A Fever in the Heart and Other True Cases Read online

  Possibly the end of the game had been fated decades before; certain choices each of them made had brought them to this place.

  Olive Morgan Blankenbaker was one of four daughters born to Esther and Ray Morgan, who named all their girls somewhat whimsically (and horticulturally): Hazel, Fern, Olive, and Iris. Their maternal grandfather, Ernst Skarstedt, was a writer of some note in his native Sweden and his intelligence and sensitivity came through undiluted to his descendants.

  Olive was born in 1910 near Wapato in Yakima County. She would spend all of her working years in the court systems of Washington. She began as a court secretary, but her true goal was to be a court reporter. This was long before the era of stenotype machines or computer disks. Court reporters wrote in beautifully executed script.

  It was also long before television was anything more than a scientific phenomenon demonstrated at world’s fairs. Radios were the home entertainment in vogue when Olive was a young woman in her twenties. Huge console radios with shiny mahogany cabinets and ornately carved facades were the status symbols of the thirties. Franklin D. Roosevelt had his “fireside chats” over the radio, kids listened to “Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy,” and “The Lone Ranger,” and dance bands from a ballroom “high atop” some hotel far away enchanted late-night listeners.

  Olive Morgan met Ned Blankenbaker in Yakima where he worked as a radio salesman in a radio and musical instrument store. She was a slender, beautiful young woman with marcelled curls and a sweet smile. Ned always seemed to be standing outside the store to catch a little sun just when Olive came walking downtown on her way to lunch. He was a short, stocky man with thick wavy hair and interesting eyes. Those eyes followed Olive as she passed by, and she knew it. He would stand on his tiptoes to make himself look taller when Olive walked by.

  “Some other girls I knew knew him and they introduced us,” Olive says. “I liked him the moment I met him.”

  It wasn’t long before Ned and Olive began to talk, and then he asked her to go dancing. That’s what all the young people did then. There were dance halls with lanterns swaying in the wind, and everyone tried to emulate Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. “Ned was a great dancer,” Olive remembers. “We’d go out to Bock’s Cafe where you could dance. It was just up the street from the music store. We knew everyone.”

  Songs like “Blue Moon” and “Anything Goes” were popular. FDR was in his first term in office and Social Security had just been voted in. The night before Olive Morgan married Ned Blankenbaker on September 25, 1935, Joe Louis took away Max Baer’s heavyweight crown. Huey Long had been assassinated in Louisiana two weeks before, and war clouds were lowering in Europe. But all that was so far away. Yakima, in the center of Washington State, was seemingly insulated from the world outside. Olive was twenty-five years old when she married Ned, and she expected her marriage would last forever.

  Ned and Olive Blankenbaker were married seven years before they had their only child. Morris Ray Blankenbaker was born on December 16, 1942. Thirty-two-year-old Olive was transfixed with love for this sturdy baby boy who made her holiday season the best she had ever had. As it almost always is, it was a “White Christmas” in Yakima. Although the world was at war and everything was rationed, everything in Olive’s life at that moment was perfect.

  A half-century later, looking back she would ask, “Why should it be that way? When people are so happy, why does it all have to disappear?”

  For Olive’s wonderful world did disappear. Somehow, the Blankenbaker marriage didn’t work very well after Morris was born. In all, Olive and Ned were married nine years; Morris was barely two when Olive was left to raise him alone. Over the years, his father would remain a part of Morris’s life and pay regular child support, but Ned fathered two more sons-Morris’s half brothers, Mike and Charles. It was Olive who was always there for Morris Blankenbaker. Her love for him was so unselfish that she encouraged him to spend time with his father and his younger brothers. They would become an important part of his life.

  Olive could easily have smothered Morris and made him a mama’s boy, but she didn’t. Morris was a natural athlete, a kid who was always running and leaping and playing ball. He had plenty of scrapes, bruises, and sprains, but Olive just sighed and bound up his wounds. She bit her lip when she felt she was about to ask him to give up the sports he adored. She knew it wouldn’t do any good, anyway.

