Publisher's Synopsis
In Flunking the First Grade and Shooting Trout, Les Flake shares his memories and adventures from childhood through young adulthood. Les left Los Angeles at 5 years old in 1946 when his Dad, Horace, purchased a 520-acre farm a few miles north of the small town of Bend, Oregon, for approximately $16,000. His mother, Dolores, thought Horace was joking about the farmhouse having no plumbing system and no electricity. It was no joke! Through the next 9 years his parents, Les, three sisters, and a brother navigated financial poverty and lived rich lives on a farm characterized more by lava rock outcroppings, big sagebrush, and juniper trees than by farm fields. Tumalo Grade School, shooting trout in the Swalley Canal, and an attack by a great horned owl are a part of those memoirs. Les and family eventually moved to Bend, Oregon, where Les writes of Bend Junior High School (1955-1957), first dances, popular songs, trout fishing, and more. His dad's dreams of making a living with a salmon trawler soon took the Flake family to the Coos Bay-North Bend area in the late spring of 1957. Les writes of the beautiful Oregon coast, a 30-foot salmon trawler, Fritz the seaman, dangers on the ocean, a boathouse home in Charleston, Marshfield High, dances, river rope swings, striped bass, dating, campouts, and so many other memories. After highs school, it was off to Brigham Young University and more memories such as a night in jail, death of Les's father, Arizona Club dances (too much fun), great advice from a professor, and Nevada Test Site adventures. The book ends with Les dating and marrying Marcia Allen and beginning Ph.D. studies in Zoology at Washington State University. Readers will be transported to a simpler time without computers and cell phones but nonetheless, filled with wonderful adventures.
