Mabel’s Memories, part 2

This is part 2 of the memories taped by Mabel Wahlquist and transcribed and edited by me. Part 1 consisted of memories of stories about the antecedents of her family.


Chapter 1: The Campbells and the Wahlquists (continued)

Later the whole family moved into Heber City, and my father, I think at that time, became the county clerk of Wasatch County. The first house they lived in, in Heber City was a house on the northwest corner of the block where the Wasatch High School now stands. My mother’s sister, Mary, lived on Main Street, probably less than a block from Mother. It must have been wonderful for these two sisters to be able to renew the close association that they had had as girls. Aunt Mary had married much younger than Mother did. She married James W. Clyde, who was a budding sheep man, and who had by this time become very successful, and they were quite affluent. But this didn’t hinder Mother and Aunt Mary, or Aunt Mamie as we called her, being very, very close. The older sister, Agnes, also lived in Heber. Her husband was Richard Jones, also a prominent sheep man. It seems strange to think that they might not have been so close during the years that Mother lived out at Daniels (or Buysville), but we have to remember that in those days the only mode of travel was horse and buggy or riding a horse, and since neither Mother nor Aunt Mary nor Aunt Agnes ever learned to do either, I’m sure they didn’t see each other a great deal except on special occasions.

Mother and Aunt Mary both had very pretty voices and as girls they had sung together a great deal in church and various places, and this they began doing again, singing at church and Relief Society and social functions in Heber. They continued this even—I can remember as a child going with Mother when they went to sing at various places. It was not until Mother had a large goiter removed and was unable to sing any more that they ceased to do this.

After they had lived in this little house for a few years (Roy and I were born there), my dad was able to buy the old Campbell home from which he had taken my mother as a bride. I’m sure it was with a great deal of pleasure that she was able to return to the lovely Campbell home. It must have given my father a wonderful sense of satisfaction to be able to buy it for her.

The home in Heber City

It probably would not be classed as one of the best homes in Heber, but it was certainly one of the better homes. It is a two-story red brick home. I’m sure most of you have had it pointed out to you. It was built in a T-shape; there were three large bedrooms upstairs, and downstairs there was one large bedroom and what seemed to me as a little girl an immense kitchen and dining room area, and of course the parlor. The parlor didn’t have any furniture for a long time, I’m sure. In fact, I can remember when some of the pieces for it were bought. It had a nice rag rug that had been sewed and woven, as they did in those days. Somewhere along the way there had been a frame summer kitchen and porch built across the back, and our cellar went down from this summer kitchen, and I do remember that we sometimes spent our summers living in this summer kitchen. But certainly the most important room in the house was this big kitchen/dining room area that I mentioned. The family lived in this house until we went to Myton in 1917, except for two years that were spent in Provo when my father was the juvenile judge there.

I don’t know how much acreage there was, but I do know that there was a lovely area south of the house where my mother had her roses and there were lilac bushes there, and my mother always had sweet peas all along the front fence. North of the house was an area that I mostly remember as being the place where we played and where ball games were held and so on. Of course there were the usual number of sheds and a corral for the cows and a pig pen which afforded an amusing story about Jack, which I’ll perhaps tell you at a later time. There was also a very good granary which I would guess might have been part of the original home. This house had been built on the original homestead. Back of the house, or east of the house was a large garden area, and my father raised everything that you can imagine in his garden. He loved to get new things and hunt in seed catalogs for unusual things and to see what he could raise. We always had a big garden, and I’m sure this afforded us a great deal of our living. We also had cows, and further east of the garden was a pasture area where the cows were kept. A stream ran all of the way through the yard. It was a creek which we called Lake Crick, and depending on the time of the year and the weather, it was anything from a small creek we could walk across rather precariously on the rocks, or it could be a rather booming stream. My memory is that it afforded most of the water that we used on our gardens.

But I’m getting ahead of myself because I’m not even there yet. Roy and I were born in this home, I think. Mother had one other child—a baby named Ruth who was what was called then a blue baby and who died at the age of 14 days, depriving me of a sister that I would very much liked to have had.

My father continued to gain prominence in the community, both in church and in civic offices. I was too young to remember many of the offices he held, but I do recall that he worked on the Stake Sunday School Board and that at the time we left Heber to move to Myton, that he was president of the Wasatch Stake High Priest Quorum. He served several terms as county attorney of Wasatch County, and he was very prominent in the Republican party. He always insisted that if we were to have good government, that good men must be interested and active in politics, and he always took a very active part and encouraged all of his family to take an active part in politics.

