“The Eldorado Kid”

VazamBam

by Vassilis Zambaras

“Small-town Bootblack vs Clunkers,

Raymond, Washington, circa 1950 B.P.C.*”

Coolly tooling by that crappy
Run-down shoeshine stand

In their souped up clunkers,
The local yokels must have thought

The town’s sole token Nigger
Ned couldn’t tell shit from Shineola;

I guess that explains why
He was never caught hauling

Smart-ass white punks like us a hundred
Miles to his whores in the city and back

Come late Saturday night
In that beautiful, sharp, shining, slick

Mother-fucking classic of a black
Eldorado Cadillac.

*Before Political Correctness

Meligalas, Greece—(Weekly Hubris)—4/12/10—Mr. Ned might have been Raymond’s sole black man but his shoeshine stand wasn’t the only one in town; he had some serious competition from my father, who owned and operated (with more than a little help from Yours Truly), Tom’s Shoeshine Parlor, as well as being a night watchman for Weyerhaeuser Timber Company’s huge sawmill from 1947 until he returned to Greece with my mother in 1959.

Both shops were on the fringe of that sinful, infamous, half-mile-long stretch of real estate known as First Street, a place once aptly described by a local resident as a “howling wilderness”—which it may well have been—but it was also home for many of the town’s residents, my family included.

The street has never been more than four and a half blocks in length, and though its present sedate state belies its hectic past, in its heyday it exuded an urban, eclectic aura, as it was a place with a rich, sometimes volatile ethnic mix of characters: Finns, Poles, Swedes, Swede Finns, Chinese, Lebanese, Lithuanians, Jews, Ossetians (a part of Russia), Latvians, Germans, Austrians, Norwegians, Greeks, Italians and more. In short, it was long on action, cosmopolitan in character, and the social and business hub of Raymond from its founding in 1903 until the late 40’s. But don’t take a Greek’s[1] word for it—here is what Stewart Holbrook, self-proclaimed “low-brow” historian and one of the Pacific Northwest’s most popular writers, had to say about Raymond during the Depression years c. 1935:

Where the railroad that came to tidewater was once a city of five thousand, all of it built either on pilings or on dredged-in land. Its business district contained several new concrete buildings, but also block on block structures straight out of Western or Yukon fiction; false-front establishments, many with fearsome architectural embellishments, called pool rooms, card rooms, tobacco stores, clothing stores, hotels, rooming houses, sports centers, restaurants, and what not. A big business on First Street was the retailing of moonshine and homemade beers and wines, all illegal in the days of Prohibition. The upstairs of many of these places were made into rooms for transients, and there was generally believed to be a chambermaid for every room.

The juke box had not penetrated Pacific County, but the electric player piano was well-settled, and the insistent beat of a dozen of these hurdy-gurdies made an evening on First Street memorable, while the tides washed and gurgled underneath the shacks and brought rich aromas to the guests and the customers. The Raymond sea gulls never slept. Busy all day, they held convention in the evening, wheeling and darting, screaming high and eerily above the pounding bass of Dardanella, fighting for scraps of food, lighting on window sills to glare at the people inside. The sidewalks and some of the streets were planks set on stringers supported by piling. At low tide they were about ten feet above water; and during the June and December tides they either sank out of sight, or floated off. They rattled and thumped much of the night as lumber carriers moved over them. The town was none too well lighted, but it was never really dark; the hot red eyes of the sawdust burners at the mills blinked, then flared and smoked, twenty-four hours a day. Great seagoing ships steamed in to dock and awaited cargo. Two railroads shunted cars the night long in order that siding and flooring and shingles might be loaded next morning.

The whole place was throbbing, fairly bursting with the energy and the urgency I came quickly to associate with pioneering—even sixty years after the covered wagons had ceased to roll. Raymond, and many another Northwest towns, did not remind me of anything I had known in New England. I found the rawness and the spirit new and wonderful.[2]

So this was Raymond in its heyday, teeming with hotels and rooming houses, real estate offices, movie theaters, grocery stores and meat markets, drug stores, bakeries, jewelry stores, clothing and shoe stores, tailors, cleaners, shoe makers, barber shops, steam baths, pool halls, card rooms, sports clubs, restaurants, cigar and tobacco shops, hardware and paint stores, furniture stores, delivery, foundry, machine shops, auto repair and storage, taxis, banks, general/convenience stores, junk stores, longshoremen’s offices, electricians, plumbers, bars and saloons, a mortuary, and, of course, brothels—you name it—every conceivable kind of business establishment indispensible for the daily needs of a small town overflowing with hard-drinking, hell-raising first generation immigrant lumbermen and stevedores, the rapidly dwindling Native Americans and the assimilated Americanized second and third generations. Everybody who was anybody—and the multitudes who were not—used to serenade down First Street on Friday and Saturday nights. Indeed, it was the center of a small town pulsing with life.

So lively in fact that at one time in the late 40’s, Raymond made Life Magazine’s list of the 25 worst cities/towns in the US—probably because of its three cathouses and a Quality Comics Plastic Man Chief-of-Police notorious for bending the law into outrageous but very profitable shapes. The chief was finally forced into retirement and the brothels were shut down in the 50’s by a city council bent on making Raymond respectable, thus opening the way for the incomparable, cool, Mr. Ned and his bevy of hot chicks who were roosting in Tacoma waiting for the cocks to eat crow!

The rest is pure poetry in motion: Having made his fortune a bit before Raymond finished hitting the skids, Ned shut down his shoeshine shop one fine day and pulled up stakes, leaving the poor local honkies in the lurch of his black Eldorado Cadillac, wondering what the fuck?

Caveat emptor: As The Eldorado Kid is a “legend” clothed in factual trappings that give it a plausible aura of verisimilitude, consumers are cautioned against regarding it as anything but a tale that is “believable, though not necessarily believed.”

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[1] greek, n. often cap, archaic: SWINDLER, SHARPER, esp CARDSHARPER (Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, unabridged, 1968). Older dictionaries do not render this meaning as “archaic”; for example, The New Universities Webster Dictionary, 1936, gives one of its meanings as “card sharper; a swindler”—without any “archaic” caveats.

[2] Stewart Holbrook, The Far Corner: A Personal View of the Pacific Northwest, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1952, pp. 13-14