A Fever in the Heart: And Other True Cases (2 page)

Seal had no choice but to bring her back to reality with firm words. "I wasn't too gentle or too courteous," he recalled, "but I said, Get in there and call an ambulance,' and so she did." While the young woman was in the house, Rowland Seal walked along the side of the thin wire fence separating the apartment house property from the lawn next door. The fence was more of a psychological barrier than a physical one, not much more than chicken wire. Seal felt the hairs prickle at the back of his neck. It was still dark but he could see that it was not a dog at all but a man who lay on his back in an open gate between the area where the people next door parked their cars and the side yard of their house. The man lay in the shadows and it was so dark near the gate that at first Seal could see only a white shirt and a white face. But there was more.

He could make out scarlet stains blood?on the man's face. He couldn't be sure who it was, but it was a big man. That and the blood were all he could see for certain. Peering from his side of the fence, Seal was unable to get any closer than five or six feet from the body. He forced himself to conquer his shock and headed back to the sidewalk. The young woman had emerged from her house again and this time two small children and a large dog trailed after her. Leaving the children and dog on the porch, she ran back to the body crying, "Oh, my God, he's dead. He's been shot. My God. He's shot. He's dead...." Rowland Seal saw that the woman was getting more and more frantic, and he didn't want the kids to catch her hysteria. He instructed her very carefully to take the children into the house and to call the police. For a moment the scene on the porch seemed eternal, a frozen tableau, until the slender, dark-haired woman turned and headed into the house. "And then," Seal remembered, "a police officer came and then another one and then another one. When the third one came, I thought everything was under control, and I gave my name and address and told him I was going duck hunting and he could find me at my address." Rowland Seal was nothing if not pragmatic, he went ahead with the day he had planned. He could do nothing to help the man who lay in the snow. Nor could he help the woman. The police would take care of it. A shaken Dale Soost went ahead with his day too.

And so did Gerda Lenberg. She had no idea at all that anything earthshaking had occurred in the dark hours between Friday night and Saturday morning. It wasn't until Sunday morning when she read the paper that she looked up and said slowly, "Oh, my lord, that wasn't firecrackers at all...." It never should have ended the way it did.

There are some people whom destiny smiles upon, human beings blessed with wonderfully classic good looks, intelligence, and talents and skills that far surpass the average people who grow up surrounded by love and high hopes. In Yakima, Washington, in that window of time in the 1 970s, there were four people like that, an oddly assembled quartet of players whose lives would grow so intertwined and hopelessly entangled that they could never seem to pull apart. The very "oxygen" of their freedom to live and breathe was soon compromised by their closeness. The obsessive desire of one player damned the happiness of the other three forever. Possibly the end of the game had been fated decades before, certain choices each of them made had brought them to this place. Olive Morgan Blankenbaker was one of four daughters born to Esther and Ray Morgan, who named all their girls somewhat whimsically (and horticulturally): Hazel, Fern, Olive, and Iris. Their maternal grandfather, Ernst Skarstedt, was a writer of some note in his native Sweden and his intelligence and sensitivity came through undiluted to his descendants. Olive was born in 1910 near Wapato in Yakima County.

She would spend all of her working years in the court systems of Washington. She began as a court secretary, but her true goal was to be a court reporter. This was long before the era of stenotype machines or computer disks. Court reporters wrote in beautifully executed script. It was also long before television was anything more than a scientific phenomenon demonstrated at world's fairs. Radios were the home entertainment in vogue when Olive was a young woman in her twenties.

Huge console radios with shiny mahogany cabinets and ornately carved facades were the status symbols of the thirties. Franklin D.

Roosevelt had his "fireside chats" over the radio, kids listened to "Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy," and "The Lone Ranger," and dance bands from a ballroom "high atop" some hotel far away enchanted late-night listeners. Olive Morgan met Ned Blankenbaker in Yakima where he worked as a radio salesman in a radio and musical instrument store.

She was a slender, beautiful young woman with marcelled curls and a sweet smile. Ned always seemed to be standing outside the store to catch a little sun just when Olive came walking downtown on her way to lunch.