My father was a very good lawyer and felt very strongly about the law, but he was also a very compassionate man. I’m sure he suffered many times over actions that it was necessary for him to take as a prosecuting attorney. My mother tells of one case where he had a young man from a small town in his court, and the boy’s mother had come to be with him. They had no money and no place to stay, so my father brought them home and they stayed in our home during the time that he was being prosecuted in my father’s court. On their return home, this mother had been so grateful for what had been done that she sent my mother a lot of old clothing that she could use for carpet rags, because my mother was in the process of making a carpet during the time that they had stayed with us.

It’s rather ironic that in later years Jack was playing in the granary and got into the boxes where these carpet rags were, and did a little dressing up and not too long after that came down with a severe case of diphtheria. On investigating, it was found that this family had had diphtheria the year before this young man had been prosecuted. So apparently this sweet lady who had sent Mother the clothing had also sent along her family’s diphtheria germs. Needless to say, the granary was a very fun place. Many’s the occasion when I and my friends have dressed up in the old clothes that we used to find there in the granary. We used to have shows there and charge pennies or pins or whatever as admission, and we had a great many wonderful times in that old granary. It just happened that Jack was the unfortunate one in this particular case. Fortunately, none of the rest of us had diphtheria, and to my knowledge that was the only unhappy thing that ever happened as a result of all of the fun that we had in that dear old granary.

I had planned here to start telling some of my early recollections of my life in Heber City, but I keep thinking about a couple of dreams that my mother told me about shortly after my father died, and so I think I’ll tell you about them here, before I go on with anything else. My father had always been a strong, healthy man. I don’t ever recall him spending a day in bed. On the other hand, my mother had always been very frail. Though she worked hard, she was not well, and I’m sure in her wildest imagination that it never occurred to her that my father would precede her in death. His death came as a very great shock to her when he died quite suddenly with a massive heart attack, and she was so inconsolable that we were very concerned about her. But one morning she woke up and told me about a dream that she had had, and I think that putting her dream together with one that he had told her about helped her a great deal. I had never heard my father’s dream—perhaps my brothers have, I don’t know—but until she told it to me at this time, I had never heard it.

It seemed that shortly after he came home from his mission he had this dream. In it he and two other young men were in a room with three somewhat older men. As dreams have a way of doing, things just sort of developed gradually so that he realized that these young men and himself were being set apart to go on missions and that the three older men who were there with them were men of great authority, so great that he gradually realized that the missions to which they were being called were not missions of this world, and that these men were not men from this world. He gradually gained the impression that the man in charge was none other than the Prophet Joseph Smith. The other fellows were set apart first. As they came to my father, he said to them that he had just returned from a mission, that he was twenty-eight years old, and that he had wanted very much to be married and have sons of his own. He told them that he was the only son of an only son and that he was the last of his name, and that if he were not allowed to marry and have sons, the name would die with him, and that he wanted very much to have sons to carry on his name and to carry on the work of the Church for which his mother had sacrificed so much. Well, it seemed that he was told that his call would be reserved for a later date and that he would be given the opportunity to marry and to have a family.

When he awoke, the dream was very vivid to him, so much so that he sought out an old man who lived in Heber who had joined the Church very young, who knew many of the hardships of Missouri and Nauvoo, and who remembered the Prophet’s martyrdom. Without telling him anything about the dream, he simply told this man that he was going to describe someone to him, and then would this old gentleman please tell him whom he had described? So he described the man whom he thought, or whom his impression had been was the Prophet Joseph. After he had described him, the old gentleman said to him, “You’ve described the Prophet Joseph Smith.” My father said, “Well he doesn’t look—the description does not fit his pictures.” The old gentleman said that he did not look like the pictures of our current day.

I guess the dream stayed with him very strongly and became even stronger when in the course of the next short period (a year or year and a half, or some such matter) the two young men who had been in the room with him both died. I’m sure that this dream had a great deal of influence on my father. As his sons came along, I’m sure it helped him have greater determination to bring them up as righteously as he could.

After his death, my mother apparently had this dream given to her, she thought, to help her with her own problem. She dreamed that she was in a room with a long counter running through it, and she was on one side of the counter and on the other side of the counter she saw my father with a group of other people working very busily. Now this counter could easily be accounted for, because in my father’s office there was a long counter, it having been, I think, a real estate office before he rented it. Of course we didn’t pay any attention to the counter—we just walked around it and on into his office. But she had the impression that she must not walk around the counter, she must wait, so she stood there waiting. Finally my father looked up and saw her there and smiled, but he didn’t offer to come to her. Well, she stood her ground; she was not used to being treated this way by my father, and she waited even though she had the feeling that she was supposed to go away. In a little while he looked up again and saw her still standing there, and this time he smiled again but shook his head and went on with what he was doing. She still remained waiting, and after a while, he finally looked up again and saw her waiting and walked over to her, and with a gentle smile that he reserved only for her, he said to her, “Lizzie, I can’t talk to you now. As you can see, we are very busy here.”

