Mabel’s Memories, part 3

This is part 3 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. Part 2 tells the first part of her childhood in Heber City, Utah.


Chapter 2: Childhood in Heber City and Provo (continued)

I have said a little about Father’s sister, Esther, and perhaps I should say something about his oldest sister, Aunt Sophi. To me, Aunt Sophi was always an old woman, though I’m quite sure she wasn’t as old as I thought. She, before I knew her, had had a mastoid operation and the surgeon had made a mistake and had cut the muscles in the side of her face and her mouth was twisted around to one side. She had been a very fine-looking woman, and she was terribly embarrassed about the way this left her face looking. Her ear was also enlarged and very badly scarred. She always wore a little triangular scarf on her head, tied under her chin. To me, she didn’t speak very well. She had quite an accent in the first place, and then her mouth being as it was probably interfered with her speech a great deal too. Of course, after her husband died, she had worked in the fields, so she was rather stooped. She was quite a large woman, and seemed, as I say, to me to be quite an old woman.

We loved to go out to Aunt Sophi’s. She—I don’t know—from the time you arrived until the time you left, you seemed to be eating. Of course, that never made anyone feel very bad. From some mysterious place or other, there always appeared doughnuts and rolls and cakes and cookies and Swedish breads, and they just seemed to keep coming from the time you got there until you went home. My father nor mother drank coffee, but Aunt Sophi had never broken herself of the habit of drinking coffee, and the coffee pot was always on the back of the stove. The moment that a neighbor or anyone came, it was always pushed up to the front to be heated up for them to have coffee. I don’t know when it ever got washed, but I suppose it did sometime. The house smelled very strongly of coffee, which I hate to say, but I do think is a marvelous aroma. To this day, I can’t smell the aroma of coffee without thinking of my Aunt Sophi.

Aunt Sophi’s children were all older than we were. Her youngest boy, John, was about three years older than my oldest brother, Keith. So there was no one particularly there for us to play with. There was the hill on the side to roam, and there were the corrals and barns on the opposite side of the street to play in, and down the street, or down the road I should call it, a little way my Aunt Sophi’s oldest daughter, Esther, lived. She had a daughter a little bit younger than I. Her name was Virginia, and I used to play with her a good deal. We also sometimes visited a family named Plummer who lived there, who had a daughter a little younger than I, whose name was Ladeana. They also had a bunch of boys. One of them was Gale Plummer, who years later had a great deal to do with the theater at the University of Utah for many years.

I think a big part of the fun of going out to Aunt Sophi’s was going and coming. In the wintertime we went in a bobsled. We nearly always went at New Year’s, and it was so much fun down tucked in a quilt and blankets down in the bottom of the sled, with the bells clanging. I used to always be asleep before we would get home. In the summer, we went in the surrey. I can barely remember when it was the surrey with the fringe on top, but I guess the top wore out and in later years it became just a two-seated buggy. It was still fun to ride out to Daniels. It’s only a distance of perhaps, at the most, three, maybe four miles, I don’t know, but it seemed like a long, long journey, and is one of the memories that is clearest to me of my younger days.

I say that I don’t think of Aunt Sophi as ever being young, but many years after we moved to Myton, in fact, after we got our first car, I remember coming to Heber with my father to Aunt Sophi’s funeral. He had learned that she was very ill, and we had hoped to get there before she passed away, but we were coming down Daniels Canyon when someone stopped us and told my father that his sister had passed away.

When I was a little girl growing up in Heber and Provo, there were no soup kitchens or bread lines, at least not in our little town, anyway. So when transients came through town (we called them tramps), they would come to your door and ask for food. In our home, I suppose because of my father’s hardships in his early years, a tramp was never turned away. He was always brought in if Father was at home and was allowed to wash up on the back porch where Father and the boys washed when they came in from the corrals. His clothes were brushed, and he combed his hair, and if his beard was too bad, he was allowed to shave with my father’s razor. Then he was invited to come in, and he sat at the table and ate dinner with the family. I used to wonder how in the world those men could eat so much. I remember once Mother had made a rice pudding and when it came time for the dessert, he, being the guest, the rice pudding was passed first to the tramp to help himself. Instead of doing this, he set the pan down in front of him and proceeded to eat the whole pudding. Very often, if the men were shabby and really looked as if they needed something, my father would rummage through his own meager wardrobe and would give them whatever it was they needed.

