Chapter 5
From Uintah Basin to Wasatch Front (continued)
I think Keith and Eva had been very happy in their nine and a half years of married life, and they had accomplished a great deal. First, they had three sweet little boys. Frank had just turned four in December, and Max would be eight in June, and Grant was somewhere in between. I think Eva’s only disappointment was that she had not had any more children after Frank. Coming from a large family, she had hopes of having a lot of children. She loved children. They had, as I’ve told you before, the fall they were married, gone directly to Emery County, where he had taught school. The next year he went to be principal and teacher at a little town, LaPoint, out in the Basin. I think he was there only one year when he came to Plain City as principal there, and I’m sure he taught some classes also. I don’t know just how long they were at Plain City, but he had from there gone to Ogden High School as a teacher. If I’m not mistaken, it was the fall before Eva died that he had become principal of the new Weber County High School on North Washington Boulevard. I’m sure that they both felt that this was quite an achievement; Eva was especially proud of him.
Each summer during these years, Keith had spent at least six weeks, if not twelve, in summer school. As I’ve told you before, some of that time Eva and the children stayed with us. At other times, they stayed in Salt Lake. Grandma Maxwell had moved to Salt Lake by this time, and the family stayed there and Keith went to school. I think some summers he went up to Logan and took the family with him. I do know that one summer he and T.O. Smith, who was a very close friend of his and taught with him at Weber High School, lived in a tent in Logan for six weeks and went to summer school.
You might be interested in a little story. The first year that he was in LaPoint (I think they were in LaPoint two years), anyway, the one summer Keith “rode ditch.” In those days, water was very scarce in the Basin, and it was not unusual for the farmers to steal water from one another. It was necessary to have what they called a “ditch rider” who had everybody’s schedule of when they were supposed to have the water and who rode the ditch and tore out the dams where someone had stolen the water and put in new dams where it was supposed to be. This ditch rider always carried a gun. Fortunately, Keith felt he never had to use his gun. Guns were not the most uncommon thing in those days. I know my father had a few cases in court that involved guns that had been used during arguments over water. I remember once when Grandpa Maxwell, who had land on North Myton Bench, went dashing out there to take care of someone who had stolen the water during his water turn. He also had a gun, but he had Eva in fast pursuit to make sure that he did not use the gun!
Keith had never fully recovered from his bout with spinal meningitis when he was in the service. He never did recover from it. Whenever he got a bump or a bruise or a cut, he had to be very careful or he got infection in it. Eva worried about this a great deal, and she did take excellent care of him. I remember the year that she turned 30, I’m sure that she didn’t believe in fortune tellers, and I don’t either, but she used to comment that as a young girl, a fortune teller had told her she would be a widow at 30 with three boys. She used to say how glad she’d be when her thirty-first birthday came. But it never came, and it was Keith who was left with the three boys.
Eva caught a bad cold in April [1928], which quite rapidly turned to pneumonia. She had had experience, or had had classes in nursing and knew quite a bit about taking care of herself, but she was not able to manage this cold, and it soon did become serious enough that she had pneumonia. She was put in the old Dee Hospital in an oxygen tent. It was at that time Keith sent for my mother. I don’t know just how long it was, I don’t remember, but I think just a matter of days, but it must have been a dreadful time for Keith and Eva, because she recognized her own symptoms as they developed, and she talked with him about them. As it came near time for her death, I’ve heard my mother say how he used to come home and tell her the things that Eva had told him. Apparently toward the end, she talked to him a great deal about their life. She told him how much she had loved him and how pleased and proud she had been to be his wife. She talked a lot about the children and told him what the different ones liked and what their problems were and what he must do. She told him that he should marry again, and that he should not marry just for a mother for his children, he should marry someone who would be a stimulus to him, and who he could be happy with. All of this, of course, was dreadfully hard for him to listen to. She even told him when to put on their [the children’s] winter underwear. You could tell that her whole thoughts were with the family and with him.