With that she awakened, but she awakened with the feeling that what he said, that “I can’t talk to you now” was an assurance that they would talk again. While this didn’t relieve her of her grief—she still grieved greatly for him—it did make her grief more bearable and was a great consolation to her, and she was determined to continue her own life in a manner that would help to make it so that they could talk again.

For many years, both before and after my father’s death, my mother was president of the little Relief Society in Myton, which is quite different, I think, from being a Relief Society president nowadays, since her dominion extended several miles in each direction of town. As I said once before, Mother never learned to drive a horse and buggy, so when she heard that someone was ill, if there was no one there to take her, she simply gathered up everything she could carry and started out to walk. When we saw her again, we knew that the person had either recovered or that Mother, perhaps with the help of some other neighbor ladies, had washed and prepared the body for burial. This was very hard on my gentle little mother, but she was a very good Relief Society president and took her responsibilities very seriously.

There were some funny sides to it too. I remember once her being very upset because she had gone to visit a lady who had a new baby, and her bed was filthy with a very ragged quilt, and Mother came home to get clean linens. As she was going out the door, she came back to take a brand-new quilt that she had just finished making, which she was very proud of, so that the lady might have a pretty bed when people came to see her. The following day, on Sunday, my father and she went to see the lady, and the dirty quilt was back on the bed, and the brand-new quilt was out in the yard in the dirt with the kids playing on it. Well, with all her gentleness, my mother could get really upset, and that’s one time when she was, and my father had to repeat several times, as he often did, that poor people had poor ways.

My mother had many interesting experiences as a Relief Society president. Perhaps when I get to the Myton part of my story I’ll tell you some more of them. With her natural shyness and her retiring spirit, I’m sure some of the things that she had to do were very difficult for her. She would always much rather be in the background than in the limelight, and she would always much prefer to listen than to speak. Perhaps it’s too bad she didn’t have more of her own mother’s natural love for nursing and for the care of the sick and such things, but this was not the case.

My father, on the other hand, was a natural with people. He loved people. He loved to be in the center of any group. He loved to express what he thought, and he loved to listen to what others thought. He enjoyed a good argument, and he could have a good argument without anger. He could be very gentle with people.

Again, to mention slightly the Myton era, I know that when we first went there and he was setting up his law practice, he was also the Branch president (it was not a ward at that time) and he had his office in our home. I can remember thinking to myself that we’d starve to death because towards many couples who came to him for divorces, he saw his duty first as that of Branch president, and he tried to counsel and help and save the marriage. Many people, I’m sure, who came expecting to file for divorce went away determined to make their marriage work, and in most cases I’m sure it did.

People sensed this love for them in my father and came to him with their problems, and for help. I don’t know of anyone, really, who didn’t love him. In that respect, he was very much like my brother Roy in his years as a bishop, and I’ve often thought of the similarity between them. They were very, very different in so many ways, but they both had that ability to draw people to them. They both had a marvelous sense of humor and a sense of the ridiculous, and they both had such compassion for people.


Chapter 2
Childhood in Heber and Provo

I will try to tell you some of the things that I remember as a small child. I’m sure that none of them will be very eventful, but they might give you some idea of our family life at the time that I was growing up.

Mabel as a child

I was born in Heber in 1904, on the seventh of January. Now this is probably the only fact that you’ll get, and the things that I tell you will probably not be in chronological order.

Aside from my father and mother, probably the first thing I remember was that big combination kitchen and dining room that I mentioned before. It was probably a very plain room, but to me it seemed like a beautiful room. I well remember the geraniums in the wide windowsills, and it seemed to me they were always in bloom. I remember the white lace curtains that were starched stiff and dried on the curtain stretchers.

I remember my bird, my Dickie, who sang in his cage above the geraniums. My Aunt Maude Campbell raised canaries and sold them, but somehow or other she always managed to provide me with one. I’m sure there were a series of “Dickies,” but they all seem like one to me, except for one time. Someone had apparently left the door open on this occasion when they fed Dickie, the door to his cage, and he got out, and my cat who was ever watchful, got to him before I did and killed him. I was able to salvage the body and give it a proper burial. Dickie was buried in a shoebox under a tree by Lake Crick, between the pasture and the garden, and it was a very lovely funeral. All of the kids came with bunches of wildflowers, and we cried copious tears. I recall that there was almost immediately another Dickie there and I don’t remember any serious grief after that funeral.

