MY STORY INTRO
THE
STORY
OF
RON PARMELE
INTRODUCTION
My uncle died 3½ months after my parents gave me his name. Robert Willis was my mother’s oldest brother. He and my father worked together falling timber, which in those days was felled by hand and brute strength. The young woodsmen’s muscles would ache and bulge as they alternately swung their large double-bit axes; as one man struck the other’s axe would swing back, poised and ready to strike. When using the ten-foot crosscut saws the young men would create a rhythmic pull-push, push-pull, humming their way an inch at a time through the majestic old-growth Spruce and Fir.
It killed him instantly, the snag. Dad and Robert’s saw had made it through the tree. They had done their calculations, determined where the tree was to fall safely to the ground between another old-growth tree and a half-dead snag. Dad was good at that, and his undercuts were precise. However, as the tree fell, it sideswiped the snag. The falling tree’s momentum pulled the partially dead tree with it; the roots of the old tree held firm. As the dead tree broke away, it sprung forcefully upright, snapping the dead tree top and hurling it towards dad and Uncle Robert. Dad’s instincts saved him. He quickly stepped to the side keeping his eyes focused up. Robert, staying directly in its path and not looking back, tried to out run the projectile. Robert Willis was impaled to the ground and died instantly. He was only 21.
Dad never forgot those lessons he learned that day. When I turned 18, I began working with my dad in the woods. Dad felled the trees and taught me to “buck” them into log lengths. Dad cautiously looked for “Widow Makers.” Widow Makers were the limbs that had broken off from previously felled trees that had gotten hung up in other trees. These limbs could be as big as 5 to 10 inches thick and 8 to 10 feet long, mostly dead, dry and very heavy. Deadly! Dad never again experienced the kind of accident that killed Robert, but when Dad was 50, while bucking a tree, a log rolled against his leg, breaking it in a number of places. After that injury, Dad gave up logging and became a dairyman. He worked at the Oregon State University Dairy in Corvallis, Oregon. Later, Dad came to work for me in the R.V. industry as Foreman of the Plumbing Department. He was the only one of his crew that passed the State Plumbing and Propane License test on his first try!
Ron Parmele born 5/4/39
According to my
birth certificate, I was born on Drift Creek – not a town or a city,
but a creek! The creek
was in
Long
after the cabin was abandoned and left to the elements, we would go by and mom and dad would point to a wild
mound of blackberries and say,
“There’s where Ronnie was born.”
No
hospital! No cost! I
was BORN FREE!
I felt like Brier Rabbit. I don’t remember being born. In fact, I don’t remember learning to talk or walk either. This is what was told to me, Okay?
Cutler City and Taft were on each side of the mouth of Schooner Creek, as it drained into Siletz Bay. Drift Creek was just south of Cuttler City. Both creeks as well as the Siletz River formed Siletz Bay. All of this is now called Lincoln City, in Lincoln County, a hundred miles down the coast of Oregon.
Dad was one of the first young men on Drift Creek to have a car – a Model T. It was in his second car, a 1926 Model A, while parked by Siletz Bay near Cutler City, that dad asked my mother, Doris Willis, then only sixteen, to marry him. Dad was twenty-one. Mom told him “She couldn’t marry a non-Adventist and would never marry anyone that smoked and went to movies.”
Dad was born an Adventist, but wasn’t living it. Neither was his older brother, Francis, nor his half-brothers, Raymond, Roy and Robert Ring. However, years later, Raymond did become a practicing member of the church. Dad had a choice to make, and he chose Mom. I never saw or heard that he ever broke that promise to her. If ever there was a Godly man, dad was it. He was always faithful to her and the church.
Both sides of my family were 3rd generation Seventh-Day Adventists. My older sister, Shirley, and I and all my cousins made the 4th. It wasn’t a question. It just was. We had no say in the matter.
