Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [61]
THERE WAS ANOTHER SIDE EFFECT to my father’s newfound sobriety: He became less agitated about traveling all the time. He now started staying put in one place longer than a few weeks. This was fine with Bessie. She had long been weary from all the migrations. She wanted a home and possessions, like the ones her sisters had back in Utah. She also wanted to see what it would be like for the boys to have a stable life—to spend a whole grade year in the same school and be able to develop some uninterrupted friendships. This became a dream for my mother.
In 1948, my family moved to Portland, Oregon, and set up residence at a housing project just north of the city. Frank had come up with an idea for a publishing venture: He would collect all the various statutes and regulations regarding the construction and development of residential and commercial property in the city of Portland and the outlying county of Multnomah, rewrite them into a readable language, and then publish them in a handy guide, full of advertising from contractors, builders, and architects. The publication would be distributed by the advertisers to their clients, and by the city and county’s official licensing departments to prospective developers and builders. The idea attracted advertisers quickly, and Frank was raising hundreds of dollars in revenue each week—more steady income than the family had ever seen. After he accumulated several thousand dollars, Frank told Bessie it was time to move on again and try the same idea in another town. They could make a lot of money real fast this way, he said.
It was one of those times that Bessie Gilmore put her foot down. “No,” she said. “You could actually do this book. You have everything you need to make it work. You have advertisers who trust you, you have the city’s endorsement, and you have the skill. This is your best idea, Frank, and it is your creation. It doesn’t have to be something you do just once: You could publish it every year or every other year and make good, regular money with it. We could finally have a home. If you do this book legitimately here, I’ll help you with it, and if you want to take it to other places later, I’ll support you in that too. But if you hundred-percent on this one and run off with the money so that none of us can ever come back, then I may as well stay here with the boys. I’m tired of all the running.”
Frank didn’t like ultimatums, but he did like Bessie’s idea of making the book an annual event. In 1949 Frank Gilmore published his first copy of the Building Codes Digest and, with the money he raised, made the down payment on a small house on Crystal Springs Boulevard, in southeast Portland. It wasn’t much of a home: two bedrooms, small yard, on the city’s industrial fringes—more a wasteland than a neighborhood. Not quite the big, handsome house that Bessie dreamed of, but she realized that Frank was still too skittish for anything that ambitious. Frank and Bessie put a fence around the yard, bought a dog, and bought a brand-new Pontiac. They put the boys in school, and come Christmas time, they put up a tree and bought a Nativity scene. It was my family’s first real home, after a decade of marriage and three children, and it was the closest to a conventionally happy time they would ever know.
Frank’s son Robert was now an army lieutenant, stationed at Ft. Lewis, one hundred and fifty miles away, near Tacoma, Washington. Robert now had a wife of his own and three children—two girls and a boy. He started bringing his family down every couple of weeks to visit his father’s family, and sometimes made the trip alone. Robert liked the changes he saw taking place in his father. The two of them were getting along better these days. They could talk to each other for more than ten minutes without the bitter recriminations and suspicions of a few