A very unusual thing happened, or at least we feel that it was. Toward the very end, at both their requests I think, the oxygen tent was removed and she was allowed to go peacefully. After the doctor felt that she was gone, she opened her eyes and with none of the gasping that she had had before, spoke quite clearly and said to Keith, “Oh, it’s so beautiful, and there are so many children.”
Eva was buried from the Ogden Eighth Ward, the old Ogden Eighth Ward chapel, and was buried in Salt Lake near her father in the Wasatch Lawn Cemetery.
Mother, of course, was not in any condition to take on such a task. She was, really, still an invalid; she had been an invalid all winter: her side had not healed. The outer skin had healed, but because of the tissue being destroyed, she still had her hernia and still wore her wide strips of adhesive tape to hold herself together. I’m sure it never occurred to her to do anything but what she did, and that was to stay on and help Keith with the family. Keith was very conscious, I know, of Mother’s condition and tried very hard to make her work as light as possible. He did all of the heavy work, and he was very good to be home in the evening to help her with getting the children to bed and taking care of them. It wasn’t long until Mabel arrived.
They put me in the drug department, drugs and cosmetics. I don’t suppose there was a place in the world they could have put me where I could have been less qualified to be. I had, I don’t think, ever owned a jar of cream in my life. I may, by that time, have had a lipstick and a box of powder, I’m not sure. I had grown up washing my face in milk and rinsing my hair with a raw egg and using lotion of glycerine with a little rose water in it, and things of that sort. I did have a nice complexion and I did have nice hair, so the customers who came in all asked me what I used, and I always used whatever was the closest thing I could get my hand on, because I didn’t know one cosmetic from another. In those days there were not as many cosmetic lines as there are now, fortunately, so I didn’t have quite as big a problem. I tried very hard to stay close to the drug sundries area, with the toothpaste and mentholatum and Vaseline and things that I was familiar with.
One funny thing that happened while I was in the drug department was my shock when a lady came in and bought six bottles of Lydia Pinkham Compound. In case you younger people don’t know what that is, it was a compound made up for women, for their various female problems, with a guarantee on the back which said, “A baby in every bottle.” This lady bought six bottles, and she told me that she gave them to her son every spring, all six bottles, to get him back on his feet in the springtime. I often wondered what became of that boy!
Across from the drug department at Wright’s was the piece goods department. It was a nice piece goods department, and I looked at it with envy every single day. Every moment that I had free found me over in the piece goods department, lovingly straightening the fabrics on the tables. It wasn’t long before Mr. Ferris, the manager of the piece goods department, and buyer, started coming over and talking with me a little bit about the fabrics. One day he finally came over to the drug department and asked me if I would like to work for him in the piece goods. I think that was one of the happiest days of my life. I left the drug department with no regret and went to work for Mr. Ferris in the piece goods department.
Mr. Ferris became almost a second father to me; he was a dear little man. He was a small man, about the age of my own father I would imagine, and he was very kind to me. I think he saw my interest in fabrics, and he did everything he could to help me, and he did help me a great deal. Mr. Ferris was not an LDS man. I think he had been at Wright’s forever, at least since he was a young man. He had come to Utah, I don’t know why, and he had married a Mormon girl. Her maiden name had been Greenwood. She must have been a beautiful girl. At the time I knew her she was of course older, but she had snappy brown eyes and black hair, and I’m sure she had been very attractive. She was LDS, but she had never been able to convert Mr. Ferris, but he had come to accept the peculiar ways of Mormons so long as they didn’t bother his pipe. He loved his pipe, and I’m sure that he would have hated to have given it up. It used to keep our end of the main floor at Wright’s quite, well not blue with smoke, but filled with the aroma of tobacco.
I started again among the cotton fabrics, dress fabrics, and I very soon learned that even though Mr. Ferris was a very kind gentleman, he was still a very strict disciplinarian. He insisted on the stocks being kept very orderly and clean and dustless, and the fabrics that were on display always had to be just perfect. The bottoms, as they hung, had to be equally as straight as my mother’s washing did on the line.