He was a short, stocky man with thick wavy hair and interesting eyes.

Those eyes followed Olive as she passed by, and she knew it. He would stand on his tiptoes to make himself look taller when Olive walked by.

"Some other girls I knew knew him and they introduced us," Olive says.

"I liked him the moment I met him." It wasn't long before Ned and Olive began to talk, and then he asked her to go dancing. That's what all the young people did then. There were dance halls with lanterns swaying in the wind, and everyone tried to emulate Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

"Ned was a great dancer," Olive remembers. "We'd go out to Bock's Cafe where you could dance. It was just up the street from the music store.

We knew everyone." Songs like "Blue Moon" and "Anything Goes" were popular. FDR was in his first term in office and Social Security had just been voted in. The night before Olive Morgan married Ned Blankenbaker on September 25, 1935, Joe Louis took away Max Boer's heavyweight crown. Huey Long had been assassinated in Louisiana two weeks before, and war clouds were lowering in Europe. But all that was so far away. Yakima, in the center of Washington State, was seemingly insulated from the world outside. Olive was twenty-five years old when she married Ned, and she expected her marriage would last forever. Ned and Olive Blankenbaker were married seven years before they had their only child. Morris Ray Blankenbaker was born on December 16, 1942.

Thirty-two-year-old Olive was transfixed with love for this sturdy baby boy who made her holiday season the best she had ever had. As it almost always is, it was a "White Christmas" in Yakima.

Although the world was at war and everything was rationed, everything in Olive's life at that moment was perfect. A half-century later, looking back she would ask, "Why should it be that way? When people are so happy, why does it all have to disappear?" For Olive's wonderful world did disappear. Somehow, the Blankenbaker marriage didn't work very well after Morris was born. In all, Olive and Ned were married nine years, Morris was barely two when Olive was left to raise him alone. Over the years, his father would remain a part of Morris's life and pay regular child support, but Ned fathered two more sons morris's half brothers, Mike and Charles. It was Olive who was always there for Morris Blankenbaker. Her love for him was so unselfish that she encouraged him to spend time with his father and his younger brothers. They would become an important part of his life. Olive could easily have smothered Morris and made him a mama's boy, but she didn't. Morris was a natural athlete, a kid who was always running and leaping and playing ball. He had plenty of scrapes, bruises, and sprains, but Olive just sighed and bound up his wounds. She bit her lip when she felt she was about to ask him to give up the sports he adored. She knew it wouldn't do any good, anyway. Olive signed up for a correspondence course to learn how to use the stenotype machine. She and Morris were living with her family in Wapato, and she managed to combine her studying with camping trips with her son. "I'd fix a big pot of stew and put it over the campfire, while Morris and his two friends indian boys from the Wapato Reserva tionwould go exploring in the forest. They could take the dog and have fun and I could study." In the meantime, Olive was working as a court reporter, using Gregg shorthand. She sat through everything from divorces to murder trials, taking down all the proceedings in her fine hand. She worked in the Yakima County Superior Court, and then transferred over to Federal Court in Seattle, where Federal Judge Bowen, an elderly man who disliked change, was delighted to discover that there was still one court reporter in the Seattle area who could transcribe courtroom proceedings with a pen. "When he saw me writing with a pen on a notebook, he set up a whole bunch of proceedings for me to cover. He hated those little black machines," Olive remembered. "I never told him that I could write with one of those little black machines. We went all up and down the Washington coast from Bellingham to Vancouver hearing cases." Judge Bowen was ninety-three and still on the bench when he asked Olive if she would consider working in Yakima, and of course she agreed readily. That was home. She and Morris moved back into her mother's house just outside town, and Olive worked days and evenings to keep up with the punishing schedule of cases that were filed into Judge Bowen's court. Morris always came home for lunch to his Grandmother Morgan's house. "You could see him coming a block away running," Olive said. "And he took her picket fence with a high jump every day. My mother loved to see that boy eat." Morris Blankenbaker was a handsome child with tight blond curls and brown eyes. When he was five, he posed proudly for his mother's Brownie camera in his cowboy shirt, tooled belt with the silver buckle, and western boots. He was a Cub Scout, and into more athletic events with every year. He went out for tumbling and scrambled up to the top of the pyramid of bodies. "He broke his arm, of course," Olive recalled. "That was Morris"

