Autobiography of Clarence Palmer, Jr.

February 8th, 1924, I was born the fifth child of Clarence and Lena Palmer. Mabel, George and Robert preceded me into the family and Portia came a couple of years later. We lived on a farm at Melba, Idaho. It was about a mile from town and we could walk to school. The grade school was a four room school with two grades in each room. We moved from the farm at Nampa when I was in the 7th grade where I attended Junior and Senior High Schools. At Melba my teachers were Mrs. McKimmey, 1st and 2nd grades, Miss Gray, 3rd and 4th grades, Mrs. DuValle, 5th and 6th grades and I can’t remember the name of the 7th grade teacher at Melba.

We attended the Melba Friends Church where, at the age of eleven, in a revival meeting with Fred Baker and Ed Harmon as the speakers, I confessed my sinful nature and asked Jesus Christ to come and make me a new person. It was a very important part of my life then and still is. It was at the Friends Church that I made up my mind never to smoke or drink alcohol. A woman from the WCTU came to the church and gave a demonstration of what tobacco and alcohol would do to my body as she collected the nicotine from one cigarette and put in on a birds’ tongue and it died. Then she poured a bottle of whiskey on an egg and it looked like she had fried it. I vowed to never use either at that time and it was a good decision. I thank God for Christian men and women that cared in that small Friends Church. My Dad received Jesus into his life in answer to my mothers’ prayers at the same time I and the rest of the family still at home did . Though there was a depression at the time, we always had plenty to eat, and warm clothes to wear.

At Nampa we lived three or four blocks from the High School and I had the job of milking a couple cows every day. It was good for me to have responsibility. Weeding the garden and mowing the lawn was a part of my duties around home too.

I developed an interest in photography while in High School and was one of the photographers on the annual staff. I pestered Art French, photo shop owner, until in self defense, he gave me a job making the 4 x 6 enlargements that he gave free with every roll of fill developed. In high school I was in the camera club and won a few photo contests the club sponsored. I made my first darkroom up stairs in the garage and made an enlarger from an old camera with the help of my brother -in-law, Charles Ommen who welded the enlarger stand. It worked really well.

On graduating from Nampa High School in 1942, I went to Portland to go to Cascade College. To pay my way I got a job at Swifts Packing Plant first and then a job in Vancouver Wa.. Working as a carpenter’s helper building houses for the ship yard workers. When school started I had to quit, but needing money to pay for schooling, I got a night shift job at Commercial Iron Works where they taught me how to weld an work with a ship fitter tacking the parts in place so a jorneyman welder could weld them in. I was drafted into the army in June 1943 and took my basic training at Kearns, Utah. From there I was sent to El Paso, TX as a clerk typist in the medics attached to the air force for a few months. After that they sent me to Mitchell field at Long Island in New York. So they sent me up there for several months. Then we went to Fort Dix to get ready to go over seas , but they changed their orders and sent us back to Mitchell Field.

Jeanne, my wife now, and I had been writing to each other and when they gave me a furlough to go home for a couple weeks, I wrote to her in Portland and said that if she loved me to meet me at my sister, Mabel’s in Nampa, Idaho. When I got there, Jeanne and Mabel were at the train depot to meet me. We went on a little trip to Boise with Mabel and Charles and ,looking n a jewelers window at wedding rings, I asked Jeanne if she would wear one of those rings if I got it for her. I was broke so she loaned me the money and we bought the rings for $24.00. We then phoned her mother and told her we were getting married. It was a short notice, but her mother had a full church wedding at the Willamette Blvd Church in less than a week. Jeanne’s brother, Don, paid for a ticket to to N.Y. so Jeanne could go with me, and we found a room with a hot plate for a stove and a bath room shared with a couple of other couples. We were there for about 6 months, Jeanne working in a department store, and I was typing a the air base. They shipped me out to Alamogordo, New Mexico so Jeanne had to go home, with our first son, Gary, on the way. The soldiers were good to her and helped her with the suitcases.

I got a delay en route to move from Alamogordo to Salina AAF base at the time Gary was to be born and so I was there when he came. I then had to go to Salina Kansas to wait to be discharged from the Army Air Force since the war was over. They sent me back to Fort Lewis Washington, to be discharged in the summer of 1945.

I got a job at sawyers making a picture postcard prints for a while and then another job working in the camera department at Fred Meyers on 6th avenue in Portland. That fall I decided to take advantage of my GI education at Pacific College in Newberg, Oregon. We lived in a veteran’s village there for a while until my dad let us rent the upstairs of a house he built on River Street. I got a job at Riley Studio, while going to college and at the same time was taking a correspondence course in photography with New York institute of Photography. When I graduated from Pacific College in 1949 with a BS degree in chemistry, we moved to Corvallis where I attended Oregon State College for two years, majoring in industrial administration. While working as a carpenter, I was offered a job with Gillam’s Camera Shop as a Portrait Photographer in McMinnville, Or, where I worked until Sept. 1954. We then moved to Dallas, Or, having purchased the McEwan Studio, changed it to Palmer Photo Shop and retired from it in 1988-an old man full of years and retired.

I learned to fly an airplane and took aerial photographs for about ten years. It was fun but it didn’t appeal to my wife, especially after I had a mid-air collision with a fellow who broke all the rules and cut a hole through my wing with the 182 Cessna he was flying when I was on final at the Salem Airport.

Since retirement, Computer Bible study, Gideon Organization, Court Street Athletic Club, golf, Bible Study Fellowship, Christian Missionary to Utah, and fishing has kept me really busy. Romans 8:28 is one of my favorite Bible verses:

"And we know that all things work together for good to them that love god, to them who are the called according to his purpose." KJV I Peter 1:23-25

"Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God which liveth and abideth forever. For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away: But the word of the Lord endureth forever. And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you. But the word of the Lord endureth for ever. And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you." KJV John 3:3-5

"Jesus answered and said unto him, verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born? Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of the water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." KJV John 6:63

"It is the spirit that quickeneth: the flesh profiteth nothing; the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." KJV

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