FLEMING JAMES GILES, “Slim was born in King County, Washington on May 12, 1910. He married Helen Winifred Laizure in Washington on December 12, 1934. They lived in rural Okanogan County, Washington in 1940 where he was an engineer working for Bonneville Power Administration on dam construction. They had three children, Gordon, Peggy (Boscacci), and Carol. Slim died in Dutch Harbor, Alaska on February 8, 1971. He and Helen are buried side-by-side in the Seldovia City Cemetery, Plots #258 and #259.**
The Thundermug – by Peggy Giles Boscacci reprinted from the Seldovia Summer Gazette 2005
My father’s house in Seldovia, before the big earthquake and its eventual demolition, could easily have been described as an architect’s nightmare. From its outer appearance, it had the unassuming look and flavor of an old two-story Victorian, in need of a new coat of paint. It was the arrangement, though, of the interior that was so intriguing. You entered into the living room through a small porch that was always piled high with wet, muddy boots and lost jackets. The living room and dining room, where no one ever ate a meal, were separated by a large arched doorway. In the dining room, there was a long, antique, mirrored buffet, a very old round claw-footed oak table, and a four drawer file cabinet, all of which were stacked high with papers, receipts, bills, IOU’s and various other articles we were forbidden to touch.
From the dining room you stepped down a step into a long, narrow kitchen that housed a large, flat-topped oil-burning stove that always made the kitchen too hot and caused the windows to sweat. There were also two bedrooms and one bathroom, the only bathroom of the house, on the bottom floor. Th bathroom was just big enough to hold the necessities, yet it had three doors into it. There was one door from each bedroom and one from the kitchen. However, the only door into the back bedroom, my bedroom, was through the bathroom. If you were caught in the back bedroom when someone was using the bathroom, you were stuck there, unless you wanted to crawl out the bedroom window, which I did on occasion, and sometimes for no reason at all.
But the part of the house that I loved the most and where I spent many hours playing as a child, was the upstairs. My brother, father, and all of his fishing crew slept upstairs. The stairs to the upper floor were on the back porch off the kitchen, and were dark, cold and filled with the ghosts from the old Russian Orthodox graveyard next door. There was no light switch until you got all the way up the stairs and into the big main room. My brave, older brother used to con me into walking him upstairs with the promise of new comic books or magazines when we got up there. But once he got that light on and was safe from all the ghosts, the comic books would invariably turn out to be downstairs after all. I never did catch on.
When you got to the top of the stairs, you made a sharp right turn down a long hall, where the slpe of the roof met with the floor and you had to stoop as you walked so you wouldn’t hit your head. This area was loaded with old steamer trunks full of ancient clothes, discarded fishing gear, broken furniture and a wealth of neat junk for the active imagination of a young girl.
It was the big room at the end of the hall where my cousin, Marillyn and I spent so many hours playing. It was a room of about 200 square feet and its main function was to dry clothes. There were 4 or 5 clothes lines strung from one end to the other, an old double-bed mattress lay on the floor along one wall, a beat-up dresser sat neglected in one corner and a couple of old chairs completed the room’s eclectic ensemble. And sitting very quietly under one of the windows, minding its own business, was the object that was to get me into so much trouble…the thundermug. It was a large, white metal pot with a lid that resembled an innocent canner in appearance and size, and it sat there, bursting with its contents, patiently waiting for some industrious person to empty it.
That fateful day was bright, clear and warm, and Marillyn and I got an early start on building a super palace by hanging blankets over the clothes lines and moving the mattress into the middle of it all. The old steam trunks yielded a treasure-trove of old dresses and shoes, and we entered into our world of make-believe happy as clams.
But outside was the “real” world and “he” was sitting on his bike in front of the house on the boardwalk, talking with my brother and his friends. Marillyn spotted him first and began to tease me, “aren’t you going to come look out the window?” She was standing on a chair looking out the window that was just a little too high for both of us to comfortably see out of without being on our very tippy-toes.
It’s painful to be at the crossroads of childhood and puberty, but my pulse was quickening and I gave in a d headed for the window. “I can’t see very well, so I’ll just stand on this pot” KERSPLASH!! Amd ,u wpmderfi;. Fim si,,er came to a screeching, wet, rank, smelly halt. It took only one sniff to realize what the contents of that pot had been. Now my pulse was really quickening, only this time it was in fear and trepidation. Oh, why hadn’t the boys walked down those stairs and used the bathroom?
I didn’t realize Marillyn and I could move so fast. We grabbed anything and everything we could lay our hands on to try and mop and sop up the hideous mess before we got caught. Because of theslant of the floor in the room, it all seemed to be concentrated in the corner and I was amazed at how quickly it was being sopped up. For being such a full pot, it didn’t seem to be that much, in fact we had almost finished.
And then came the bloodcurdling scream from downstairs and I instinctively knew I’d had it. My sister was nearing hysteria. But how could she know what had happened? No one had come up the stairs or anything, and we were very quiet. It wasn’t until I raced down the stairs, through the kitchen and into the dining room where she stood, that I knew for sure my life was going to be a short one. The yellow-ornge, odoriferous liquid had leaked through the ceiling and was now running down the walls in the corner of the room, covering everything in its path. All of my father’s important papers, receipts, bills, and everything in his filing cabinet were forever streaked, stained and “scented.”
Frantically, all of us grabbed Lysol, Pine-sol, soap and water, and every manner of disinfectant, and tried to scrub and deodoriz the wall, floor and filing cabinet, and dry out the smeared bills and receipts before my father came home Nothing, however, was helping to alleviate the odor that was now permeating the entire house and settling into its pores. We opened all the doors and windows and even threw my sister’s expensive perfume all over the walls, but nothing was working and panic was setting in. My chicken cousin opted for the safety of her own home and left me with the misery of facing “Uncle Flem” by myself. I didn’t have long to wait!
My father was famous in Seldovia for his unique and imaginative use of swear words that he strung out in long phrases, and his ability to bellow these unique phrases so they could be hear across the entire bay of this quiet fishing village. And now those words that roared from my father’s mouth and echoed off the mountains were being aimed at me, and my knees trembled and my heart nearly stopped.
It took many days and lots of fresh air and room deodorizers before my father saw any humor in the situation, and allowed me to stay for the remainder of the summer. But, the upstairs thundermug was forever banned to a spot in his workshop
Author’s aside: As children, my brother, sister and I spent our summers fishing with my father. His house was originally located approximately where the now-existing boat haul-out is. In fact, he had the first boat haul-out in Seldovia in that location. The 1964 earthquake changed all of that and his house was eventually torn down in the reconstruction of Seldovia.