My mother was very nervous with these tramps, and it was understood that if they came when my father was not at home, they were not to be invited to come in. My father saw to that. She did let them come on to the porch and wash, while she prepared a big plate of food, which they were permitted to eat sitting on the back steps. I remember once when we were living in Provo that a very young man came one day who touched Mother’s heart. He looked very, very shabby. It was getting towards fall and the days were rather nippy, and she knew the nights were very cold. He didn’t have a coat. Father had just bought a new suit, and his old one was kind of shiny on the seat and the sleeves were rather gray, but Mother knew that the coat would be warm. So while he was eating, she went to the clothes closet and got out the suit and gave it to him as he handed her his plate. Well, it developed when Father came home that night from Heber City that she had not put out his new suit that morning, and so in his hurry not to be late for the train, he had gone in his old suit. Mother had given the tramp Father’s new suit! Poor Father.

Mother usually laid out whatever Father was to wear the next day. Somehow he was just oblivious to what he wore. On Sunday mornings she would lay out the things he was to wear and he put them on and went. One time I remember, many years later when we were grown, Father got up and I guess got dressed and went off to church before anyone else for an early Bishop’s meeting. He went in the things that Mother had put out, but when Fred got ready to go to Priesthood meeting, he discovered that his coat was gone. Their suits were very much alike, and lo and behold, Father had gone to church in Fred’s coat. Father was rather a stout man, and Fred was unusually thin, so Father’s coat would wrap around him at least twice. Fred wouldn’t wear the coat, of course, but he carried it over his arm—it was summertime—and went down to church. He said when he went in, Father was up conducting the meeting with his coat about twelve inches from meeting in the front. Fortunately, Father wore a vest. After Priesthood meeting, Fred got Father in a corner to change coats, and that was the first that he was aware that he had been wearing the wrong coat.

Back to Provo. We were only in Provo about two years. My father was Juvenile Judge for Wasatch and Utah Counties, and since he would be away from home more by living in Heber than by living in Provo, we rented our house in Heber and moved to Provo. My impression is that Father did not enjoy his work as a juvenile judge. Apparently it was very hard for him when the time came necessary to send a boy to the state school in Ogden. When his two-year term was up, he ran again for county attorney in Wasatch County and was elected, and we went back to Heber.

Mother didn’t enjoy Provo very much either, especially not after we moved to our house on Center Street, just a few doors down from the gate of the State Mental Hospital. It was a smaller house than we’d had before, but quite adequate. It had a big back yard with plenty of fruit trees and plenty of room to garden. She was very nervous there, especially when my father was away, particularly so after we had a midnight visitor from the mental hospital.

He was a jolly fellow, but she didn’t appreciate his sense of humor. About 12 o’clock she heard a hammering on the door and got up and looked out through the glass: there was no one there. But about that time, someone was pounding on the back door. So she went to the back door and looked out: no one there. But someone was hammering on the front door. This went on quite a while, at least until it woke my brother Keith up. He, being a teenager, wanted to go outside and see what was going on, but of course, Mother wouldn’t let him. Finally her fear was overcome by her impatience and she went to the telephone, which was on the wall right near the front door, and started cranking it up, and said in a loud voice, “I’m going to call the police.” That seemed to be all it took, and there was silence from then on. She didn’t call the police, but the next day in talking to a nurse who lived across the street, she learned that a man had escaped from the mental hospital that night. It seemed that he was a trusty and a very harmless fellow who loved to play pranks. I’m afraid my mother didn’t appreciate his pranks. From then on, the nights my father was away were very long.

I remember only a couple of things while we lived in Provo that are at all important. One was [that] we were living there when the Titanic sank, and a lady who lived not far from us was a passenger who lost her life on it. I also remember that I was baptized while we lived in Provo. My father was in Heber at the time trying a case, and I was baptized by a man named Brother Russell. I was always very sorry about this, because I would have liked to have been baptized by my father.

