A Fever in the Heart and Other True Cases

  As they are in most small towns in America, sports were king in Yakima, and the Moores were very much a part of the fabric of the town, of its educational system and its sports circle. Gabby Moore had taught in tiny Union Gap first, and then at Washington Junior High in Yakima. He moved steadily up the career ladder. In 1960 he was hired to teach and coach at Davis High School where he stayed to become a much-admired fixture. Gabby taught math and driver training and was the track coach and the assistant football coach. One year he was the head football coach.

  But the gridiron wasn’t his forte; it was at wrestling that he excelled as a mentor. He became, arguably, one of the most outstanding wrestling coaches in America. He could have moved on up to college coaching—he was certainly skilled enough—but he had sunk deep roots in Yakima.

  Gabby Moore was the impetus behind bringing “kid wrestling” to Yakima. The town’s boosters were pleased, and the Yakima Junior Chamber of Commerce honored him for that program by giving him the trophy for “Outstanding Physical Education Educator” for 1969. Moore’s wrestling team took the Washington State Championship in 1972. He was a member of the selection committee in the Washington Cultural Exchange with Japan, where wrestling is a major sport. Gabby found a way to travel to the Orient with his star athletes so that they could wrestle with the best.

  Athletes from many graduating classes had passed through Gabby’s wrestling programs and they never forgot him. He could take a boy with no particular aptitude for sports and turn him into a champion. He could, and he did, not once but many times. His athletes loved Gabby, and he cared deeply for his boys.

  Beyond his solid place at Davis High, Gabby Moore had other compelling reasons to prefer Yakima to one of the college towns on the “coast” near Seattle or to the east: Pullman or Moscow, Idaho, where Washington State and the University of Idaho were located. He and Gay had an extended family in Yakima with a closeness that anyone would envy, a tight circle of love and emotional support.

  Gabby’s father-in-law, Dr. A. J. Myers, was an osteopathic physician and surgeon who owned and operated the Valley Osteopathic Hospital on Tieton Drive in Yakima.

  “Doc” Myers had practiced medicine in Yakima for more than thirty years and in 1952 he built Valley Hospital.

  “Doc” and Gabby met for the first time shortly before Gabby married Gay, and they soon became fast friends. Myers was Gabby’s doctor and his friend, a relationship that existed outside of Gabby’s marriage.

  In those days Gabby Moore was a family man and a revered coach. He was twenty-seven when Morris Blankenbaker graduated from high school, and they kept in touch, although only sporadically. There was no reason to think that their lives would touch again in much more than a tangential way.

  While Morris Blankenbaker was an Adonis of a young man who was everyone’s friend, Gabby Moore’s popularity came from his compelling, persuasive personality. As he aged, his appearance changed from that of a good-looking young coach to one of an average-looking man who seemed older than he really was. All coaches at every level are under pressure to win. Gabby didn’t handle stress well. The pressure to win—much of it self-driven—got to him and he developed primary hypertension in his early thirties. Gabby’s high blood pressure was serious enough to concern his father-in-law. A. J. Myers did his best to convince Gabby that elevated blood pressure was nothing to ignore, but his warnings usually fell on deaf ears. Gabby Moore continued to demand too much of himself and of his athletes. When he concentrated on something, it was with every fiber of his being; he did nothing halfway.

  With the years, Gabby’s hair thinned and he was beginning to resort to “comb-overs” and deliberately careless bangs over his forehead. By the time he was in his late thirties, despite his sports activities, Gabby had a burgeoning paunch that his wrestlers teased him about. He wasn’t the handsome young coach he had been in his twenties; Gabby had come to look like a thousand other high school teacher-coaches in America.

  But that hardly mattered. It was his personality that shone through. An alumna remembered that, as a teacher of driver’s training, Gabby was so calm-so patient.

