Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

company and they sent us some zippers - they thought it was an interesting idea. When you
hoisted the sail you just held the zipper and hoisted it up. You had a uniform pull on the mast. The
only problem we had was that it tended to stick to the mast, but then we found out by running a light
line inside it, it would break the seal and give enough motion. Here again we couldn't measure it.
The one we had most fun with was making a sail boat with wheels, to get rid of the skin friction. I
thought it was a very good idea but our experimentation was very crude. We made a framework with
three axles and six wheels, we made drums out of wood and we got truck inner tubes and blew
them up. One night we wanted to see how far you could blow one up before it burst. We went round
to a service station, holding it around the corner of a wall blowing this damn thing up. Then we
discovered we had to make casings to keep the inner tubes in shape. We made them out of burlap
sacking. We'd spent a fair amount of time on this. We took the mast and sail off a small boat we
had there and towed it out, to try it out. Ron was in his seal boots and hat. Ron was a poseur, liked
costume, which was fine. I'd take sneakers any day. We tow this thing out, he gets on it and the
damn framework wasn't strong enough and it split and he was getting a little wet. It couldn't sink,
you had six inner tubes holding you up. He wanted me to take him off, and I thought I'd never seen
anything so funny in my life, and I'm down in the bottom of the rowboat roaring with laughter, and
the more I laughed the madder he got. He had red hair and had a real temper. Finally I rowed
ashore and let someone else go and get him because he would have killed me if he'd got his
hands on me at that time. I sure as hell wasn't about to let him catch me when he had his temper
up like that. He was mad, no question of that. But I just stayed out of sight for a couple of hours and
we had dinner that night.
We had used 2 x 2 notched out - too good a job - so we didn't have enough strength. We should
have just laid one across another. This was in Yukon harbour and several people on beach were
watching the operation. We let it go at that.
He lived at South Colby all the time. He went back east occasionally and did some writing back
there. Polly and the kids were there all the time. He had a little cabin in the woods about 100ft from
his house. It was a nice little cabin of knotty pine - you could buy knotty pine then for $25 a 1,000 ft.
He had his books there and we'd play chess. He had a little air pistol and would shoot at a carton at
the other end of the room as a target. Mostly he worked at nights.
I got elected to the legislature and had my own business to run, but I saw a fair amount of them. We
both joined the Bremerton Yacht Club and had ourselves made advisers to the junior yacht club.
This was good - we took the kids out on the boat and got them to do some work. They were getting
sailing and he was getting work done on the boat. It was a good arrangement.
We were having a dance one night, when Ron shows up in his boat and Polly drives over in her car.
They are not speaking to each other. It took me a while to find out what had happened. Ron had
written a couple of letters to girls in New York and had put them in their rural mail box to be picked
up. Polly had gone out to pick up the mail, saw envelopes and transfers letters and doesn't tell him
until after they'd been picked up. He took a dim view. Polly was a great girl. We loved her and the
kids.
After Ron left Polly was working and supporting the kids and married an older fellow. He died not
too long after they were married. That helped Polly - she was getting aid from social security, she
had a nice home overlooking the bay in Bremerton and later on she went back east and took a
cruise to Everglades and met a fellow from Pennsylvania and got married and moved there.
In 53 I was teaching school in Alaska and Nibs and Henrietta rented my house in Seattle.