I gradually worked my way along until at the time that I finished at Wright’s I had charge of the silk department and was doing most of the buying for the other departments. But that story will come a little later. I spent nine years at Wright’s, and I could probably spend hours telling you things that happened to me while I worked there, some of them very amusing and some of them not so amusing, right at the time at least.
About the time that I went there to work was when rayon first came into the picture. I may not have said so before, but I feel that I lived, or I have lived in a marvelous time in my life, beginning clear back before electric lights and telephones and cars and all down through the many things—tv and radio and everything. In my work at that time, to come to handle a brand-new thing such as rayon, which was a synthetic fabric, not something that was grown as linens and silks and woolens and cottons, was simply marvelous. The rayons at first were mostly in linings, then very quickly the hosiery manufacturers grabbed onto rayon and we began wearing rayon hose instead of our old cotton lisle. It wasn’t too long until the manufacturers began to work rayon in with the cotton or the linens or even the woolens and silks to make completely new fabrics. It began to be a completely different world.
I very well remember when the government—of course at the first there were no regulations how fabrics could be used; there had been no need for it—but finally the consumer began wanting to know what was in the fabrics. Was it rayon? Was it cotton? Was it this percent or that percent? There were no regulations stating, and so the government came out with a regulation that the fabric must state how much rayon was in it. I remember when each store had to label their fabrics. I don’t remember what the law was called, the Cotton-Something, and it was a stupid thing, really, to expect us in the store to label our merchandise, because we didn’t know what percentage was in it either. We had to go through and put a label on all of our fabric that had rayon in it, telling what percent each thing was. I’ll never forget that time and what a beautiful job of guessing we did. I remember in later years asking a gentleman in a New York showroom one time when I was buying draperies what the content of a piece of fabric was, and he said, “Only the Lord and the guy who made the formula knows that.” I thought, well, maybe the Lord was with us when we were helping to label those cottons and rayons way back at Wright’s in the beginning days of synthetic fabrics.
I soon found many friends in the store and got acquainted with Mr. Gus Wright, who was the manager and who was always very nice to me, and also his brother, Arthur Wright, and his uncle, Frank Wright, whom I was very fond of.
I found very fine friends in the Ogden Eighth Ward at church. At the time I came to Ogden, Joseph Barker was the bishop in the Eighth Ward. Melvin Swenson was one of his counselors, and the other counselor, his name escapes me at the moment, but maybe I’ll think of it after awhile.[2] I found some very nice friends; Marcelle Taylor was in the ward then, and Ellen Young, who worked for the Barkers, and Hilda and Mary Edling, and Zola Schaer, and so many of the girls. They were all so friendly and kind; in fact, they invited me to join the little club that they had. Also, they invited me to sing, and it was nice to sit up in the choir with the girls, which I did. I don’t think I did too much damage, and it was a change to sit in the choir sometimes.
Keith’s family and Mother and I filled one row over in the old Eighth Ward building. We sat so we could keep the boys separated. First Max and then his dad, then Grant, and then Mother, and then Frank, and then me. In that way we could keep them from giggling and kicking each other and generally creating a disturbance. I guess since I was the one on the end, it was all right occasionally for me to sing in the choir.
