Growing up in Bend, Oregon
A kid in a lumber-boomtown during the 1970's and 80's
I wrote this song, titled “Little Sister,” about 10 years ago with my band KouseFly. It’s not about a real sibling though, it’s a figurative term of "Little Sister,” who can be any younger female friend who is dating a guy who perceivably is no good for her.
As for my childhood and my family, I moved to Bend in the mid-late 1970’s with my mother and sister. A culmination of many childhood experiences led to a life-long passion of songwriting and performing live music. For me, there were many motivation factors of wanting to be on the stage. Surprisingly, it wasn’t centralized on performing music. My interest drew from experiences that I had while traveling in my younger years, combined with the discovery of the songwriting medium to express those experiences.
My attraction to performing in front of an audience began when I was a child, growing up in the northwest during the late 70s and early 1980s. My mother, (real) little sister and I arrived in Bend, Oregon on a Trailways bus from Arizona that dropped us off at a bus station off of Greenwood and Bond Street. By the way, that’s the same location where Deschutes Brewery is located downtown today.
Both my mother and genetic father were teenage parents. I’m not aware of the whole story, but they broke up after the announcement of the pregnancy of me. The closest thing to a father figure I had were my uncles, my grandfather, and my sister’s dad, who my mom would eventually separate from the young marriage. We ended up going to Oregon to start a new life, where my aunt and uncle who lived with their family at a farm in Tumalo.
My mom was a young single parent working at the hospital as a nurse's aide. We lived in low-income housing next to the hospital, and I attended an elementary nearby. We often had food bank workers deliver non-perishables to our front door, where I’d also get some school supplies and jackets.
I was in the third grade when casted in my first school play at Juniper Elementary. I had a simple part to play an astronaut with the end of the role being a really animated little guy shouting, “energy, energy, ENERGY.”
I got a little carried away with my astronaut character, and did it with so much flare that all the kids around me laughed along with the parents in the audience. I discovered that I didn't really have stage fright, or maybe I simply converted that stage fright to the energy of the performance. Who knows?
I was a normal, average kid living in a small town. During the early 1980’s Bend, Oregon was primarily a lumbermill town, not so much a tourist/resort town it would become known as today.
Later I was introduced to music from my music classes at school, I played an issued violin for a little bit. I annoyed the heck out of my mom by playing the harmonica in my room. It wouldn’t be until I was an adult when I would start playing the guitar or attempt singing. I was also, what they call, a “free-range” kid. From a very young age (8-9) I was roaming through fields and climbing pilot butte and doing death defying leaps on my way down the cider sides.
The best way to describe the city is it was kind of a Norman Rockwell painting of a town, small shops and store owners knew all customers by name.
My mom started dating a man while my sister and I continued to attend elementary school, and things really started working out for them. They entertained the idea of moving in with each other. Shortly following that, my mom, sister, and I took up residence in his home off of Greenwood on 4th Street, located midtown, right behind one of the town’s supermarkets.
It was a nice little, old green painted house, and both of us kids each got our own room. I found a coin underneath the carpet in the closet that was dated 1938 - which means that home was really old and in terms of Bend - pretty much from the beginning. We lived next door to an older couple who ended up being lifelong family friends who also lived in a very old home.
My relationship with the man who would eventually become my stepdad, was a little standoffish on my part. Now, don’t get me wrong, he is a wonderful man and great dad. I was just a shy kid who was not sure how to bond with a father-figure. Up to this time, I never met my genetic father, who was apparently back in Arizona where we had left a few years earlier.
You’d think that I would’ve been calling my stepfather “dad,” but since we lived with him, and it was many years later until he and my mom got married, I grew accustomed to calling him by his first name and it stuck. I still call him by his first name.
He has a large family with a few brothers and a sister. They all welcomed us with wide open arms, and like out of nowhere, my sister and I had new aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents. Life was different in a much better way.