  “I had Gabby for driver’s training,” recalled the woman, who worked in the Yakima County District Attorney’s Office, twenty years after graduation. “I liked him. We all did. I remember he always told us to ‘Look for a way out, to expect trouble, and be ready to get out of the way.’ He wasn’t temperamental. He wasn’t mean. He was a great guy. I still can’t understand what happened …”

  For most of his years of teaching and coaching, Gabby Moore was a dynamic, charismatic man who could make anyone believe anything. And if he believed, his listeners believed. If he said a kid from Yakima could make it to the Olympics and bring home a gold medal, then, by golly, the kid would go for it. He would not listen to excuses. “If you got a problem,” Gabby would say, “you eliminate the problem-and you win.” While Gabby was known to have a short fuse on occasion, it didn’t affect his job or his status at Davis High School.

  Gay Myers Moore was a beautiful woman and, unlike Gabby, she grew more attractive as she approached middle age. Gay was teaching girls’ physical education at Lewis & Clark Junior High. Both Moores were busy with their teaching schedules and raising three youngsters, but they made a great couple. Their marriage seemed as solid as Gibraltar.

  No one really knows how things are in a marriage, though, not from the outside looking in. Maybe Gabby focused too much on his wrestling squads and forgot that his family needed him too. He not only had after-school practice, he usually brought some of his wrestlers home for practice-after-practice. There weren’t enough hours in the day for him to have had much time to spend with his wife-at least during wrestling season.

  In 1965, just after Morris and Jerilee got married, he and Gabby Moore had no closer a relationship than Gabby did with any of his ex-athletes from Davis. They sometimes saw one another in Yakima when Morris and Jerilee came home to visit their relatives on holidays or during the summer, but that was about it.

  Morris had precious little free time. The curriculum at Pacific Lutheran University was far more demanding than the classes he had taken at Washington State. PLU attracted students with the highest academic records. And Pacific Lutheran is a private university where the tuition is a lot higher than a state school. This time, Morris had no football scholarship-he didn’t have time to play football. Both he and Jerilee had to work so that they could make it financially.

  Jerilee might have looked like a fragile, dependent girl who needed a man to look after her, and, yes, maybe she had played that role a time or two because boys seemed to like it. Inside, though, she was strong and smart; she just wasn’t used to letting it show. She was the kind of woman who combined a kittenish quality with profound sensuality—a Brigitte Bardot or a Claudine Longet kind of woman. Physically, Jerilee resembled Longet a great deal.

  Jerilee Blankenbaker was highly intelligent. She and Morris needed the money she could bring in, and she was determined to get a job. She applied at a bank in Tacoma even though they hadn’t advertised for new employees. She simply strode in and said, “I want a job.”

  The bank manager drew up a chair and asked her to sit down.

  “The bank had a test they gave to everyone,” Olive Blankenbaker recalled. “They handed Jerilee this great big stack of checks, and they said, ‘There’s one forgery in there. See if you can find it.’ And do you know, she found it—and nobody ever had before. She is really bright. You’ve got to give her credit.”

  Jerilee was hired at once. Not only was her appearance an asset to the bank, but she was obviously smart. They hadn’t guessed wrong on her. Although she had no training and was fresh out of high school, she was a quick study and she proved to be a very valuable employee. She began as a clerk, but she rose rapidly to a position of trust officer.

  Morris found a job at Western State Hospital in Steilacoom, Washington’s State institution for people who are profoundly psychotic. He worked the late shift
from three to eleven P.M. It was a demanding job. He was at work for the evening meal and then he helped medical personnel get patients settled down for the night with a variety of medications. He always had to be ready for trouble. The most placid patients sometimes had psychotic breaks with no warning at all. Morris knew that one of the reasons he had been hired was his muscular build. But Morris’s innate kindness and his calm manner seemed to soothe the more disturbed patients at Western State.

  No matter how difficult the night’s work had been, Morris still had to study when he got home close to midnight. While he worked nights, Jerilee worked days. Her “banker’s hours” ended just as his job began. In the little time they had together, they got along well. If they argued at all, their discussions were about money or in-laws. Jerilee had assumed that Olive would continue to send money to Morris until he got out of college, while Olive figured that he was a grown man now, and a married man as well. She had looked forward to cutting back on the heavy workload she had carried since he was a baby.