Another thing I remember about that room was the big, black, kitchen stove. It stood out a ways from the wall, at least far enough so that Roy and I could crawl in behind it on cold days with the latest Sears-Roebuck Catalog and play our game of “I’ll take this page and you take that page,” which we did by the hour. From the oven of that big old stove my mother used to take beautiful brown loaves of bread, which she would always allow us to break, at least one, while they were warm, to eat with butter and honey and jam. That was a wonderful feast.

I suppose the focal place of the room would be the big dining room table, where the seven of us sat down three times a day to eat, and I mean three times a day. Somehow we all understood that everybody was to be there at mealtime. My father came home for lunch from his office, and we came home from school. In the morning and in the evening we had family prayer, and we all took our turn giving the prayer, from Father down to me as soon as I was eight years old. I remember being coached at that time and being prepared to take my part in family prayer.

I don’t remember our seating arrangement at the table except for Roy and I. My father sat at the head of the table with Mother on his left—I guess that was closest to the stove—and me next to Mother and Roy on the other side of Father. That probably saved some arguments, because for some reason or other we only needed to be able to look at each other or kick each other under the table to send us both off into giggles, and sometimes it was necessary for us to be sent away from the table. But on the whole, our mealtime was a very happy time at home. Each of us had an opportunity to tell the events of our day and my father and the older boys discussed politics and current events and religion.

Since I never did finish high school, I’ve always maintained that I gained my education around our dining room table.

Above the dining room table hung a coal oil lamp which provided most of the light in the room. There were probably other coal oil lamps scattered about, but I don’t remember them; I do remember the one above the table.

I must tell you one funny thing that happened when we were having family prayer. We had in Heber, oh, not more than a half dozen families who were not members of the LDS Church, and they had a little mission church—Southeast Something—I don’t remember the name of it. One family who attended it were quite close neighbors of ours and friends of ours, and we did visit the church occasionally. I liked to go because we were always given a little picture with some religious scene. They liked still better to come to our church because we had “play dinner.”

Back to the prayer. One night we were ready for dinner and one of the little boys in the family was there to play with Roy, and since he had had his dinner, he was told that he might wait while Roy ate. Of course before we ate, we all knelt down to have family prayer. I don’t recall who was giving the prayer, but during the time that the prayer was being given, all of a sudden a little voice piped up [from] down on the floor by us saying, “If you’ll tell me what you’ve lost, I’ll see if I can help you find it.” Well, I’m sure it cracked up most of us, but somehow we got through it without the little boy having his feelings hurt or probably even knowing what had happened.

After dinner, in the evening, the dining room table was still pretty much the focal point because that’s where the light was. That’s where the boys studied, and that’s where my father sat to read his paper and where Mother sat to read her book (she was very fond of reading), and where I sat to do my coloring and painting. So we grew up pretty much around that dining room table.

I imagine we were a noisy bunch. Sometimes Mother used to slip away to go over to Aunt Maron Campbell’s for a short visit, probably to get away from us while Father was there to see that things were kept quiet. Aunt Maron was my Uncle John’s wife. He was the one who had owned the sawmill from which the lumber part of our house came, and had at one time owned the house. He died very young and Aunt Maron was left with two daughters, Jenny and Maisie, or I guess to put it correctly, Maisie and Jenny. They had also had a boy, younger, but he died as a small child. Aunt Maron was a lovely person and she and my mother were very fond of one another. My father was very good to Aunt Maron, and I’m sure she appreciated him greatly. I should call her Aunt Marion, but we didn’t, we called her Aunt Maron.

As I started to say, Mother would slip over there in the evenings to visit with Aunt Maron, but before she could be there more than a few minutes, she said one by one we would all come traipsing in. Since Aunt Maron was a very careful housekeeper, Mother shooed us out back home where we belonged. Aunt Maron earned her living sewing. She did beautiful sewing. My mother was not a sewer. She loved to make quilts and rag rugs and things of that nature, and she did make our house dresses and she made some of my school dresses. But my best dresses were always made by Aunt Maron. I remember many times going over to have my dresses fitted, and on Sunday morning running over to have Aunt Maron tie my sash so it would look right before I left for Sunday School.

One very funny thing that happened was on the Fourth of July, or 24th, I don’t know which. I had been given a nickel to spend and I had the nickel in my mouth when I went over to Aunt Maron’s to have her tie my sash. In the course of events, I swallowed the nickel. By the time I got home all of the family had left, Father and the boys. Mother was still there.

