Memories and motorcycle meatballs in Auburn | Whale’s Tales
Published 1:30 am Friday, March 6, 2026
My folks were the original owners of the house on 16th Street Northeast when the neighborhood was new, grass had not yet covered most of the yards, and the house had just donned its first coat of paint.
My dad snapped a now-yellowed photo of the house before it was a home.
My brother Jack and I have talked about the great time we had growing up there. It was the neighborhood’s golden age for kids: the Youngs next door, the Coggers and the Moons across the street, the Smythes and Knudtsons up the road, Fleck on 17th Street.
Friends were everywhere, ready to join in early-evening games of hide-and-seek, pine cone fights, baseball and football games in the North Auburn Elementary school yard.
Lots to look back on and laugh at today.
Like the day big brother, Jim, swinging at a basketball, drove it unintentionally into dad’s head, and the old man’s legs went out from under him in a perfect L-shape before he hit the ground. Seeing this, Jim hoofed it down the road as fast as his own legs could carry him. Funny thing — dad never said anything about it.
Like the day dad chased away a kid who’d ridden his motorbike into the yard with these words: “Get out of my yard, you motorcycle meatball!”
And the night that my brother, Matt, running his finger around the rim of a glass to make it sing outside my sisters’ room, decided the way to reassure them “it’s just me” was to poke his arm holding the glass through the curtain unannounced. It didn’t work as he’d expected. Carole’s screaming woke the house, and Matt took off.
The archetypal childhood, if one was lucky.
Of course all the kids of that generation left a long time ago to their lives, as it should be.
Many have since died: Patrick Moon perished in the Inauguration Day storm in 1991, when and a tree fell on him as he stopped to help a stalled motorist on the Maple Valley Highway near Renton. Other notables are Craig Cogger; my borther, Jim; Jeff Conway; and Jim Price.
Today I live in Sumner with my wife of 10 years, Ann, and our German Shepherd, Holly. Very happy there. My nephew, Chandler, lives in our old home.
Yet sometimes I drive through the old neighborhood just to see if it’s what I remember. I imagine I hear children hidden excitedly in the trees and bushes in games of hide and go seek. I turn, and no one’s there.
No, it’s not what it was. The police blotter tells me there’s more crime there than when we were growing up. And I don’t even recognize a single person there.
I recall a conversation with my dad three or four years before he passed on Christmas Day of 2011.
“You know what I miss about the old neighborhood, kid?” dad said. “The sounds of children playing.”
As Charles Kingsley wrote a long time ago about aging:
“…God grant you find one face there,
You loved when all was young.”
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Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@soundpublishing.com.