  Olive signed up for a correspondence course to learn how to use the stenotype machine. She and Morris were living with her family in Wapato, and she managed to combine her studying with camping trips with her son. “I’d fix a big pot of stew and put it over the campfire, while Morris and his two friends—Indian boys from the Wapato Reservation—would go exploring in the forest. They could take the dog and have fun and I could study.”

  In the meantime, Olive was working as a court reporter, using Gregg shorthand. She sat through everything from divorces to murder trials, taking down all the proceedings in her fine hand. She worked in the Yakima County Superior Court, and then transferred over to Federal Court in Seattle, where Federal Judge Bowen, an elderly man who disliked change, was delighted to discover that there was still one court reporter in the Seattle area who could transcribe courtroom proceedings with a pen. “When he saw me writing with a pen on a notebook, he set up a whole bunch of proceedings for me to cover. He hated those little black machines,” Olive remembered. “I never told him that I could write with one of those little black machines. We went all up and down the Washington coast from Bellingham to Vancouver hearing cases.”

  Judge Bowen was ninety-three and still on the bench when he asked Olive if she would consider working in Yakima, and of course she agreed readily. That was home. She and Morris moved back into her mother’s house just outside town, and Olive worked days and evenings to keep up with the punishing schedule of cases that were filed into Judge Bowen’s court.

  Morris always came home for lunch to his Grandmother Morgan’s house. “You could see him coming a block away-running,” Olive said: ” And he took her picket fence with a high jump every day. My mother loved to see that boy eat.”

  Morris Blankenbaker was a handsome child with tight blond curls and brown eyes. When he was five, he posed proudly for his mother’s Brownie camera in his cowboy shirt, tooled belt with the silver buckle, and western boots. He was a Cub Scout, and into more athletic events with every year. He went out for tumbling and scrambled up to the top of the pyramid of bodies. “He broke his arm, of course,” Olive recalled. “That was Morris.”

  One summer, when Morris was seven, Olive took him for an automobile trip all across Canada. “We stopped wherever there was a swimming pool,” she said. “Even at seven, he swam like a fish, and he could dive off the high board, doing somersaults in the air. People used to gather around to watch him.”

  Olive was running her own kind of marathon in the Yakima Superior Court. “I kept up for a long time, but I finally had to quit,” she said. “I was just about breaking down, because I was working for the most effective judge, and everyone was filing their cases in his court.”

  As common as it is in the 1990s, a single mother raising a son was a rarity in the 1940s. There were fathers who were away during the war certainly, but divorced mothers were far from the norm and it wasn’t easy for Olive. She kept trying to find a job that would give her more time with Morris. She moved to Vancouver, Washington, where Morris went to Fort Vancouver High School.

  Later, they moved to Spokane, ” … to a big court with a lot of cases.”

  Back in Yakima again, Morris went to Washington Junior High and then Davis High School. He was the golden boy who could do anything. He was on the “A” squad of the track, baseball, football, and wrestling teams. He played the trombone and the French horn, marching in the Davis High band, carrying the huge horn as lightly as a feather. His mother remembers the band triumphantly playing “Bonaparte’s Retreat” as they marched down the field.

  It hardly seemed possibl
e that one kid could participate in so many activities-but Morris did. He played baseball, ran track, and wrestled, and he was the star fullback on the football squad. The crowd shouted his name again and again as he made touchdowns. “MOR-RIS BLANK-EN-BAKER! MOR-RIS BLANK-EN-BAKER!”

  In the summertime, Morris worked as a lifeguard in Yakima parks. From his teens well into his twenties, he always had an audience of adoring girls who carefully spread their towels out so they would be directly in his line of vision. He appreciated the view, but Morris didn’t date much. He scarcely had time. In the end, there was only one girl he ever went steady with. Only one girl he ever really loved.

  Jerilee. Jerilee Karlberg*.