It wasn’t too long after we came to Ogden that I was asked to be on the Stake Sunday School Board, and that was a very interesting experience. The Eighth Ward at that time was much bigger than it is now. As I recall, the boundary line was the 12th Street on the south, and went clear out to 1st Street on the north, and to the mountain on the east, and of course Washington Boulevard on the west. The old Ogden Stake, which was our stake at that time, comprised everything from 24th Street and Washington Boulevard north, including Pleasant View and North Ogden, and also the towns in Ogden Valley, Huntsville, Eden, and Liberty. When I was on the Stake Sunday School Board, we used to visit all of those Sunday Schools. There were, I think at the time, four stakes in the county. We were the Ogden Stake, and in the south part of Ogden above Washington was the Mount Ogden Stake, and then west of us were South Weber and North Weber Stakes. The visits up in the valley were most interesting, and I made some wonderful friends up there. In fact, some marvelous friends turned out to be the Hawkses, because I got acquainted with Laura—she wasn’t Laura Hawkes at the time, and I can’t remember her maiden name—but she later married John Hawkes, who was the mission president, at the time that I lived in Minneapolis, of our mission there, and it was nice to find myself acquainted with them. President Hawkes, John Hawkes, had been one of Keith’s students at Weber High School, in one of the first graduating classes from Weber High School.
Also in our Sunday School visits, we visited the School for the Deaf and Blind, and Brother Woodbury was the president of the branch, the deaf and blind branch. I remember so often when we went there, we always had to speak. That was always quite an experience, because we would get up to speak, and he would stand beside us, and with his sign language, relay what we were saying to the audience. I found it rather a frightening experience keeping my thoughts collected long enough to wait while he signed before I went on to give my next sentence. I said to him one day, “Brother Woodbury, I didn’t know I was going to speak; I haven’t the faintest idea what I’m going to say.” He said, “Well, don’t worry about it Mabel, I’ll see to it that you give a good talk.” I’m sure he did.
One of my favorite stories has always been one that happened on a visit there. In the classroom the teacher was giving a lesson on prayer. She had asked the children how many of them prayed, and they had all raised their hands except one little boy. He looked very puzzled and finally he held up his hand and said to her in the sign language, “I didn’t know that Jesus understood the sign language.” She explained to him that Jesus understands all languages, that he understands a little German boy or a Chinese boy, or whoever he might hear, because he doesn’t listen to us in the language, but he listens to the things that are in our hearts. I’ll never forget that little boy’s face: it grew brighter and brighter all the time she was talking. For the first time in his life, he realized that he could talk to his Heavenly Father. He had grown up in a home where I guess they hadn’t understood the need for him to know this. They did have family prayer, but he had never been called upon to pray, because he couldn’t speak. He had not known; he had gotten the idea that he couldn’t talk to Heavenly Father. When she got through explaining it to him, he held up his hand again and said to her, “I’ll pray.” I’ve always remembered that story and I’m sure I’ve told it many times and used it in many talks that I have given in the past.
I remember Mother going there one time. I took her to an evening concert they were having, and two little blind girls got up to give a violin solo. I’ll never forget Mother’s worry, because each time that the one girl drew her bow across her violin, it came easily within an inch of the nose of the other girl. Mother was just so sure that she was going to hit the other girl’s nose and disrupt their performance. But she didn’t, and they got along just fine and it was a very nice performance.
I think of all the places that we visited on the Board, I loved to go to the Deaf and Blind School the most. They were so happy, particularly I believe, the deaf people. I remember Brother Seegmiller, who was the Superintendent of the Sunday School, and I remember him telling me one time that he was glad that the Lord had not given him the use of his tongue, because he couldn’t say the mean things about people that he had heard other people say. I thought what a marvelous philosophy that was.
For several years my assignment was to teach the girls out at the State Industrial School, at Sunday School. At that time they had the old building; I don’t know that many of you will even remember it. It stood away east of the other buildings, and the girls were housed up there. They just had one class, and of course the number varied according to how many happened to be in the school at the time. There were usually anywhere from 25 to 50 of them. Some of them were awfully sweet girls, and I really loved going out there to teach them. They made me feel so welcome and they were so nice in so many ways.
There were some of them of course that didn’t belong there at all, and I felt badly about them. They should have been somewhere like American Fork.[3] They weren’t really well enough to understand, I don’t think—didn’t have the mentality to understand the things that they had done that were wrong—but there was no place else, I guess, at that time for them to be, and so that’s where they had ended up.
