket. Anne says, “Well, I’d never been proposed to before, so I figured I should just say ‘yes!’” Which is exactly what she did.

Tom & Anne

Anne and her close friend, Palma Lee, were both very into horses. Anne and her brother both had horses stabled out behind their mother’s house, and Anne loved to ride – especially with the young men from the nearby military camp. So when Anne and Palma both had some vacation days at the same time, they decided they wanted to take a “horsey” vacation and booked a cabin at a dude ranch in Ellensburg, Washington.

The first night they were there, they unpacked all their things in the cabin and headed up for dinner. At a ranch like this, everyone came to eat in the main hall for all their meals. When Anne and Palma walked in the big front doors, they came into the lounge, which had a huge fireplace with a stone hearth encircling it. And there were several young men sitting on the hearth, chatting. As Anne and Palma walked by, one of the young men looked directly at Anne and said, “Hello, my name is Tom Clement.” She thought he was very forward and ignored him, while thinking “Gee whiz, he’s ugly!”

But Tom wasn’t going to give up that quickly. As the young women went into the mess hall, they sat down at one of the long tables where guests ate family style. Tom came in and sat down right next to her. She was embarrassed to be so publicly pursued.

And Tom still didn’t give up – he kept showing up wherever Anne went; whether it was to meals, or on trail rides (even though he was a Pennsylvania boy and didn’t know much about horses). He was bound and determined to get her attention.

A Careful Pilot

Anne used to fly a charter plane when she owned her own local airline. She once had a group of six clients who wanted to fly down to Las Vegas for the weekend, and chartered her plane with her as the pilot. She, along with her son Paul, flew them down for the weekend.

However, when she went to set up their return flight, the weather was less than favorable. She was flying a Cessna, which is lightweight and has wings which will accumulate ice quickly in cold temperatures and high altitudes – which in turn will freeze up the wingflaps. Rather than risk it, she convinced her clients to take a commercial flight back, though they didn’t want to and insisted everything would be just fine.

She and Paul took it slow and careful when flying the Cessna back by themselves. Sure enough, when they reached the airport and did the post flight checks, there was water dripping off the wings and the beginning of ice crystals forming. If she had opted to cave in and fly back with all eight passengers, she most likely would have lost control of the plane and possibly crashed.

Monkeys

When Anne’s daughter, Kate, was very young she loved monkeys. She would beg her mom and dad for a baby monkey for a pet. While getting odd pets wasn’t unheard of at this time, Anne couldn’t see ever letting a monkey into their house. So for Kate’s birthday, Tom and Anne bought her a stuffed plush monkey. They carried it out of the house and across the street to a small pine tree that sat in the lot facing their home which would later become the site of Chief Joseph Middle School. They put the monkey in one of the lower branches of the tree.

When Kate came out later that morning, her parents looked out the big picture window facing the street. One of them asked, “Why, Kate! What is that funny looking thing sitting in the tree over there?” Kate looked out the window and started jumping up and down yelling, “Monkey! Monkey! Baby monkey!” Then her dad carried her across the street to capture the monkey for her very own pet.

The Fireplace

The tiles surrounding the grate of this fireplace were designed by Anne’s mother. She used to work at a tile factory in Roseville when she was 17 years old, and specially designed them for the fireplace. The wood burning stove was eventually replaced by a coal burning pot-bellied stove. But the register the fireplace supplied heat to upstairs was always a favorite listening spot for Anne and her younger brother, David. Long after the grown-ups had thought they were soundly asleep in their beds, Anne and David would hunker down on their bellies and listen to all the interesting conversations of the grownups downstairs.

When Anne was around 8 years old, her mother and Aunt Lucy took the automobile to the store for groceries – leaving Anne alone with 3 year old David the first time. She felt very responsible, and wanting to be a good babysitter and homemaker, decided to start a fire in the big fireplace, which was used to heat the entire house. She found a copy of the Saturday Evening Post and began to tear the pages out and put them in the fireplace. Then she lit them, and sat in front of the nice warm fire and regularly tore out another page to add to the flame.

On their way back from the store, Lucy and Anne’s mother drove by the front of the house and saw the fire through the front windows. They drove around the back alley to park the car and then Anne’s mother came screaming into the house, grabbed Anne and hauled her upstairs. She then proceeded to whip her good and proper. Anne didn’t really understand what she’d done wrong until later. By using magazine pages as tinder for the fire, she had put the entire house in danger of burning down. The pages stacked up and sent tendrils of still-burning paper ash up the flue and chimney and over the roof to the lawn. The bits could have very easily lodged somewhere in the chimney or on the roof, or even could have flown out of the grate and caught fire.