It was a happy day when we boarded the old Heber Creeper to leave Provo to go back to Heber. The boys had gone on ahead with our belongings in wagons, and driving our cows. But I was quite loaded down that day when we got on the train. I had my canary in a cage, and my dog, and my teddy bear, and such other things as I could carry. I was feeling very badly because I didn’t have my cat. I had a beautiful little white cat, but of course I had learned earlier in life that cats and canaries don’t get along. So with much persuasion from Keith and many promises from him that he would take good care of it, I permitted them to take it ahead with them on the wagon.

Well, it so happens that they had spent the first hour of their journey chasing that cat, and it finally occurred to Keith that one good place to put it would be in the stove. So he had put it in the stove, thinking that it would get sufficient air from the stovepipe. But the cat soon learned and it climbed up the stovepipe and out, the blackest cat that anybody ever saw. I think that ended it for them; I don’t think they chased it any further.

We had a long day on the train that day. I remember it quite well. We stopped several times to take on water. Everybody got out, particularly at Bridal Veil Falls. We all got out and watched the falls for awhile. Mother had prepared a big lunch, and we nibbled on it all day long. We got into Heber late that afternoon. I don’t remember how we got to our house. I don’t think we walked, because the train depot was at the far end of town from our house. I would guess that perhaps Uncle Jim Campbell met us there and took us home. Anyway, when we got there, the boys had already arrived and were setting up beds and arranging furniture. We all felt that we had, in truth, returned home.

I said once that I thought that our garden provided a great part of our living, and it continued to do that, but I think also a good part of our living was furnished by my mother’s butter and eggs. My father’s salary was, I think, about $50 [a week], which was probably fairly good for those days, but not enough for a growing family of five children, especially with a son almost ready to go on a mission. So my mother had quite a lot of chickens and she was also very, very good at making butter. We didn’t have a separator then. I don’t even know if there were separators then. I remember that we used to bring the milk in and put it in round tin pans, milk pans they were called. They were about three inches deep and possibly about sixteen inches in diameter. (Incidentally, the rice pudding that the tramp ate was made in one of those pans. And Elizabeth says I like rice pudding!)

As the milk would cool, the cream would come to the top and of course it would be skimmed off and made into butter. Mother was very proud of her butter. She had been told by Mr. Moulton that it was the very best butter in Heber, and that all of the ladies who had to buy butter (most people made their own), but the ones who did, all wanted Mother’s butter. She never let the cream get rancid or old. It was churned almost daily, and almost daily it was my job to trudge down to Moulton’s Department Store to take the butter and eggs and get the things that Mother needed to buy, which included usually sugar, salt, and baking powder, or soap, or things that didn’t grow in the garden.

I don’t know how Mother managed so well with her figures, but she always had at least 10¢ left over for candy. That I took home very meticulously, never taking a piece. When I got home with it, it was spread out on the table and divided equally among us. Anyone who wasn’t home, their pieces were put up in the cupboard and were given to them when they came home. Everybody knew that they were getting a fair amount. I sometimes wonder if this carried over in Keith’s dating days, which started about that time, I guess. Whenever he went out on a date, of course in those days you didn’t buy the girl a box of candy, you bought a sack of candy and ate it together in a show. So whenever he went, the next morning there would be a few pieces of candy in his pocket for Mother. I got one of them every once in a while, and I suppose he knew I did, and this carried over as long as he lived at home.

Keith did get himself in quite a jam one time—well, I guess because he was the one in charge. Not long after we came back to Heber, Uncle Joe Campbell, my mother’s brother Joe, fell through the barn. They lived on a farm in Idaho. He fell through the barn and somehow caught both arms over the edge and hung that way for some time. Under his arms broke out into open sores, which became infected, and they turned to cancer and he was very, very ill. My Aunt Mary, who traveled quite a bit, had gone up to see him and came back and reported that he had not long to live. Of course the other members of the family were very anxious to see him again. Aunt Agnes wanted very much to go, but she was as nervous as my mother and had never done any traveling alone. My father simply didn’t have the money to send Mother at that time, but Aunt Agnes said that if Mother would go with her, she would pay her way. I’m sure it was hard for my father to accept this charity, but he couldn’t refuse it under the circumstances, so Mother and Aunt Agnes went. That’s another story, but they did have a good visit with Uncle Joe while he was still able to visit. My father took them as far as Provo. They were to be gone a week while he was to be in court, and he would pick them up and bring them home.