We saw them come and go; sometimes one would come up and tell us that she was being released and would be leaving. We’d talk so hard to her to tell her to try not to come back, but it wouldn’t be long until we would go again and there she would be. The saddest part of all was their own story that when they left the school, that they would go intending to go straight, but when they would get out, they would discover that the nice girls that they would liked to have associated with would have nothing to do with them. Since they had to have friends, eventually they found themselves drifting back to their old friends, and of course that eventually led to their return to the school. One girl who was there was a daughter of a stake president. She understood the gospel as well as anyone I’ve ever known. She knew exactly what was going to happen to her, but somehow she didn’t have the control to maintain herself when she was out of the school, and she returned several times during the time that I was there.
They were such sweet girls in so many ways. A lot of them liked to write poetry, and they were always slipping a little verse to me as I would be leaving, with little thoughts of their love. I don’t know of any group that I’ve ever worked with that I’ve felt the love of the group as I did with that particular group. I remember when my mother was sick, before she died, a few days before she died, that they sent a huge bouquet of sweet peas to her. Sweet peas were my mother’s very favorite flower, and we set the bouquet of sweet peas on the table right by her bed, and she did love them and loved the fragrance from them. About an hour after they had been there, she suddenly seemed to develop a terrific cold, and though she had never had hay fever before, when the doctor came and examined her, he could find no reason for the cold, and finally he said, “Let’s try taking these flowers out of the room,” which we did, and within a couple of hours Mother’s cold was gone. I’m sure that in all the years that she had raised sweet peas that had never happened to her before. But it was so thoughtful and sweet of the girls to do this for her, and of course I never let them know that this had happened.
I don’t know just how long I was out there, but it has always stayed with me as one of the outstanding things that I have been permitted to do in church work.
I’m sure the boys missed their mother a great deal. She had always spent a lot of time with them. Although they were very normal little boys and had their good and bad times, they somehow, as children seem to do, seemed to recognize my mother’s physical limitations and they tried not to be too demanding. I remember watching Frank one morning from the kitchen window. He had been sitting on the back steps for quite awhile with his elbow on his knee and his chin on his hand, looking off into space, and since he was always such a lively little fellow, I wondered about it. After watching him for a little while, I finally went out and sat down on the step beside him and said, “What are you doing, Frank?” He said, “Oh I was just thintin’.” I said, “Well what were you thinking about?” He replied, “I was just thintin’ about Muddy.”
Keith went to summer school that next summer and I’m quite sure that it was that same summer that he graduated with the fall class and received his bachelor’s degree. You remember he started teaching school with a high school diploma and six weeks of summer school. I remember that he took Mother and the boys with him for his graduation. I have thought so many times, and I have heard Mother tell and cry about how what an empty day it was for him that day to receive his bachelor’s degree without Eva present, because he thought that she had done so much to help him earn the degree. Keith didn’t stop there, he continued going on to summer school and was at summer school when he died, still working towards his doctoral degree.
I can’t remember if it was the first or second summer that we were with Keith and the boys that I added to Mother’s problems by having several attacks of what Dr. Strandquist called chronic appendicitis. He decided that my appendix must come out, so they did the operation. While I was in the hospital, since I had had some very bad sore throats, he decided that he would also take out my tonsils. He wanted to do it before he took the stitches out of my side, and he didn’t want to give me an anesthetic, because in those days the anesthetics made one so nauseous that he was afraid I’d tear the stitches. The anesthetic that he gave me, the local anesthetic which he gave me didn’t work very well, and it was a very painful ordeal, and by the time he was through I went into shock. I spent about two weeks in the hospital, and another two weeks at home in bed afterwards, so that added a great deal to Mother’s worries and to her work, I’m sure.
It might be interesting—we talk so much now about the expense of medical care—it might be interesting to tell you that to have this operation I had borrowed $100 from my cousin, Marie Erickson, Aunt Sophi’s daughter, and that covered everything, so far as I can remember, for the surgery and hospital stay. I remember I paid it back to Marie at $10 a month, which seemed like it took forever to me.