  Jerilee was upset about that, Olive remembered, but it wasn’t a big problem. Mostly, Jerilee was homesick for Yakima and for her own mother and sister. She didn’t know anyone in Tacoma, and she spent most evenings alone because Morris was working. She was uneasy too; sometimes people escaped from Western State Hospital. PLU’s campus had a lovely sweeping greensward and scores of huge trees, but the streets nearby quickly disintegrated into high-crime areas. When Morris was gone, it seemed to Jerilee that every sound was magnified.

  Morris had hoped to finish college at Pacific Lutheran, but Jerilee was so miserable and homesick that he finally agreed to move back to Yakima, find a job there, and attend Central Washington State College in Ellensburg on a part-time basis. A move would mean that his degree would take a year or two longer than he had hoped. In truth, it would be six years before Morris Blankenbaker graduated from college.

  Back in Yakima, Morris took a “temporary” job with the phone company as a telephone lineman. It wasn’t his ultimate goal, but he liked scampering up poles with spiked boots and the camaraderie of the crews he worked with. And he was happy being back in the county where he was raised, back with his good friends. He had grown up in the big old house where his grandparents lived and he often stopped in for his coffee break, bringing his whole crew with him. His grandmother Esther looked forward to fussing over Morris and his fellow linemen, and she usually had something baking in the oven just in case.

  All the while, Morris plugged away at his college degree at Central Washington College. It was only thirty-five miles to Ellensburg, but it was a rough thirty-five miles before the freeway was built: across the Twin Bridges, and then along the riverbanks outside of Yakima and across great stretches of barren land and winding roads through hills that were more like mountains, past squared-off buttes. Eastern Washington is not at all like the rainy and mild western half of the state. In winter, blizzards often made State Road 821 virtually impassable while, in summer, sand storms full of tumbleweeds blinded drivers who headed north out of Yakima toward Ellensburg. It was a great road for sightseers, as it curved along the Yakima River, but it was a student commuter’s nightmare.

  Gabby Moore, Morris’s old track coach, was taking classes at Central Washington too, and he and Morris often car-pooled. They renewed their friendship, but it was a different kind of friendship now; they were both adults. In the spring of 1969, Gabby’s and Gay’s three kids were growing up and Jerilee was pregnant with her first baby.

  Sometimes, Gabby and Morris went hunting or spear fishing together on weekends. They often went whitewater rafting and boating on the Yakima River. Theirs was a male friendship; the Moores and the Blankenbakers didn’t socialize. Jerilee scarcely knew Gabby.

  Rick* Blankenbaker was born on May 5, 1969, and Jerilee was swept up in first-time motherhood. Amanda* was born a little over a year later on September 1, 1970. The young Blankenbakers had it all: a happy marriage, a little boy, and a little girl. Old photographs show Jerilee and Morris posing happily with their babies: Morris hoisting his chunky young son high with one muscular arm; Jerilee riding on Morris’s shoulders on a whirligig as the family plays in the park; Jerilee and the kids proudly presenting Morris with a birthday cake. Looking at the photos, it seems impossible that it could not have gone on that way forever.

  The young Blankenbakers had every reason to believe that they would grow old together and watch their children and grandchildren live out their lives in Yakima too.

  Olive Blankenbaker was in her mid-fifties when Morris married Jerilee. It seemed to her that it was too late then to find anyone marriageable who appealed to her. More out of habit than anything else, Olive kept up much the same heavy work pace she had set for herself so long before. She did, however, stop court reporting and accepted an offer to go to work for I.P. “Pete” Tonkoff of the Yakima firm of Tonkoff and Holst. It proved to be the best job she had ever had, a steady-if intense-schedule, with more benefits than any of her other positions.

  Pete Tonkoff, a native of Bulgaria, was a “great attorney,” dynamic and dramatic in the courtroom. He was not in the least impressed with city lawyers. He once subpoenaed Eleanor Roosevelt as a witness in a case he was bringing against Fulton Lewis. Olive would work for Pete Tonkoff for ten years, driving in from her family’s old homestead near the Yakima River in an “old jalopy.” She loved the challenge of working for Tonkoff. She admired his brilliance, even his occasional bombasity.