One summer, when Morris was seven, Olive took him for an automobile trip all across Canada. "We stopped wherever there was a swimming pool," she said. "Even at seven, he swam like a fish, and he could dive off the high board, doing somersaults in the air. People used to gather around to watch him " Olive was running her own kind of marathon in the Yakima Superior Court. "I kept up for a long time, but I finally had to quit," she said. "I was just about breaking down, because I was working for the most effective Judge, and everyone was filing their cases in his court."

As common as it is in the 1990s, a single mother raising a son was a rarity in the 1940s. There were fathers who were away during the war certainly, but divorced mothers were far from the norm and it wasn't easy for Olive. She kept trying to find a job that would give her more time with Morris. She moved to Vancouver, Washington, where Morris went to Fort Vancouver High School. Later, they moved to Spokane, "... to a big court with a lot of cases." Back in Yakima again, Morris went to Washington Junior High and then Davis High School. He was the golden boy who could do anything. He was on the "A" squad of the track, baseball, football, and wrestling teams. He played the trombone and the French horn, marching in the Davis High band, carrying the huge horn as lightly **skip**as a feather. His mother remembers the band triumphantly playing "Bonaparte's Retreat" as they marched down the field. It hardly seemed possible that one kid could participate in so many activities but Morris did. He played baseball, ran track, and wrestled, and he was the star fullback on the football squad. The crowd shouted his name again and again as he made touchdowns. "MORRIS BLANK-ENBAKER! AIOR-RIS BLANK-EN-BAKER!" In the summertime, Morris worked as a lifeguard in Yakima parks.

From his teens well into his twenties, he always had an audience of adoring girls who carefully spread their towels out so they would be directly in his line of vision. He appreciated the view, but Morris didn't date much. He scarcely had time. In the end, there was only one girl he ever went steady with. Only one girl he ever really loved.

Jerilee. Jerilee Karlberg.

One of Morris's coaches at Davis High School during his senior year in 1961 was Talmadge Glynn Moore. Of course, nobody called Moore by his full name, and very few people called him "Glynn", everyone knew him by "Gabby." Morris had known Gabby since he and Olive came back to Yakima in the midfiftiesever since junior high. He figured Gabby had coached him in about every sport there was at one time or another: wrestling, football, track. Gabby was almost exactly nine years Morris's senior.

Morris's birthday was on December 16, and Gabby's was on the twenty-first. But when Morris was a schoolboy, Gabby was a grown man, married with a family, and their worlds were completely different.

Morris always called Gabby "Coach", he always would, even after he too was an adult. When Morris graduated from Davis High in 1961, he took home just about every athletic honor. He received the Traub Blocking and Tackling trophy, and he was voted "Best Athlete of the Year." Best of all, Morris was offered a four-year football scholarship to Washington State University in Pullman. All he had to do was keep his grades up and do what came naturally as an athlete. Olive was living and working in Spokane then, and Morris visited on holidays and weekends when he didn't have a game. Morris was playing right halfback for the Washington State Cougars. His mother didn't have the time or money to get to his games, but she did manage to get to Spokane to watch him play once. "That was when Washington State played the University of Washington," Olive said.

"They played in Spokane at *The names of some individuals in the book have been changed. Such names are indicated by an asterisk (*) the first time each appears in the narrative. night under the lights. I got to go to that game. It was so terribly cold. We were wrapped up in blankets with long underwear and everything. I even remember the date it was November twenty-fourth, 1962. It was a real good game, and he played all the way through. l was so proud of him," Olive remembered. "He was so handsome and they kept shouting Morris Blankenbaker! Morris Blankenbaker!"

" Even so, for the first time in his athletic career, there were other halfbacks at Washington State University who made the starting lineup more often than Morris did. He was 5'11", tall pounds.