I think I’ll say right here before I forget it that the little club I mentioned a while ago, that the Eighth Ward girls invited me to join, is still after these some fifty years going strong. Our membership has changed a little, but not the number of members; well, that’s changed now too. We held our membership to twelve. And there, when I came back from Minneapolis, I found that there were some people who had either moved away, or died, or dropped out, but, and they had been replaced with other members. At this time there are just ten of us left. Two died within the last two years and none of us are in very spry health at the moment, but we still meet. We used to meet in the evenings and cook dinner for one another in each other’s homes, but now we have progressed to the state where we meet at noon at the Mansion House for lunch and then go to one another’s homes to visit for a couple of hours. It’s been nice to keep this relationship through all of these years, and I think that in many cases we have been able to lend a considerable help and encouragement to one another, and we have had a lot of fun together. Even now, at our advanced age, I’m sure some of you younger people would laugh if you could see us doubled over in laughter over some of the things that have happened to us in this last fifty years. We have decided at this late date that we will not add any new members, we’ll just plug along and sort of see who ends up at the finish line last.[4]
I also meant to tell you that the $100 that I received from Marie came in First World War United States Liberty Bonds. I’m sure none of you have ever seen one of those; those are really the only ones I ever saw too. I can’t remember the denomination on them. It seems to me they were only $10, but perhaps they were twenty-five. I worried a lot about this, because as I sent my money back at $10 at a time, I was afraid Marie would not put the money back into her savings. I knew that I wouldn’t have done under the same circumstances.
Marie was a very great favorite with all of us. I’m getting to the point where I can’t remember all the things that I may have told you, and I may have told you this at one time. She was my father’s favorite, I’m sure, of all of his nieces and nephews. She didn’t marry until she was forty-two. She did have one child, a boy named Fred. She had been disappointed in love in her early years and later married Charlie Erickson, who had loved her all of his life. I think he was one of our two town drunks in Heber and she wouldn’t marry him when they were younger. Later, after Aunt Sophi died, Marie did marry him. He was a nice guy—he had a farm in Heber and did very well. I think most of the boys worked for him at one time or another in his fields. I can remember when we first got our telephone that Mother used to get quite upset at our town drunks. When they would be hauled into court for drunkenness, my father always just took the bottle away from them and put them in jail until they sobered up. Then they were released, because they were both very nice guys and very harmless. Any time of night or day our phone might ring, and Mother would go to the phone and a voice would come over the phone, “Where’s Charlie? I want my bottle back.” They called my father “Charlie” because they knew him well, and she, not liking drunks, in fact being very frightened of drunks, almost wished at times that we didn’t have a telephone.
Marie had always been one person we had turned to. I think she was quite a bit older even than Keith. She lived with us in Provo, I remember, when she was nursing, and we always felt that she was almost one of the family.
It was also while we were living with Keith and the boys that Father’s favorite nephew, Charlie Bjorkman, was killed. I promised you that I would tell you something about Charlie earlier, so perhaps now is as good a time as any. You remember that I told you Charlie’s mother died in childbirth as a result of a fright and going into labor and dying in childbirth. When Charlie was—I don’t really know how old—but rather a young boy, he began to lose the use of one leg, and he finally was on crutches. My father saw that he went to several of the best doctors of that time, and they didn’t seem to be able to decide what was wrong. I think they finally had come to the conclusion that it was, well, I suppose what now we would call cancer. It didn’t seem to progress any further than to the point where he was not able to use his leg. He did have quite a bit of pain in it. He also lived with us in Provo and went to school at BYU.
You might be interested in Charlie’s patriarchal blessing. I know that it always sustained him through this period of his life. His patriarchal blessing had told him that he’d have a mysterious ailment in his body. Now, he received this patriarchal blessing before anything went wrong with his leg and he was perfectly healthy and normal. It told him that he did have a mysterious ailment in his body that would affect him, but that if he would have faith and live as he should, that it would not destroy him, and that ultimately he would be healed. It was not long after he had this patriarchal blessing that he started to go lame.
