Before she could relax and enjoy the amazing 61-year reunion of what everyone still calls “The V Street Gang,” Linda Clark spent weeks tracking down her former neighbors, and the children of those neighbors, to make sure everyone was in the loop.
“I’ve had my detective hat on,” Clark said. “There were seven families I couldn’t find. Then I found them.”
Clark, a DIY genealogist who loves a research challenge, got inspired during a chat with longtime pal Ruby Kelly, who recently lost her husband. Kelly used to host occasional reunions at her home, but when Clark heard Kelly’s status update, she took over the project — and really ran with it.
The Columbian counted 14 people at the reunion, which took place on a recent Thursday over lunch at an out-of-the-way diner called Nayhely’s Place. But counting everybody wasn’t easy amid all the happy hugs and how-are-yous, and the actual ordering of lunch didn’t begin until well past lunchtime. Hearts, not bellies, took priority as old friends walked in the door; food had to wait while stories, laughter and family photographs took over Nayhely’s big table.
“This group is a joy,” said Kelly. “We never had much, but we have more than most people because we have these friendships that have lasted. Friendship is the most important thing.”
The friendships began one June day in 1958, when a bunch of young moms and moms-to-be found themselves hanging out in the kitchen of Beverly Lowry, now Beverly Johansen. Johansen was simultaneously defrosting her fridge, serving her guests (including Ruby Kelly) coffee and suffering labor pains. Billie Shinnick was playing guitar.
That mellow gathering was the beginning of a bond that has proven incredibly durable, deep and special. All but two of those original moms are gone, and everyone has moved near and far, but survivors and descendants keep showing up and keep renewing the connection among the families that used to live around the corner of V and 39th streets in Vancouver.
“Everybody takes care of each other,” said Kelly. When her husband died, she said, “They were all at the service.”
Of course they were, responded Debbie Lowry, the daughter of that perfect hostess who was preparing coffee while preparing to give birth. “Ruby met my mom the day she went into labor with me,” Lowry said. “We have a bond that will never break. It’s a real family.”
And, like any family, it’s got some outrageous tales. Reporters are accustomed to sources wanting certain secrets to stay “off the record,” but rarely do they see ladies of a certain age going red-faced and insisting “Don’t write that down!” about exploits from many decades ago.
All of which seemed awfully tame compared to what goes on today. So I did write it down as Kathy Janssen White recalled how the neighborhood kids used to sneak over to Dairy Queen instead of going directly home after high school football games at Kiggins Bowl — assuming their parents had no way to know when the games were over. But those clever parents only had to notice increased traffic on the street, it turned out. The folks showed up at Dairy Queen “and we were so busted,” Janssen White said. “We got into so much trouble.”
One day when she was much younger than that — 5 years old — Janssen White discovered her warm, loving, busy neighborhood mysteriously empty. Her family wasn’t home. She went knocking on doors and realized everybody else was gone too. “I thought I was in the ‘Twilight Zone,’ ” Janssen White recalled.
Then her father drove up to collect her, and little Kathy learned she’d been forgotten in the general commotion to go on a neighborhood picnic in Hazel Dell. Nobody was keeping track of which kid was in which car; that’s the kind of community it was, she said.
It was also the kind of community where all the littlest neighborhood girls got organized into a birthday party dance troupe by 8-year-old authority figure Vicki Carr, a veteran of dance lessons. Those birthday dance showcases went on for years longer than they should have, Janssen White laughed, but in this accepting crowd, nobody learned to be self-conscious until much later.
Janssen White and Lowry compared notes about their fathers, both of whom worked for the city of Vancouver and both of whom drove orange public works trucks. That gave them roving surveillance stations, as their daughters knew well. Somehow it didn’t prevent them trying to duck down and hide in plain sight on the street, they laughed. “What were we thinking?”
Everybody regularly gathered at the biggest house in the neighborhood, the Shinnicks’, on Friday and Saturday nights to play games and sing songs. And when the whole neighborhood went dark during the historic Columbus Day Storm of 1962, the Shinnicks’ is where everybody gathered to transform a scary emergency into a delightful adventure — which lasted for four days.
That’s the sort of community building you don’t experience much anymore, Kelly said. She lives in Battle Ground now, with neighbors who are also close and friendly, but that appears to be more an exception than a rule these days.
“Everybody is busy. People don’t talk to each other. Everybody’s on their cellphone, everywhere you go,” she said.
Kathy Janssen White said she goes out of her way, every once in a while, to drive down V Street and remember how it used to be. “I have such happy memories of childhood there,” she said.
Carol Shinnick said: “Every mother in the neighborhood was my mother, and every father in the neighborhood was my father.”