  One of Morris’s coaches at Davis High School during his senior year in 1961 was Talmadge Glynn Moore. Of course, nobody called Moore by his full name, and very few people called him “Glynn”; everyone knew him by “Gabby.” Morris had known Gabby since he and Olive came back to Yakima in the mid-fifties ever since junior high. He figured Gabby had coached him in about every sport there was at one time or another: wrestling, football, track. Gabby was almost exactly nine years Morris’s senior. Morris’s birthday was on December 16, and Gabby’s was on the twenty-first. But when Morris was a schoolboy, Gabby was a grown man, married with a family, and their worlds were completely different. Morris always called Gabby “Coach”; he always would, even after he too was an adult.

  When Morris graduated from Davis High in 1961, he took home just about every athletic honor. He received the Traub Blocking and Tackling trophy, and he was voted “Best Athlete of the Year.” Best of all, Morris was offered a four-year football scholarship to Washington State University in Pullman. All he had to do was keep his grades up and do what came naturally as an athlete.

  Olive was living and working in Spokane then, and Morris visited on holidays and weekends when he didn’t have a game. Morris was playing right halfback for the Washington State Cougars. His mother didn’t have the time or money to get to his games, but she did manage to get to Spokane to watch him play once.

  “That was when Washington State played the University of Washington,” Olive said. “They played in Spokane at night under the lights. I got to go to that game. It was so terribly cold. We were wrapped up in blankets with long underwear and everything. I even remember the date—it was November 24, 1962. It was a real good game, and he played all the way through. I was so proud of him,” Olive remembered. “He was so handsome and they kept shouting ‘Morris Blankenbaker! Morris Blankenbaker!’ ”

  Even so, for the first time in his athletic career, there were other halfbacks at Washington State University who made the starting lineup more often than Morris did. He was 5’11” tall and 175 pounds. That was plenty big enough in high school; in college, there were players who dwarfed him. Dennis McCurdy, Herman McKee, and Clarence Williams were playing halfback for the Cougars too and they were 6’1”, 6′3″, and 6′2″ respectively, and they all weighed over 190. Morris’s dreams of becoming a professional football player before he started a coaching career seemed less realistic than they once had.

  Besides that, there was Jerilee. Jerilee Karlberg was three years behind Morris in school, and she attended the other public high school in Yakima: Eisenhower High. Morris barely knew her when he was in high school but he got to know her well when he went back to Yakima to visit his hometown. He had always been a guy who dated casually. As far as any of his friends remember, Morris was never serious about any girl in high school.

  Jerilee Karlberg was another story. Outwardly, she seemed to be what every teenage girl in the sixties yearned to be. She had a perfect figure: slender, but full-breasted. She had clouds of dark hair and blue eyes and she wasn’t just pretty; she was beautiful. Her skin was flawless and her features were enchanting. She was petite and entirely feminine. And of course she was a cheerleader for Eisenhower High.

  “Jerilee was everything we wanted to be,” one of her peers remembered. “She was pretty and slender and popular—so popular with boys. Her father was Henry Karlberg* and he had his own real estate company. He let Jerilee drive his new Cadillac whenever she wanted. While we all yearned after the “jocks,” Jerilee married Morris Blankenbaker, the super athlete of them all. We envied her … I suppose some of us hated her. Or at least resented her. It’s hard to put into words. Maybe you had to have lived in Yakima in the sixties to really understand.”

  Jerilee Karlberg may have appeared to have had everything, but her life was no more serene and perfect than any other teenager’s was. She had her insecurities in high school and often smiled when she didn’t feel like smiling. It was true that she came from an affluent family and she was gorgeous—but her world wasn’t ideal. She longed to have a boyfriend of her own, someone she could count on. She wanted to go steady; she didn’t want to date different boys all the time, even though she was besieged with offers. Basically, Jerilee wanted to marry young and have a family.

  Morris was something solid for her to hold on to and she loved him for that more than for his prowess on the football field. She wasn’t really that interested in sports. She could see that everyone liked Morris, and he seemed to have scores of friends. Morris was handsome and built like a young Greek god with bulging biceps and a “washboard” stomach that rippled with muscles. He was a college man and he made the boys at Eisenhower High look like wimpy kids. There was no question that Jerilee was completely in love with Morris.