Mother very rarely went with us to the parade. She usually stayed home and made chicken and dumplings and green peas. We always had green peas and chicken on the 24th of July. That was the first time that my father permitted the potatoes to be dug, because he thought, in his good, practical way that we had to wait until they got big enough, but we could dig some nice new potatoes to have with our peas on the 24th of July. That, with homemade ice cream and cake, made a wonderful dinner when we came home hot and tired from the parade.

When I got home, why, the boys, as I say, had gone. My father always gave each one of them something to spend while they were downtown. Come to think of it, Jack had not gone, because he’s the main character in this story. I mustn’t forget that. Jack was still there, and I was crying because I had swallowed my nickel. Mother said to Jack, couldn’t he give me one of his nickels so that I would have something that I could spend for candy? But Jack, being of a good, solid, practical nature, said, “Well Mother! She’s got her nickel!” He wasn’t about to give me one of his. I kidded Jack about this in California just a few years ago, and he declares that he can’t remember it. I don’t know that I blame him for not remembering.

I just happened to think, so I’ll mention here that I remember as a little girl standing in my nightgown and my bare feet out on the back porch with my hand in my father’s watching Halley’s Comet, and remembering my father saying that we wouldn’t see it again for such a long time that he would probably never see it again. He felt that it was worthwhile to wake us all up so that we might come out to see it.

My father and I had a very close relationship. He somehow had the idea that everything I did was funny. I remember, too, that whenever I got in a bit of trouble during the day, that I used to watch for him to come home at night, and as I saw him coming down the street I would run down to meet him, and with my hand in his walking home, I’d have my side of the story all told before we got home to Mother. Somehow he thought this, too, was funny.

I’m not going to take very long, and everybody’s fussed so about it, I’ll just do it and get it over with. But now that I’ve started, the memories keep coming in so fast that I can’t sort them out. I don’t have anything chronologically, and I really can’t think how quite to put them together, so I’m just telling you things as they come to my mind. If they’re where they fit, fine; if they’re not, I’m sorry.[1]

Somebody said, why don’t you tell something about school, but that’s the last thing I want to tell you anything about. Everybody else can remember their teachers, they can remember what they did at school, they can remember who were in their rooms, they can think about their pictures in their minds and all, and I don’t remember a thing about school until I was in the sixth grade. I can’t remember a teacher I had. I can’t remember anything that I did except recess, playing ball, and I wasn’t very good at that.

I remember going to school in the cold winter mornings after a snowstorm with us all strung out in a row, Keith first, then Fred, John, Roy, and me at the very end. Of course my legs weren’t quite as long, so I sometimes got stuck, and Keith had to come back and lift me over the rough spots. Then I can remember as it got colder that we could walk on top of the snow in Heber, and sometimes right across the tops of the fences. I can remember walking home that we used to throw ourselves with our arms out back in the snow to make angels. I can remember all sorts of intelligent things like that, but nothing about what happened in school.

I do remember something that happened in Provo, but I’m not supposed to be in Provo yet; in fact, I don’t know where I’m supposed to be really. I was in the second grade, I guess, when we were in Provo, and I do remember that they had fire drills. To show you how smart I was, there was one house between our house and school. There were three doors in our school, I can remember that, and I can remember the building. Keith was in junior high school then, but the other three boys were in the same school I was. I just never did learn—when we got a fire drill, why, I would get out as quickly as I could, run around to all of the doors and see that all of my brothers were out, and then I would run home to tell Mother. Well, I’m sure Mother wanted to know. She was always worried about everything that everybody did, so maybe that was what I was supposed to do.

Somehow school didn’t mean a great deal to me until the sixth grade, as I said. Then I got Atty Wooton for a teacher, and he woke me up and from then on, school was really lots of fun. I had an experience that I remember in one of the grades when a little Moulton boy broke his arm and we all took nickels to school to buy him some oranges. I had never had an orange then, but I took my nickel and we bought this bag of oranges and the whole class went down to see him. My, those oranges did look good! I stumbled over everything I could see for a week afterwards, but I just was not lucky enough to break anything.

Well, that ought to take care of school for awhile. We’ll pick it up when I’m a little further along and I can tell you something just a little bit more complimentary, at least to me.

