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Even after what she and Gabby had done to him, Morris still treated
Gabby with respect. He still called him "Coach," and he had told her he
couldn't bring himself to hit Gabby a week before when he had broken
into their house. No, she couldn't imagine Gabby Moore killing Morris.
But then, she couldn't imagine anyone else killing Morris. Of all the
things she had been afraid might happen, that was one eventuality that
had never crossed her mind. Sergeant Brimmer called Gabby Moore and
requested that he come down to the police station, asking him to bring
any firearms he might own with him. Gabby did come to the station on
that first Saturday afternoon, but he did not come prepared to talk to
Brimmer. Instead, he said that anyone who was interested in talking to
him would have to talk to his attorney. He had nothing to say. Detective
vernon Henry Henderson had broken through barriers of one kind or
another all of his life. Like Morris Blankenbaker, he had grown up in
Yakima. But Morris was born there, and Vern arrived at the age of five
coming from the South to a world entirely different from the one he had
known. "My mother, my sister, and I came from Shreveport Louisiana,"
Henderson said. "My grandfather was living up here already, and he
called and told us to come on up here that it was a better life. He
owned some houses in Yakima and told my mother she could probably get a
home up here. We moved up, and we were able to get a home." It wasn't
easy, Vern's mother, Leona, would work in a Yakima cannery her entire
life. She was everything to her son just as Olive was all things to
Morris. Henderson's sister, Joanne, died when she was only twelve, and
he was working by that age thinning apples in the orchards, picking
fruit when the trees grew heavy with ripe produce. As hard as they all
had to work, the move did bring Leona Henderson's family a better life.
"When I was growing up, you could leave your house open," Vern recalled.
"And no one would go in it. And if someone did, we all knew who it was.
We knew who the bad people were. Later, when I was on [police] patrol, I
knew who the bad kids were, but now, you don't know who they are, and
that makes it real hard to investigate." There was no father in Vern
Henderson's world, and while Morris Blankenbaker did have his father,
Ned, in town to go to in a pinch, basically both Morris and Vern were
being raised by their mothers. Athletics and the friendship of two of
his peers, Les Rucker and Morris Blankenbaker, filled in most of the
empty spaces in Vern's life. They were family to him.
"I met Morris at Washington Junior High," Henderson recalled. "He showed
up in either seventh or eighth grade." That would have been when Olive
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left her court job in Vancouver, Washington, and headed back to her
hometown. Vern said that Morris lived with his mother and his
grandmother out near the river. Morris had always been blind to the
color of anyone's skin. He had played with Indian boys when he was
smaller, and if you had asked him what color Vern Henderson and Les
Rucker were, he probably would have had to think a moment to come up
with "black." There weren't many blacks living in Yakima four or five
decades ago. Vern remembered that he was one of only six at Washington
Junior High and that there were eight black students at Davis High
School when he attended. Over the years, many races would move into
Yakima, but in the midfifties, there were very few Mexicans and the
Indian population mostly lived south of town in Toppenish on the Yakima
Indian Reservation. At Davis High, when Morris, Vern, and Les attended,
out of the three hundred teenagers registered there was a total of
twenty mixed-race students: blacks, Indians, and, perhaps, two or three
Chinese. Yakima was a typical small-town orchard and farming community
where it was "normal" to be white, and unusual to be any other color,
unless you happened to be there to harvest the fruit or work in the
fields, and then move on to another migrant worker camp. But the migrant
kids rarely got a chance to attend school, they headed south with the
first cold snap. While Morris treated everyone the same and didn't
notice that his school was mostly white, Vern Henderson did, he had come
out of the Deep South to a far better life, just as his grandfather had
promised, but he was still aware that he was a member of a minority
race, and that he was truly in the minority at Davis High School. His
mother had found them a house in the northeast area of town, an
exclusively Caucasian section of Yakima "Everything north of Yakima
Avenue was white then," he said. "South was where other races lived....
I even played on a baseball team where I was the only black, because all
my friends were white." In Yakima, Catholic teenagers went to Marquette
High School, and all the rich kids who went to public school went to
Eisenhower High School. Jerilee, several grades behind Vern and Morris,
would go to Eisenhower. Later, Vern Henderson remembered that she had
lived in a big house up near Thirty-second and Inglewood. "There were no
poor people up there." Morris and Vern met Gabby Moore for the first
time at Washington Junior High. He was the assistant wrestling coach
then and they viewed him as the hero figure that most boys see in their [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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