excerpt
“Irv, I told you to get those people back and sell that car,” he
said. “You’ve lost your last sale here. You’re through.”
Judge Sam Winter parked in the lane and walked over to a basement
full of blackened debris. Ten years ago, depression squatters
camping in the Thorp house fled after they knocked over a kerosene
lantern. The flames spread and when the roof fell in, the wave
of heat shocked Poodie awake in his cabin. By the time he got back
from the Gellardys with help, the house was a heap of embers and
the big elm tree in front a torch. Sagebrush and bunch grass
reclaimed the Thorp land long ago, except for the few yards around
Poodie’s cabin and the outhouse. The barn and the shed were leaning.
The pickers cabin next to Poodie’s collapsed in the early forties.
Scavengers took the wood. New orchards were going in
farther out, some creeping up the foothills. The way the valley had
developed, even after the depression nobody wanted orchard land
close to town between the tracks and the river. People were talking
about creating park land along the Columbia. Sam thought the
development would be a long time coming.
Samuel Deacon Winter, the third of seven children, was born in
1883 on a farm in Seward County, Nebraska. His mother and
father, born to German immigrants, homesteaded in Nebraska
from Pennsylvania shortly after the Civil War. His father fought
under Grant and was wounded in the Virginia campaign. Samuel’s
Lutheran parents imposed strict standards of morality, behavior
and literacy. All of the children developed into intensive readers,
none more voracious than Sam. Only his older brother stayed on
the farm. The five girls became teachers. Following high school,
Sam worked for a time as a runner and clerk in a law office in Lincoln,
then attended law school at the University of Nebraska. Surveying
his state’s gloomy economic situation and stimulated by
what he read and heard of opportunity in the west, he struck out
for Oregon. After a year of boredom at the bottom of the ladder in
a Portland law firm, he moved to Eastern Washington in 1906 and
set up a practice in the valley, which was just beginning to develop
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