My father was very fond of Charlie. We all were; he was a very sweet fellow and very humble and tried very hard to do the things that he should. While he was at our place in Provo, he met a young lady who was also going to the BYU and was married to her. After he finished his schooling there, he also started to teach school. I don’t remember the details of when it happened, but eventually he did regain the use of his leg and was completely cured of whatever the problem had been. Now, I can’t tell you whether he had surgery, or whether it just went away, or what happened. I just do not remember. We weren’t very close to Charlie after he was married and after my father died. Charlie moved up to Logan and we moved to Myton. His wife’s family came from up in the Logan area, and he taught school up there. During the time that we were with Keith and the boys, Charlie was going to school one morning, driving. He was living in Logan and teaching in Wellsville (I’m not right sure of that), but anyway, the railroad used to cross the main highway, or the main highway crossed the railroad, however you want to put it. He didn’t hear the whistle; the engineer insisted that he did whistle. Apparently, Charlie, with his windows rolled up tight and perhaps with his thoughts on something else, didn’t hear the whistle, and so he was hit by the train and killed.[5]
I’m sorry we haven’t kept in better touch with that family. I have talked to his wife a time or two since. I really don’t know any of Charlie’s children or a great deal about his wife. I wish that some of you younger people might follow through and renew an acquaintance, or make an acquaintance with Charlie’s family. I’m sure it would please your grandfather very much.
Mother’s side still plagued her all of the time that we were with Keith and the boys, but for the most part she was able to plug along and do what had to be done. On one or two occasions, though, I remember that the area around where the tube had been in her side at the time of the surgery became infected. I remember the horror that I felt once when Dr. Strandquist came and lanced this area and took a full cup, teacup full of pus out of her side. She was soon on her feet again, though, and back on the job of taking care of the family.
That’s the only serious illness I can think of that we had during that period, except the second year that we were there when Max spent most of his winter in bed with kidney trouble. Poor little guy, he was so patient. He was spoiled, because he had never been a well child from his birth. Eva and Keith had been told that it was unlikely that he would grow to be an adult, and so they had always taken special care of him, and he had always been given just a little bit more attention than the other boys had. It was really wonderful to see that little kid when he was in bed, and to see how easily he could be persuaded to do the things that were necessary for him to do. He had to stay in bed all that winter. Mother and I spent endless hours reading stories to him, and he spent lots more hours drawing pictures and things of that sort. Keith spent a lot of time with him too, as much as he possibly could. After he was well and able to come to the table, it was really quite remarkable to see him too. He had to be on a special diet, and many times I could hardly eat my meal because of course the rest of us had to have food that was healthy and that we should have, and there were so many things that he couldn’t have.
Fortunately, time has a way of healing our wounds, and so though I’m sure they didn’t forget, Keith and the children were able to begin making a new life for themselves and accepting things as they were, the children accepting Grandma as a mother figure and Keith being able to go on with his work.
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Notes:
- Wright’s Store was on the northwest corner of 24th Street and Washington Boulevard in Ogden, Utah.
- In the Ogden 8th Ward at that time, Bishop Joseph Barker’s counselors were first Ephraim Manning and Nephi Brown, then Rulon Peterson replaced Nephi Brown. In 1931, Rulon Peterson became bishop with Mel Swenson and Claude Wheeler as his counselors.
- American Fork is where the state school for the mentally handicapped was located.
- When Mabel died 17 February 1991, club members Emma Stephens, Mildred Stowe Anderson, and Mary Edling were still living.
- Charles Peter Bjorkman was killed June 8, 1934. He had been married in 1924 and had three children, the first of whom had died at birth.
Go to Part 12 here.
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Eagerly waiting for part 12
ReplyDeleteHi Linda, I'm doing this as fast as I can! It is incredibly enjoyable too. She was SO amazing!
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