Before she left, my mother instructed Keith that the cream was to be churned into butter, and I knew how to put it into pound molds, because I had helped her many times. We were to take the eggs and butter down to Moulton’s store and he was to give us cash. She hoped that there would be enough saved to pay for two cases of strawberries that she expected to get delivered from Provo by the peddler who used to come up every summer with them. Strawberries were very rare to us because they were not grown in Heber. The only things we grew up there were hardy fruits like apples and plums and things of that nature.

Strawberries must have come early that year, because the day after they left, the strawberries arrived. We had no money to pay for them, but the peddler said that he would trust Mother and she could pay him when she got back. There were the strawberries and we knew they wouldn’t keep for a week, and how could you eat strawberries without cream? So for a solid week we ate strawberries with nice, rich, thick cream. When Father and Mother got home, we had no money, and no strawberries, and very little cream. I’m sure Mother was dreadfully put out with Keith about it. I really don’t remember how it all turned out, but it must not have been too serious. I would guess that perhaps my father’s sense of the ridiculous saved the day again.

I only remember seeing Uncle Joe twice. I barely remember when they left Heber to go to Emmett, Idaho. All I remember about it was standing out in front of the house and all these people in the wagon and my mother and Aunt Maron were crying. Uncle Joe’s girls and Jenny and Maisie, who were all about the same age, were crying. I was too little to realize what it was all about. Uncle Joe came down to see us once, though, several years later. He was a big tease and I was very shy, and he loved to catch me and kiss me. This I didn’t like. The day that he was to leave, I remember, he had told me that he was going to kiss me goodbye, and I was determined that he wasn’t. I remember that I hid under the rocking chair in which he was sitting. I don’t remember his catching me or his kissing me goodbye, but I can’t believe that he was so stupid that he didn’t know that I was there.

Years later, when I lived in Boise, I lived for a month with Uncle Joe’s daughter, Annie, who was a very favorite of his and who had his wit and his sense of humor. I dearly loved her and she was a close friend all of the years that I lived in Boise. She played one mean trick on me, I remember, during the war.
I came home one night from work and she said, “You’re going to give blood tomorrow.”
I said, “Oh, how come?”
She said, “Well, I’m in charge of getting blood tomorrow and so I said you’d be glad to do it.”
I said, “Well, you’re awfully free with my blood.”

The next day we went to give the blood. She wasn’t going to give any, she said, because she was in charge and she would have to look after everything. As it developed, somebody didn’t come, so Ann had to give blood too. After it was all over, I went right back to work and worked all day, and when I got home that night, she had a great, big beefsteak for both of us. It was really quite a joke between us after that how she thought she fooled me but got fooled herself.

I guess the funny part of that story was the next Sunday there was picture in the paper of all of the people who had given blood that day. So here we were, I was right at the very end of the row and everybody’s face showed up in the picture except mine. I had on a black dress and you could see all of me right up to my face, but with my light hair and my white face, there just was no head on me at all. You couldn’t see anything but just my dress. No one would ever have known who I was. Ann thought that was really very, very funny.

I notice that I can’t make up my mind whether it’s Moulton’s or Murdock’s store. It was Murdock’s store where I took the butter and eggs. When I first started taking them, I took them to the Heber Exchange, which I think is still in operation in Heber, and also down to Mr. Murdock’s. But Mr. Murdock had regular customers for my mother’s butter, and so he insisted that we take it there, which we did.

My Uncle Jim had worked at the Heber Exchange for many years. He drove a coal truck for them, and he was injured very badly in an accident and was unable to work the rest of his life. He just puttered in the garden and he did raise a beautiful garden. He sold a lot of vegetables and Aunt Maude sold her canaries. The boys soon worked, but they were quite poor. My father always stayed with them whenever he came to Heber and he and Uncle Jim were very close.

I’m not sure that I’m right about this: Aunt Mary may have given them money, but in my mind, I think my father paid back the money that Aunt Agnes gave Mother to go to Idaho by sending Uncle Jim up to visit with Uncle Joe before he died.

