Teep

Three acres of flax

Mother made me go on to high school. Nobody else in the family went past eighth grade except Ruthie, and Ruthie graduated at seventeen and married.

Why me, out of all of them? That's a tough question to answer. I'm writing now, and I think I'll probably write that one. I was the youngest boy. I worked in the house because she said there were already two guys outside. But I'm not sure. I was very much like the Kjemhus family.

I was the academic one. Everybody in the whole neighborhood knew it.

[Bev put it to him that his mother saw the same thing in him, and—unable to simply let him be, the way she thought a farming family couldn't—pushed him toward it instead. "Same thing," he said.]

Going to high school meant moving to town, fourteen miles away, and renting a bedroom in somebody's home. In the ninth grade.

I paid for it myself. Dad gave me three acres of virgin land for the summer, and he covered the fuel and the seed in return for my work.

Three acres. Virgin soil, which is where you put flax, and it was incredibly productive. Flax normally sold for six or seven dollars a bushel. That year it went to sixteen.

I went to high school with a little over fourteen hundred dollars. In today's money that's about thirty-nine thousand. I went back and went on the internet to find out what the average yield was.

It really was a real good deal.

From then on I paid my own doctor bills, my own dental bills, my own rent. I bought my own clothing. I was a man on my own at fifteen.

Nine years old, and the rock

His father farmed a hundred and sixty acres a mile from the house. This is that field.

That hundred and sixty acres is the field I was working the spring I was nine years old, the year Dad and I put in all that wheat.

I was running a tractor pulling a thirty-seven-foot harrow. When a rock came up, you had to lift a section of the harrow to let it pass under, and I wasn't strong enough to lift a section. And the rock was too big to kick out.

So I'd leave the tractor going down the field. Jump off. Run around the back side of that harrow, get behind it, lift the thing up, stumbling along holding it—and when the rock passed out under it, I'd drop it and run like—

Well, that's the field!

The double-breasted suit

So then Dad came to town—I was in my junior year, in November, end of October or November—and came into the restaurant, and he said, "How do you like school?" because he knew I hated it with a passion.

"Dad, I really don't like it." And I told him the principal had wanted to throw me down the staircase that day.

So we went to church one Sunday, and this was the first snowstorm of the year. All I had on was a double-breasted suit, and my ride was on Highway 2, which would be sixty or seventy miles away. So Dad drove me down there, and we waited until we saw the car come by that I knew was going to be there. I got out of Dad's car and into theirs.

[Carl, hearing the road named: "The same Highway 2 that we take over to Glacier National Park, right here?" US-2 runs from North Dakota across Montana and through the Idaho panhandle, past the place where they were sitting—so the road that carried him away from home in 1950 runs past the porch he told the story on. The sixty or seventy miles is Pete's, and measures from the farm to where he met his ride.

Carl adds that the same road runs past Amoth Lane in Idaho, where Walter Amoth—Martin's son, and Albert's brother—lived; Carl stayed with him on his first trip out, at seventeen. Pete did not stop in Idaho in 1950, and Carl is not sure Walter, Albert or their brother Henry had moved there yet.]

We always wore engineering boots at home, but all I had was dress shoes, leaving in a dress suit.

Mother raised hell the whole way.

Dad let me go because he knew that whatever I tried, I'd be okay at. He really did know that. He never had any doubt about it.

The men in the car were from my hometown, headed out to California. I'd just asked them if I could go, and they'd said sure, if you'll be on Highway 2 at such-and-such a time.

In Montana we stopped at the biggest bull-shipping center in the state and had a steak dinner where the steaks hung from the ceiling with the green mold on them. And I bought a pair of Levi's and a western shirt.

Harbor Lights

There was another young man with us, a nephew of one of these guys, older than me. We shared a room in Seattle that night. The men had left some whiskey and we got into it—he did, mostly; I wasn't big on whiskey.

"Harbor Lights" was new that year and it was playing. And I sat there looking down over the harbor and the harbor lights.

Such a soulful song. God, I remember that just detail by detail to this day.

Portland

I got off in Seattle and took a bus down to Portland. We'd come down through the Yakima Valley.

Why Portland? It was a pretty-sounding name.

They wouldn't hire me there. You had to either be in school or have graduated, and I was neither. So I went to the bar where they had the one-armed bandits and sat on a stool and watched the men come in and work those machines. When one of them gave up and walked away, I'd go over and put my silver dollars in.

I actually paid my way doing that.

One night I was riding home from the bar and the man sitting next to me had a Masonic ring on. I spoke to him—I'm not bashful. I told him my dad was a Scottish Rite Mason.

He wanted to know what I was doing out there, because I obviously looked young, and worse than that. So I told him the lines were all down back home and Dad wanted me home and I didn't know what I was going to do.

He said, "Do you have enough money?"

I said yes.

He said, "If you don't have enough money, here's my card. Just call me. I'll give you the money to get home."

I'd been in Portland a couple of months.

The girl in the movie theater

I saw Amalene in a movie theater in Memphis in January of 1952. I was still in A school.

God, she was beautiful.

I had a girl with me, of course. And she was on a blind date with somebody else. She wanted to sit by me and I wanted to sit by her, and that naturally screws up everything—you do all the wrong things.

Afterward we went to Walgreens, four of us in a booth, and she sat directly in front of me. The girl I was with—I have no idea who she was. No idea. She probably was nice-looking. I don't have any recollection of her at all.

We didn't know each other at all. I never got to talk to her.

Moffett

The next week Amalene went home to Mississippi by bus, which is how she traveled.

I found this out years later: that weekend she told her parents she'd found the man she was going to marry.

They said, "Oh, what's his name?"

She had no idea. So she made one up. Moffett.

She didn't know my name, but she was going to marry me. That part wasn't a lie.

From what I'd overheard I knew she'd go to the YWCA, because girls were highly supervised in those days. So every time I had enough money for liberty I went looking for her. Torgy Torgerson had bought an old Buick and did the driving.

I don't think I ever went without a date. I'd leave the girl in the car and run in to see if Amalene was there.

Never made any of them mad at me.

I found her in March. January, February, March.

I asked if I could call on her sometime—literally, because I still didn't know her name. I got her address and how to get to her place. She lived with about six or seven girls in a house with a widowed lady.

Three months later I gave her a ring. Three months after that we were married.

The watch

There was a watch that belonged to my grandfather, Carl Amoth.

It went to Guy, because Guy was the eldest son. And before he died, Guy sent it to me—to give to my son.

Not because I was the next oldest. Because I named my son after his father.

And the two of them had wanted to adopt me, once, and I'd had a close relationship there.

So it came from Carl, to Guy, to me, to Carl.

It's really a nice circuit when you think about how that happened, and why it was sent to me to give to my son.

There's a lot of history behind that watch.

The recordings end here. At the close of the Idaho session in 2011 Pete named what he would take up next—"The McGraw-Edison era"—and they did carry on, two years later at the beach house, but never reached it. Everything above comes from those two recordings.

Carl is adding what he remembers of the rest: the McGraw-Edison years, the moves from town to town, the small anecdotes a son keeps. Those will go in a section of their own, under his name, so that this part stays what the subtitle says it is.

Recorded by Carl and Bev Amoth: Idaho, August 25, 2011, and the Outer Banks, North Carolina, October 7, 2013. Transcribed from the audio by Gemini. Transcript corrected, and this account assembled and edited, by Carl Amoth in September 2026, with Claude. The editorial decisions are Carl's; the words are his father's.