Poor Man’s Paradise
The Camwood Mobile Home Park, long gone now in this era of gated communities and exclusive developments, once offered modest living on beachfront tracts destined for future high taxation. When the hammer finally fell, there must have been 20 single wides all lined up in angles that gave each tenant a peekaboo view to the Sound and the Olympic Mountains beyond, and although the lease was a bit high and the power and water levy exorbitant, folks with limited means could enjoy a small piece of the good life at a reduced price. Most of the island back then, really, was affordable.
Sure, there was no work and the drive to the nearest town was hellishly long, but there are always folks who prefer the edge of poverty to the sacrifice of 8-5, a sadistic boss, a crap job. I should know, I was the same way. My good luck, however, was having a small savings account, enough to buy a shack, not rent a trailer at the Camwood. Some folks there owned their single wide but most rented from Elmer Havelot, the slumlord/slash proprietor of the place who rarely made any appearances, just let Sue Novinsky manage the properties in exchange for free rent in Unit #6, the one with a fine view of the road down from the west side highway.
Sue was divorced. Twice. From the same guy, Phil Novinsky, a charmer but a mean drunk. The second divorce she needed a restraining order the Island County sheriff wouldn’t enforce so she left the island for a year and came back when Phil had died in a head-on, killing his drunken self and a teenage girl when he crossed the centerline just south of the Plaza Grocery. So Sue came back, managed the trailer park for Elmer, worked part time at the Tyee Grocery and decided the single life in a single wide was the life for her, what easily could have been a chart buster single on the country western station she listened to most days. If she’d been a song writer. Or played honkytonk guitar.
When Elmer gave the residents 30 days notice, her life threatened to become that country western song, heartbreak #3. But she worked a deal with Elmer, bought trailer #9, a reasonably intact 1953 Silver Star for peanuts and used what savings she had left for a half acre parcel behind Tyee Store, moved the trailer and cut her commute to walking distance. A few years later Tyee went under and Sue took a job at Twin City Foods, long commute, at least until TCF closed down. Last time I sat with Sue, drinking coffee with a shot of Jack, she said she was ready for retirement and Social Security. “If I learned anything in this place,” she told me, “it was how to live poor.”
The South End, if you give it a chance, I might’ve said back, will teach you that, all right. What I did say was what old Ted Snowden, the guy who built Tyee Store back in the ‘70’s, told me once: “It’s a poor man’s paradise.”
“A woman’s too,” Sue said, “once you get past the drunk husband.” We drank to that….
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Tags: Camwood Mobile Home Park, E-Z Living on the South End, South End Paradise