Meeting Joe West

My first marriage worked.  As a result, for nearly 30 years, I have had a whole family of in-laws, including a father-in-law like no other.

Late March 1983.  I don’t remember the exact date, but I know it was late March because I was touring as a baritone in the BYU A Capella Choir.  (Don’t get too impressed.  I was well hidden in a large choir.)  It was a bus tour through the Northwest and into Canada, barely.  On the way back to Provo, we stopped in Pendleton, Oregon to do our last performance, in Vert Auditorium.

My fiancée Kim had it in her head that her dad and I should meet before the wedding, which by late March was only about a month away.  I didn’t do the traditional ask-the-future-father-in-law-for-her-hand thing.  Not sure why, probably just didn’t occur to me.  But there I was in Pendleton, about one month from marriage and about 120 miles from my not-so-distant-future father-in-law’s hometown.

Kim knew my itinerary, so she called her dad and arranged for him to come to the Pendleton concert and meet me in the lobby afterwards.  Simple enough.

As we sang, I peered into the audience, trying to decide which of these people was Joe West.  I don’t remember whether I had seen any pictures of him, but I had a description:  full-bearded mountain man, who by day was the barber in John Day.  Hmm.  The beard description was helpful; that eliminated many of the men in the audience.  They were all dressed about the same, ranging from slacks and dress shirts, to sports coats, to business suits.  But I couldn’t see all of the audience, and I was unable to draw any conclusions.

By the time the concert ended, I was duly nervous.  My instructions from Kim were to go to the lobby and find him there.  I went, still dressed in my tuxedo, found a perch on the bottom step of the balcony stairs and watched for bearded men.  Not a few passed by.  I tried to make eye contact with each.  No luck.  In return, I got mostly anesthetized stares.  (Is that what a-capella, classical music does to bearded men?)

This went on for a few minutes, and the crowd was beginning to seriously thin out.  Maybe this meeting was just not meant to be.

I was about to give up, perhaps too willingly, when a man came into the lobby from outside.  No mistaking – moccasins, blue jeans, and button-up nature-looking shirt (if you know Joe, you know the shirt), all topped off with a plaid, flannel jacket and a full beard.  He obviously had not been in the audience.

I approached him, shook his hand, and we had a very brief, superficial, but cordial conversation.  I had no idea what he would be interested in, and I’m sure he had no idea what to say to me.  It was not unpleasant, just chit-chat between two people who really didn’t know each other.

After about five minutes, I had to leave to go stay the night with a host family, so we said good-bye, again pleasantly.  He left through the front door where he had come in, and I headed backstage to go home with a host family.

I got paired up with a nice family – the father was a corrections or probation officer – that lived outside of town.  As we got into the car, I noticed Joe getting into his car.  It was a small car, so small that it had no business having a trailer hitch.  But it had a trailer hitch, and a small boat was hitched to it.  I would later learn that a car had little utility to Joe if it could not pull a boat.  This little car was taking Joe and his boat to fish on the Columbia River, which he thought he would do to make a trip all the way up to Pendleton in late March more agreeable.

I pointed Joe out to the host father and said something like:  “I’m marrying his daughter next month, and I just met him.”  Mr. Host wanted to know more, so I told him that Joe was the barber in John Day.  Mr. Host immediately knew him.  As a fisherman and hunter, Mr. Host had been in Joe’s barber shop.  That was where everyone who wanted to know about hunting and fishing in Eastern Oregon went.  I think I got to know more about Joe the Barber from Mr. Host than I had gathered from Kim and Joe combined.

I didn’t see Joe again until after I was married.  Kim and I came out of the temple, and Joe, with Kim’s grandmother Rita, had arrived.  This time he was dressed in a suit, not his more usual and comfortable attire; however, despite being way out of his element, he seemed much more relaxed and happy.  Probably because Kim was there.

We all went to Uncle Tom’s in Walnut Creek for a nice luncheon.  The plan was for Kim and me to go up to Mendocino for a few days, then meet everyone in Sacramento for the reception.  Before long, Joe leaned over to me and said:  “You better get going before Kimmy gets a headache.”  I’m sure my face turned plenty red, but ever since that day Joe has been my friend.

Over the years, we tried to spend a week in John Day during the summer.  On these trips, I really got to know Joe.  Being a grandfather brought out the best in him.  Every year, it seems, he had an adventure waiting for us.  We went to lakes and rivers all over Eastern Oregon, pulling out prodigious numbers of fish, and either having a good fish fry or freezing them and packing them up to take home to California.  I spent many hours sitting side-by-side with Joe filleting fish.

Beginning even the first year we went to Oregon, I became Joe’s close friend, not just a pleasant friend.  He would come in early and wake me up to go track elk, or bob puppies’ tales, or put together the gear to take the kids fishing.  We were different in almost every way, but we shared a deep love for his daughter and his grandchildren. 

He later told me that he opted out of attending the Pendleton concert and instead went to a bar to pass the time until it was over.  In fact, concerts and tuxedos never really were my favorite things either.  I might have felt more comfortable having a root beer at the bar with Joe that night in late March 1983.