A Fever in the Heart: And Other True Cases Read Online Free PDF Page B

with her first baby. Sometimes, Gabby and Morris went hunting or spear fishing together on weekends.
    They often went white water 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 I, 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 midfifties 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 J. P. "Pete" Tonkoff of the Yakima firm of Tonkoff and Hoist.
    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 Hoist. 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 round 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." 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 "mid life 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