Wilbur and Denver

My mother's maiden name was Wilbur and she lived in Denver. I do some exploring.

Aug 25, 2024

This week I’m trying something unusual. My mother, Pearl Wilbur Pollak, used to live in Denver. North Portland has a Wilbur Avenue and a Denver Avenue. I took these two cues to do some exploring on these two streets.

But first,

Check in

When I started writing Becoming two years and 106 postings ago, I had the idea of helping people. I’m getting on in years and I’ve learned some things about living that I wanted to share.

But I am not really dispensing wisdom. For one thing, I don’t know any more than anyone else. I’ve also discovered that every other human is as wise as I am, just in different ways.

So I’m not here to tell anyone how to live. I just remind my readers that there are certain things that matter, like silence and noticing, caring and forgiving, shadows that you can walk into and lose yourself in. I like the word “authentic” but am afraid of overusing it.

I want folks to be fulfilled. I think happiness is inextricably bound with creativity, so I urge everyone to make things: meals, one-act plays, gardens, linen aprons, music, origami.

But mostly, fulfillment is love. I want everyone to be in love all the time: in love with life, with family, with friends, with strangers. With nature. With darkness and grief. With wholeness and hope.

We are all bound together, lurching through life on the broken pavement of this planet. We can make it. Hold my hand. Trust Spirit. Trust love, the only language of the Universe.

Wilbur

I may have written about my mother before, but her story is worth repeating.

Pearl Augusta Wilbur tells that she was born in a tent on the Western Colorado frontier in 1914. When she was still small, her father took the money out of the sugar tin and absconded, leaving her mother, Frances, with five children. The family was homeless for many years, living in a wagon (they slept underneath it) with a horse and a cow. Then someone stole the cow.

When Pearl was 11, her mother brought her and her siblings to an orphanage in Denver. The child weighed 40 pounds.

She lived and thrived in the orphanage through high school, where she excelled at academics and was a hit in the school play. After graduation, she went to nursing school. The head of the orphanage “lent” her the tuition, then was astounded when she paid him back.

Her first nursing job was in Cripple Creek, Colo., which she says was not a romantic posting at all. She made it to San Francisco and was working at the University of California SF hospital when WWII broke out. She enlisted in the Army and spent four years in England. She met my father, Adam Pollak, there.

She must have seen unbelievable carnage. Unsurprisingly, she never talked about it.

Pearl Wilbur as an Army nurse. All nurses were commissioned as second lieutenants so the soldiers would defer to them.

She had four children, divorced my father for being unfaithful, and became certified as a nurse anesthetist, which paid a bit better. Nurses were still vastly underrated and underpaid during her career. She never remarried and had few friends until, while living in Portland, she circumnavigated Mount Hood with a group of other seniors, 10 miles at a time, on a route that no longer exists. One by one, the dear friends she met on those excursions died before she did.

She died in 2011 at the age of 97.

Wilbur Avenue

Last week, in a posting about Ghost Streets, I wrote that all the north-south streets in Portland were numbered avenues. This is not true of North Portland, however. This “quadrant” contains land on the east side of the Willamette River that is west of First Avenue. The dividing line between Northeast and North is North Williams Avenue.

So there are no numbered streets in North Portland. The east-west streets are “streets” and the north-south streets are “avenues.” Thus, Wilbur Avenue, although this old street marking says “street.”

As I noted last week, several streets disappeared during the great renaming of 1931-33. Other have new names. Patton became North Interstate. And in Southwest, Figaro became Boundary Street.

Reminders of Pearl

My mother was devoted to us children while we were growing up, but once we were on our own she insisted that we call her “Pearl” instead of “Mom.” Even though she is gone, my brothers and sister still refer to her as Pearl. I try to call her Mom or Mother.

About Wilbur Street: It does remind me of Mom in some ways. The houses are for the most part modest, as she was.

Though there is some new construction, most houses on Wilbur Avenue are small and, often, Cape Cod designs. Fran Gardner photo

A few of these houses were even painted the same color as the house she had built for us in Bloomington, Minn., in 1959. I hated the color, which reminded me of canned green beans, which I was forced to finish as a part of the school lunch. We had real food for lunch and were expected to eat everything.

We lived in that house for five years before we moved to Sioux Falls.

The house on the left is on Wilbur Avenue; the split level is the one Mom built in Bloomington, Minn., in 1959. The siding is asphalt shakes that have never been removed or painted. Both houses are the same color but the camera temperature is different.

Neighbors

“It’s a great street. I love it!” said Dorothy, whom I found working in her yard about a block from Arbor Lodge Park.

A few blocks away, Jessica agreed: “We have excellent neighbors on the street,” she said. Her cat, Canelo, she said, is the king on the neighborhood cats. Such a king, he refused to sit still so I could take his picture.

In this page from the 2008 Thomas Guide, north is to the right, not the top. I miss map books like the Thomas guides. They provided a lot more context than those tiny map apps on your smart phone.

North Wilbur Avenue runs from Killingsworth north to Lombard. It runs between Greeley and Denver, then reappears for a few blocks at the northern edge of the city, up by Columbia Boulevard. This second segment is a short dead-end street. A sidewalk leads from the dead end to Columbia. On the other side of that street, train tracks and a little more Wilbur Avenue with some industrial businesses and a scary sign that warns “Homeland Security Regulated Facility.”

I didn’t want to go on that property, anyway. Fran Gardner photo

An anonymous industrial building on the northernmost part of Wilbur Avenue. Fran Gardner photo

Denver

Denver Avenue is the beating artery of the Kenton neighborhood, north of Arbor Lodge, where most of Wilbur is. It’s guarded by an iconic statue of Paul Bunyan.

This traditionally working-class neighborhood is gentrifying, with sparkling new businesses and a small branch of the Multnomah County Library. Last week, I attended the Kenton Street Fair. It was quite an affair, with dozens of booths and crowds of thousands.

North Denver Avenue was closed off for the Kenton Street Fair on August 18, 2024. These young dancers were part of the crowd. Fran Gardner photo

Street fair poems

While I was at the Kenton Street Fair, I put on my “Let me write you a poem: it’s free!” placard. Several people asked me to write for them. These are some of the poems.

Danny is working toward being a writer and an electrical engineer