Reprinted from the WENATCHEE WORLD with permission from Wilfred
R. Woods, and submitted by Walt Thayer.
RIVERSIDE-You might be able slow Chet Cramer down a bit, but
you’ll have a hard time stopping him.
After 88 years filled with bruises, close calls and plain hard
work, Cramer is still going strong.
Cramer, one of Okanogan County’s old timers, has lived in
the county off and on since he came here from Montana 69 years
ago.
In his first few years here, Cramer was part of something that
revolutionized life in the nearly empty county–construction of the
old Great Northern rail line up the Okanogan Valley.
Working on the railroad was not an easy life for Cramer, who had
two close brushes with the great beyond.
One time, he recalls, he was hauling a wagonload of dynamite and
blasting powder from Brewster to Monse where track crews were
blowing a right of way through solid rock.
It was a cold, icy winter night, but the crews wanted the
explosives by the morning so they could get an early start.
Cramer and a companion had already left Brewster when the
companion decided to go back to get something he had forgotten.
Cramer pulled the team to the side of the road and agreed to
wait.
A tired Cramer fell asleep. But as he dozed, several burros came
up to the wagon, picking a fight with the rig’s mule team. The
mules bolted.
When Cramer woke, he was on top of a load of explosives being
wildly pulled down a dark, bumpy, icy road by a team of upset
mules.
Uncertain about how long it would be before his explosive cargo
blew him into shreds, Cramer desperately tried to slow the charging
animals.
‘I couldn’t leave,’ Cramer dryly recalls.
After about a mile, Cramer finally brought the team under
control to his indescribably relief.
‘It makes me laugh now, but it was no laughing matter
then,’ he says with a smile.
Cramer came even closer to death on that same construction job
when he was hauling gravel fill for the Monse tracks in a
horse-drawn, track-guided wagon. That time, he remembers hearing a
shout to clear the area and an explosion in the rocks ahead.
‘I hope to tell you I ran,’ he says.
Almost as soon as he got off the wagon, a huge, flying boulder
landed squarely on the driver’s seat.
As he tells the story, Cramer points to a stove in his
Riverside-area cabin.
‘It was about twice as big as that,’ Cramer says.
‘I look at those tracks every time I drive past them and
think ‘I had a close call there”, he says.
In those early years in the Okanogan, Cramer worked other jobs
as well as the railroad, doing a bit of everything, he says.
For a time, he hired himself out as a horse and buggy driver
carrying traveling salesmen on four-day runs around the county. The
circuit began at Pateros and stopped in Okanogan the first day,
Conconully the second, Winthrop on the third and finally back to
Pateros on the fourth day.
Cramer also worked as a fireman on the old riverboats that came
up the Columbia and Okanogan Rivers from Wenatchee to Okanogan
until the boats were replaced by the railroad.
For a time, he also drove horse-drawn road construction
equipment. He remembers some wood-block streets he helped build in
Wenatchee.
‘They didn’t last long,’ Cramer says. ‘Whenever
you’d get a good rain, the blocks would start floating
out.’
One time during those early years, Cramer recalls, he bought a
new saddle horse ‘that was supposed to be broke.’
His first try at mounting the horse was in front of a saloon on
First Avenue in Okanogan, the town’s main street in those early
days.
‘That horse threw me real nice right through the door into
the saloon,’ Cramer reminisces.
Through all his scrapes, bruises and close calls, Cramer kept
going strong until he finally had a serious injury working in
Seattle’s railroad yards in 1925.
It happened while he was up on a ladder working on a locomotive.
Because another worker had failed to post warning flags, a rail car
barreled through the area and knocked Cramer off the ladder. The
fall and impact broke his back in two places. That left him unable
to work for five years.
But Cramer finally did return to work, mostly as a mechanic for
various food processing plants throughout the Northwest. He tells
how during the busy season he would sometimes work two 72-hour
shifts in a week with one 12-hour break in between.
Cramer kept working until age 79 when he was finally forced into
retirement by a leg injury.
That might have slowed him down some, but it couldn’t stop
him. Along with his wife, Cramer has worked tending sheep for four
of the five years the couple has lived in Riverside. That work
ended this year only because the owner sold the herd.
But Cramer does not mind. That gives him more time for two of
the great loves of his life–hunting and fishing. This summer, the
Cramers took off in their mobile home to live for two months at one
of Cramer’s favorite fishing spots.
‘I do love my fishin”, Cramer says.
Of course there is work to be done now that cold weather is on
the way. Cramer has been busy lately hauling and cutting firewood
to fuel his wood stove during the winter months.
That’s okay with Cramer because it gives him just another
excuse to be outdoors. That’s important to Cramer, part of the
reason he lives in the country.
‘We like the country,’ says Frieda, his wife. ‘I
think that’s what has made Cheat live as long as he has. . .
good, fresh air.’