  Jerilee was still in high school when she started dating Morris, and she begged him to come to Yakima to take her to her proms. She didn’t want to miss the most memorable social events of any teenage girl’s school years, yet she refused to go with anyone else. For Morris, it was almost a four hundred-mile round-trip, but he made it willingly. He posed with Jerilee who wore lovely formal gowns with the corsages he’d given her. Sometimes, the long trips back to Yakima cut into his study time and his grades suffered, but it didn’t matter. Morris Blankenbaker was in love for the first time in his life.

  Jerilee certainly had the intelligence to go to college, but she didn’t want that; she wanted her own family. On August 28, 1965, three months after she graduated from Eisenhower High School, Jerilee and Morris were married. She was just eighteen. He was twenty-two.

  “They had a big church wedding in the Presbyterian church,” Olive remembered. “With a huge reception at the Chinook Hotel in Yakima. They served food and had liquor and everything …”

  Henry Karlberg had put on a wonderful wedding for his daughter. Had it been up to her, Olive would have chosen not to serve liquor at the reception. It was just one of the things that carved a chasm between Olive and Jerilee’s family, one that they all crossed tentatively for years to come. Olive and Morris had not exactly lived a hardscrabble existence, but nothing had ever come easy. No big houses and certainly no fancy cars.

  For decades after that wedding in 1965, Olive and Jerilee Blankenbaker would have an ambivalent relationship. It was to be expected. They both loved Morris. He was Olive’s only child, the son she had struggled so hard to raise, and he could do no wrong in her eyes. She had wanted so much for him to graduate from college before he got married, and Jerilee had detoured him from that goal. For her part, Jerilee at eighteen was perhaps a little spoiled. She was not nearly as expert at either housework or a career as Olive was. Eventually, however, the two women would come to have a kind of grudging respect for one another.

  The newly married Mr. and Mrs. Morris Ray Blankenbaker moved to Tacoma, Washington, where Morris planned to obtain his bachelor’s degree at Pacific Lutheran University. He hadn’t given up on his ambition to get his degree and become a coach. It would just take a little longer.

  Morris had dropped out of Washington State and joined the Marine Corps Reserves before the draft could scoop him up. This meant that he had to train in the desert outside Coronado, California, for a few weeks each year, and risk being called to active duty in Vietnam. He was lucky; he didn’t have to go to war and eventua
lly he made lance corporal. Four years later, in February of 1969, he was honorably discharged from the Reserves.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Talmadge Glynn “Gabby” Moore had coached at Davis High School in Yakima since the 1960-61 school year. Like Morris, he was a Yakima boy, although he wasn’t a native. Gabby was born in the depths of the Depression in Missouri-four days before Christmas, 1931. His family moved to Yakima when he was a child and Gabby attended school there, graduating from North Yakima High School in 1950. He too was a sports hero. He received North Yakima High’s football inspirational trophy. But Gabby Moore, like so many teenagers graduating in the early fifties, went off to the Korean War instead of to college. He served in the Air Force from 1951 to 1955.

  When he was discharged, Gabby came back to Yakima. He was a very handsome young man then with straight blond hair and heavy-lidded dark eyes. Gabby Moore, who looked like the jock that he was, clean-cut and in great shape, wanted to be a high school coach. He went to college on the GI Bill—first to Yakima Valley Community College, and then to Central Washington State College (now Central Washington University) in Ellensburg where he got his BA in 1958. Two years later, he received his master’s degree at the same college.

  Gabby’s education wasn’t easy; he taught and coached while he was going to college. He had married by then, to Gay Myers, and during the time Gabby was getting his education and beginning his career as a teacher they had three babies: Sherry,* Kate,* and Derek.* Gay, who was startlingly attractive with smoky blond hair and a lithe figure, eventually became a physical education teacher herself.