I don’t know when, or now both families became Seventh Day Adventist, but great grandpa George Parmeles’ brother, Rufus Parmele, was the president of the Florida Conference of SDA’s. His wife was a surgeon and helped start the Florida Adventist Hospital. Ellen White, the one most responsible for founding the Seventh Day Adventist church, was alive until 1915. They all would have known her. They may have heard her speak at camp meeting, as they nearly always went. I do know that most of the Adventist visiting preachers always stayed with the Parmeles for weekends. Elder Pickhams’ wife was a cousin to Edgar Parmeles’ wife, Ruby. He taught at Laurelwood Academy when I went there in 1954 – 1957.
George and Nannie Parmele had six children. Hoyt was born in 1878. The only daughter Myrtle was born in 1880. My dad’s father, Clarence, was born in 1881, and Edgar was born in 1885. I was told by my mother that there was a son named Seth who died of blood poisoning at the age of fifteen. I looked on the internet, and Seth L. Parmele was buried in the IOOF Cemetery, grave 8, Bay City, Tillamook County, Oregon. It didn’t mention the dates of his birth or death. My mother said he was the second boy. They all remained Adventist until their deaths.
My dad’s mother, Carrie Lockwood, was a neighbor to the Parmeles in Kansas City. Carries’ mother had died a year after her birth, and her oldest sister, Ellie, had raised her. When the Parmeles moved away, Carrie started seeing a few non-Adventist guys her sister didn’t like, and she ended up sending her to live with the Parmeles in Oregon. Carrie and Myrtle were always as close as sisters.
(Back row). Bert Lockwood married Myrtle Parmele
(Front row) Clarence Parmele married Carrie Lockwood in June 4, 1905.
After Myrtle’s father, George Parmele, found out about Myrtles marriage, he had a fit. No non-Adventist was going to marry his daughter. Bert, in all honesty, couldn’t become an Adventist just to marry her. Myrtle never married again. Bert Married Maud.
Mr. and Mrs. Clarence and Carrie Parmele
He brought his beautiful, 20 year old wife, home on horseback to an almost empty house with so little furniture. She borrowed a hammer and saw from the mill and made a chair, a bed, a cupboard and anything else she needed.
My grandmother was that way until she was in her late 70’s. She would buy a house and remodel it, sell it and buy another one. I helped her while I lived with her in Salem Oregon. It was my first year out of Academy. She wanted me to go into a partnership with her, buy houses and fix them up. I should have taken her up on it, but I wanted to go to college, take theology, get married, (which I did) and become a Seventh Day Adventist preacher, which never happened.
They remained near the mill site for only a short time. They then bought a place overlooking the south end of Devils Lake. The view of the lake out the back windows and a view of the ocean out the front windows made a wonderful place
Carrie was to have a baby soon. A son named Francis was the first-born. Then triplets came two girls and a boy. They were born early and all three died within a week. Today, they would no doubt have been saved. Next born was another son Cecil. Next born was my father Orville. My dad was only three weeks old when his father, Clarence Parmele, died of appendicitis. He had gone to Portland Adventist Sanitarium to have them taken out. During the night it had stopped hurting badly, so he crawled out the basement window and came the 80 miles back home. A short time later, it burst, and he was gone. Carrie was left alone with 3 boys to rise.
My dad was born August 12, 1913, was born in the coastal area now known as Lincoln City at the north end of Devils Lake, where the Seventh Day Adventist church school is now sitting at, what used to be Ocean Lake. His father, who had suffered for sometime with attacks of appendicitis, was hit with an acute attack, which resulted in a burst appendix, while driving a team of horses one Sabbath morning to meet with others as they gathered in the hall above the old Taft Store building used for church services. He was buried at the pioneer cemetery in Taft.
At the age of twenty-one dad started dating his best friend Bob Willis’ sister. Her name was Doris; she was only fifteen at the time. He soon asked her to marry him. She said she could never marry a non-Adventist. And she would never marry anyone who smoked. So I stopped smoking and began going to church with her. We got married when she was sweet sixteen.
Orville and Doris Parmele
Shirley, Ronnie, Jeannie, Dickie
They soon had four children, my brother Randy was born while I was
A senior at Laurelwood Academy in 1957
GO TO CHAPTER ONE