I remember saying that I could remember some of the furniture that went into our parlor. So maybe I could tell you about a couple of things that I do remember. I remember when we got our phonograph. Oooh—that was really a big day. That summer we had been sitting out on the bank of Lake Crick listening to [the] Jones’s phonograph. They got theirs before we did. I remember their favorite record, or at least my favorite record of the ones they had was “Red Wing.” They had a big old black horn on theirs; it wasn’t very pretty. When ours came, it was a beautiful red horn. It had big pink roses all over on the inside. The records were cone-shaped. I’m sure some of you have seen that type of phonograph in museums and probably down at Pioneer Village or somewhere. It was just the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my whole life. We got several records with it. I remember there were some Harry Lauder records with it that my mother and father could laugh and laugh over. There was “Sweet Alice Ben Bolt,” some religious records, and I guess the one that impressed me the most was the one about who threw the overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder.

The other thing I remember coming into our parlor would be several years later, but it was when my father bought my piano for me when I was eleven years old. That was really a wonderful day, too. Who says advertising is new? My father saw an ad in the Deseret News. I am 72 now and I was 11 when I got it, so that was 61 years ago.[2] He saw this ad in the Deseret News that had a coupon, and if he took it into Dayne’s Music Store in Salt Lake, they would allow $50 on a piano. I didn’t know I was to get it, but he was going to Provo and I guess on to Salt Lake, at least he did go on to Salt Lake and looked over all of the pianos. He didn’t know a thing about music and couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, but he was a good shopper, and he looked them all over and picked out the one that he liked. He was not the most trustful soul, apparently, because he went back to the piano and made a little mark on it so they couldn’t gyp him. I remember when we uncrated the piano when it came, that the first thing he did was to go around the back of the piano and look for his little mark, and then he was satisfied that he had gotten the one he had picked out. It was a lovely piano and it did have a beautiful tone.

I took lessons from Nellie DeGraff, my Aunt Mary Clyde’s oldest daughter. I don’t remember how many I took, but I must have learned something; at least I learned how to play the hymns. My father was quite insistent that that be part of my learning process, and it did stand me in good stead, because in later years I played the hymns in church for many years.

I remember an incident of coming home at night, getting home before Mother and Father did from church. None of the boys were home, and I was kind of frightened, but I didn’t want to show that I was frightened by going outside or running to the neighbors or over to Aunt Maron’s or anywhere. So I sat down and played a hymn, and when Father and Mother came home I was playing hymns. Of course I confessed to Father that I had been frightened and that that’s what I had done. I will always remember how pleased he was. He at that time said that he couldn’t think of anything one could do better if they were frightened than to play a hymn.

When I mentioned sitting on the bank of Lake Crick listening to the Jones’s phonograph, it made me think of a couple of other times when Lake Crick and the Joneses played quite a part in my life. I remember one time when Lake Crick was a rather roaring torrent. My brothers and some other boys got a tub and fastened a rope on each handle of the tub. One stood on each bank of the creek and one would get into the tub and they would pull each other across. Well, I thought it would be fun to ride, and so did my friend Lizzie Fisher, who lived at the Jones’s (I think she was their niece; she had always lived with them as her mother died when she was a baby, and I always thought of her as a Jones). Anyway, we thought we would like to do it, but we were littler than they were, and of course we were pushed aside as little kids are, but we were not defeated. So we went over to our old granary and found an old tub of my mother’s and took it out to Lake Crick. We couldn’t agree which one would get in first, and anyway we had no ropes to pull one another across, so we both got in and started down the stream. We soon found that the tub we had chosen had a hole in the bottom, plus the fact that the stream was much swifter than we had anticipated. Fortunately, we were able to yell loud enough so that the boys heard us and we were rescued before we came to the bridge.

The other story I’m thinking of is when the Jones’s house caught on fire. It was on a Sunday. We had had Sunday School, and we were hurrying with our dinner to get back to the 2 o’clock Sacrament meeting. My father hadn’t changed out of his brand new suit, which he was wearing for the first time. Suddenly, Lizzie Fisher came running up to the front door screaming, “Our house is on fire!” My father and my brothers went on the run. We had no telephone then, so Father told us [Lizzie and me] to run up and down the street as hard as we could and as fast as we could screaming “Fire!” We had no fire department either in Heber at that time; it was a voluntary fire department. Well, we did this, we ran and ran and ran, until we both were exhausted—fell onto the ground exhausted—and we didn’t realize until afterwards that neither one of us had said a word.

The men who did see the fire formed a water brigade, each with a bucket, passing it along one to the other from Lake Crick to the Jones’s house. They did have a hydrant and a hose, and they finally did get to use them, but they didn’t for quite a while because the oldest of the Jones girls, Annie, had been putting up fruit—she had put the fruit upstairs. She had immediately run upstairs and started throwing the fruit out the window! It was landing on the sandstone walk below and the bottles were breaking and the glass was flying so hard that the men couldn’t get near the house with the hose. But finally, the fire was put out and everything turned out well, except my father’s suit.