  The years passed. Olive was in her sixties, but she was as efficient as ever and indispensable to Tonkoff and Holst. At some point, Pete Tonkoff took one look at the car she drove through blizzards and summer heat alike and bought her a new one, gruffly saying he didn’t want her missing work because her old car had broken down.

  Olive’s ideal job ended suddenly on July 18, 1973, when Pete Tonkoff was lost and presumed dead after the Beechcraft he owned and was piloting disappeared over Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana. Tonkoff had been flying in to handle a New Orleans case. He had been coming in for a landing when the tower ordered him to make another go around because the runway was occupied. He never came back. Later, his plane was found deep in the lake. His death was only the first blow that Olive Blankenbaker would suffer in the mid-1970s.

  “Up until then,” she said, “everything was good. I thought it would last forever.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  All too often the falling-down of lives is like dominoes tumbling. When one falls, it knocks over the next, and the next, and on and on until everything is flattened. In the early 1970s, Gabby Moore was at the very peak of his profession, with his athletes winning more honors every year. His own son, Derek, made the football team at Davis, and another generation of Moores played for the Pirates. His daughters, Sherry and Kate, were pretty girls and good students.

  Who can say what detours human beings from a smooth road ahead? The “midlife crazies,” maybe. Unfulfilled dreams? On occasion, it is a near-tragedy that serves as a wake-up call that life doesn’t go on forever.

  Gabby Moore came so close to dying one summer day that he may well have reevaluated his life and realized that he had slid into middle age without ever seeing it looming on the horizon. Had it not been for Morris Blankenbaker, Gabby Moore never would have made it much past forty.

  It happened on one of the river trips that Morris and Gabby often took. The day began like any other. The two men had parked one of their cars near Olive’s place close by the Yakima River and driven the other up to Ellensburg. There, they pushed off in a boat and headed downriver toward Yakima. They had made this trip dozens of times before. But this time something went wrong, and their boat capsized in a powerful undercurrent, scattering its occupants and their gear alike.

  Both Morris and Gabby were plunged beneath the surface of the river, sucked deeper and deeper, down where the sunlight was swallowed up and they had to dodge floating debris and sunken logs in an underwater obstacle course. Morris was the strong swimmer and he quickly
fought his way to the surface. Somehow Gabby ended up beneath the bank along the river’s edge, his feet entangled in the clutch of vines and roots that flourished in the deep water. There was no way he could ever have gotten out of their death grip by himself and he was virtually invisible from the surface of the river.

  Morris wasn’t worried about himself; he was like an otter in the water. As a younger man, he had tormented his friends and his mother by swimming underwater so long they were sure he had drowned. But he was only “counting” until he was confident he had broken his own record for holding his breath. Satisfied, he then would burst up triumphantly just as they were all running for a lifeguard to pull him out.

  Now, in the whitewater that overturned their drift-boat, Morris dove again and again, looking for Gabby. Finally he saw him flailing his arms helplessly, his feet held in the vise of the underwater vegetation. Morris wrenched Gabby free and took him to the top. Gabby flopped on the bank like a dying fish, throwing up. But he was breathing and he was alive.

  “I wish he’d never made it,” Olive Blankenbaker would say with quiet bitterness many years later. ” I wish Morris had left him there in the river.”

  Olive would remember that she had felt an aversion to Gabby Moore from the first time she met him out there at her river place. She never said anything to Morris, because she couldn’t put her finger on what it was about Gabby that set her teeth on edge.

  Morris was unaware that his mother didn’t like Gabby. The two men remained fast friends. They hunted and fished and sometimes worked out at the YMCA together. Morris was flattered when Gabby sought his advice on football plays. Morris attended a number of Gabby’s teams’ wrestling matches and he sometimes helped coach the heavyweight wrestlers. The two men talked often, almost every day.

  In December of 1973, Gabby confided to Morris the shocking news that he and Gay were getting a divorce. He said he would be moving out of his family home after Christmas. Morris was stunned. Gabby and Gay had been married almost two decades, and Morris had had no idea they were having problems. From what Gabby told him, it was Gay who wanted out of the marriage, and Gabby who was fighting to keep it together.