I don’t know how old I was when we got our first telephone. I was never, ever allowed for a long time to forget my first phone call on it. I came home and I was so excited about it. When it got around to my turn to use it, why, I called one of my friends to tell her that we had a telephone. In the course of the conversation, she said to me, “What are you doing?” and I said, “We’re making fudge, can’t you smell it?”

I also remember the first moving picture I went to. It was a silent film, of course. My brother Keith took me to it. Keith was my idol for many years. He was the oldest one in the family and so he was enough older than I was that he would take me places, where Roy wouldn’t because he was afraid somebody might think he was taking a girl. Jack and Fred were too involved in other things, but Keith would very often feel sorry for his little sister and take me somewhere, and he did take me to this picture show. I remember the show was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The show house was right next to the livery stable, which made a very nice setting for it, I’ve thought since, because it was in the middle of the summer, and the fragrance from the livery stable fit in very nicely with the mood of the show.

I remember the first doll that I got that opened and closed its eyes, and I still remember the shudder that went through me when it did that. It just didn’t seem natural to me to see this doll do such an unnatural thing. My mother said I never did play with the doll, but it did have some nice clothes and they fit my cat rather well. I used to dress my cat up in the clothes and wheel it around in my doll buggy. It was much more satisfactory than the doll because the cat would cry and of course if it didn’t I could always pinch its tail. I did get in a little trouble one time when I dressed my father’s new Rhode Island Red pullets that he had sent away for in the doll clothes and wheeled one of them around in my doll carriage on its back. I discovered to my horror that they don’t live very long on their backs. That’s one time when I rather think my father didn’t think I was funny, but I don’t recall that even then he punished me. I didn’t play very much with dolls except when I played with the other girls in the neighborhood—Lizzie Fisher and the Duke girls who lived just a little further along the block and who were also very good friends during the years that I was growing up.

I did love to play with the boys and go up in the pasture where they were digging roads and doing all sorts of interesting things. But they had their own way of getting rid of me, when my mother would, after I had pestered her long enough, insist that they take me. When we’d get almost up there—they knew that I was terribly afraid of spiders—when they’d hear a hoot owl (and we had loads of hoot owls in the trees up there) they would say to each other, “Did you hear that spider?” That’s all it took, and I would turn and run for home as fast as I could go. The boys knew they were pretty safe, because when Mother would ask me why I had come back, I’d always say, “There was a spider.” She knew that I was afraid of spiders, so that took care of that. They didn’t ever get into any trouble over it. I don’t think they even recall the incident. To this day I can’t hear a hoot owl without thinking about spiders.

A dear little German lady lived a few houses from us, who made her living selling flowers. We always got our flowers from her at Decoration Day, and she always brought flowers every Sunday to church, to Sunday School. Everyone loved her. Roy and I got in a little trouble one time because of what we did, and I think we learned our lesson that time on honesty. We wanted to butter our mother up a little bit for something, I don’t even remember what it was we wanted her to do, but we thought it would be nice to take her some flowers. So we were going by Mrs. Schank’s place, and it occurred to us that we could pick a nice bouquet of flowers just by taking flowers whose heads were sticking through the fence. They weren’t in Mrs. Schank’s yard at all, they were outside the fence. We picked a nice bouquet of flowers, and we took them home to Mother. It didn’t take Mother long to figure out what had happened. I never will forget us going back with Mother right behind us, taking us back over to Mrs. Schank’s to tell her and to apologize and to explain to her that we had taken the flowers. She explained to us that that was how she made her living and said all of the things that she should have said, being a very wise little old lady, but then she brought us each out a great big sugar cookie. It was one of the best cookies I think I ever ate, and I think that it was also one of the best lessons I ever learned.

I don’t want to come to the end of this cassette in the middle of anything, and I’m sure that I’m almost through with it, so I don’t think I’ll start anything of any great length. I might tell you younger people who think “home evenings” are new that they are not. One of the very first things that I can remember is family home evening, which was a weekly occurrence in our home. I remember that one winter we read a children’s version of the Book of Mormon. I also remember our home teachers. Those days they were called ward teachers. They used to come regularly and it was part of the evening for each of the children to take some part in the lesson when they came. You children today have Primary, and we also had Primary then, but in addition to Primary, we also had religion class. That was also a weekly meeting, and one which we were expected attend each week. As I recall, I enjoyed religion class fully as much as I did Primary.

I was too much of a tomboy to be very domestic, but I do remember how proud I was the summer I was ten when I won a prize in baking bread. I guess I was particularly proud of myself because I had a cousin, Lavina Campbell (she was Aunt Maude and Uncle Jim Campbell’s daughter—we used to visit with them a great deal), and Lavina could just cook anything. They were very proud of her and whenever we’d go there for dinner, why, Aunt Maude would say, “Lavina made the biscuits,” or “Lavina made the pie,” or “Lavina did this.” My mother would look at me and say, “See what Lavina can do,” and it was years before I could learn to really appreciate or like Lavina.

The nice thing about bread was the homemade yeast that we had to work with. I don’t suppose any of you can remember what fun it was when your mother ran out of yeast to be sent to the neighbor’s to get a fresh start, and how much fun it was to carry it home, and how good it tasted to stick your finger in it and then put your finger in your mouth. The next thing you knew you were taking a little sip and another little sip, until sometimes by the time you got home, why, it was rather obvious that you had been doing quite a bit of sipping. It was a whole lot better tasting than the yeast that we have today, and it did make darned good bread.

There might be time on this [cassette] to tell Myrna and Kristin about another room in our house, and that was the clothes closet. It was a big clothes closet underneath the stairs in the house. Of course, where the stairs were at the top, it was a nice, high ceiling and was a big closet, but as the stairs went down to the ground floor, so did the ceiling, so the back of the closet was very low. Back here my mother used to keep her baskets and where she kept her rug rags. Someone had told her that lightning wouldn’t strike if you sat on a feather tick or on rags or clothing of some sort. She was very, very frightened of lightning, and of course because she was, I was too. We did have very, very bad electrical storms. I remember spending many hours in that dark closet with my mother, sitting on these baskets and rags, waiting for an electrical storm to get over with. It seemed like sometimes they lasted a long time. The storms would go down and around the mountains of that little valley and keep coming back into the town. We’d hear the thunder crash and we’d hold tight to each other and sit back there on the sacks of rags.

It has just occurred to me that in telling these experiences, that I have fallen right into a pattern of calling my parents “Father” and “Mother.” Somehow, some children did, I don’t remember, but we never did call them “Mom” and “Dad.” When we were little children we said “Mama” and “Papa,” but when we were too big to say that, we said “Father” and “Mother.”

Mabel’s parents, 1914

I’ve been wondering why this cassette hasn’t run out, but I just noticed that it’s thirty minutes on each side instead of fifteen as the others that I have, have been. So there might be time to tell you what I promised, as to why my father was so against practical jokes. With all of his sense of humor and with all his love of fun, that was one thing he did not like, was a practical joke.

It had to do with the death of his youngest sister, Esther. She and her husband had just recently come to Utah and neither one of them spoke English,[3] and she was about to have her first child. They lived in a little house in the mouth of Daniels Canyon. I guess it would be the last house before the canyon. At that time, well, and I suppose today, the sheep men take their sheep up the canyon in the springtime where they graze in Strawberry Valley, and then in the fall they bring them down either to be slaughtered or to be taken out west to the winter range. On this particular night, three young men were bringing a herd of sheep down the canyon, and they were getting near home, and I guess drinking a bit, and they thought it would be great sport to play a joke on this immigrant family. They were trying to think what they might do when suddenly they realized that one of their dogs had torn one of the sheep’s legs quite badly, and it was bleeding quite profusely. They got the idea to cover blood, or to smear blood over one of the men, and then the other two men carried this man into the house. They came yelling and banged on the door, and Aunt Esther’s husband opened the door, and they came in with this man all covered with blood. Perhaps when the young men saw what they had done, they were sorry, I don’t know, but she immediately went into labor. Before help could be brought, the baby had been born alive, but she had died from shock. The baby was named Charles, I suppose after my father, and as a young man and boy, he was quite close to our family. I’m sure I’ll tell you something about him later. But my father always felt that this was such a senseless death, and it was one of the reasons, I’m sure, why he abhorred practical jokes.


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Notes:

1. By this time in the taping of these stories, two of Mabel’s brothers had visited and heard her stories, and as people from the same family with different memories will do, they each disputed with her over details of her stories, certain that she was remembering things wrong.
2. This was 1976, when Mabel had been taping her stories for over two years.
3. Esther came to Utah from Sweden with her mother and little brother in 1877 and married much later, so this story had acquired details that were not quite right by the time Mabel retold it. But Esther did die when her first child Charles Bjorkman was born.

Mabel, second from right on top row, as a sixth-grader, age 11 or 12

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Go to Part 3.
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