Uncle Jim and Aunt Maude also had five children. There were two older boys, Glen and Milton, and then Lavina, who was such a good cook, and a boy named Grant, and a girl, Elizabeth, whom we called Beth. Lavina was Roy’s age, and Grant was my age, and Beth was a little bit younger. Grant was a great favorite of mine. We used to play together a great deal. He was the first person through whom I came in contact with death. I had gone to funerals with my mother many times when she sang at funerals. I had run quickly past houses with other children where someone had died. But it wasn’t until Grant took sick and died that I really had the experience of knowing of someone whom I loved who died. It was a very sad experience for me.

It was about time for Keith to leave on his mission. The Sunday before he was to leave, my father thought it would be nice to have Patriarch Duke come to the house and give all of us a patriarchal blessing. So Patriarch Duke came for dinner and afterwards gave each of the family a blessing, beginning with my father and working his way down to me. I don’t quite understand why my father had not prepared me for this, because he was always so careful to explain everything ahead of time, but I had not understood at all what they meant by patriarchal blessings. Perhaps if I’d have stayed in the house and listened to the other blessings, by the time it came to me, I would have known. But I didn’t. I was frightened, and so I ran outside and hid. I hadn’t heard any of the other blessings. When it came my turn, it took quite a bit of shouting and hunting and all to get me in so that I might have my blessing.

I remember years later going with a friend of mine when I worked at ZCMI across to the church office to Patriarch Hyrum G. Smith, while she had a patriarchal blessing. After she had received her blessing, I told Patriarch Smith about this experience, and he laughed and he said, “Well, you know my dear, you only have one patriarchal blessing, but I would be glad to give you a blessing.” So he did. It might be a testimony of patriarchal blessings to read those two blessings and realize how similar they are.

Keith’s leaving on a mission was like the end of the world for a little ten-year-old girl, but pretty soon his letters started coming and I hoarded them, each one, no matter who they were addressed to, in a shoebox. I had a shoebox full by the time we went to leave for Myton, and I insisted that we take them with us. It was put on the wagon along with the other household goods. Some time, somewhere along the way between Heber and Myton, the box got knocked off the wagon, or lost off in some way, and the letters were scattered for a distance of many miles, I guess, because for months after we moved to Myton, people were knocking on our door and saying, “Here’s a letter of yours that I found on the side of the road, somewhere in Strawberry Valley, or in Duchesne, or somewhere, and I thought you might like to have it.” Well, Keith was not very pleased about that.

The Heber period of my life would not be complete without telling you something about Bessie Clyde, my cousin. She was Aunt Mary Clyde’s youngest girl, and just my age. Mother and Aunt Mary were very close, so we were thrown much together. When we started school, the Clydes lived directly across the street from Central School, which we both attended. I would have to say that, with the possible exception of Lizzie Fisher, she was my very best friend. We did have a lot of fun together and played together as long as we lived in Heber. Uncle Jim Clyde, by this time, had become a very well-to-do sheep man. He had bought his girls a little set of Shetland ponies with a surrey with the fringe on top. It was bought for some of the older girls, and they delighted in driving it around town and it was the envy of all the other girls in town. By the time it got down to Bessie, of course, the top was gone, but it was still just loads of fun to ride around with her in this little buggy with the Shetland ponies. It was a sad day the day one of the ponies died, but Uncle Jim Clyde took the tongue out of the buggy and put a shaft in and then we drove around, driving the one Shetland pony.

The only problem about it was that before Bessie could play, she always had to go home and wash the lunch dishes. My mother never did make me do that; she always washed the luncheon dishes. She said that she always had them left for her when she was a little girl, so she didn’t do that to me. But Bessie had to go home and wash the luncheon dishes. If I was going to get to ride, I had to help, so I think I washed more dishes at Clyde’s than I ever did at home.

Aunt Mary had ten children, nine girls and one boy. You can imagine that there were a lot of clothes that were outgrown. Aunt Mary, though they had a lot of money, was quite frugal, and she passed the clothes along down to each girl as they came along. Occasionally there would be something that none of them could wear, and she would give them to Mother for me. Aunt Maron was very clever at remodeling them and fitting them and making very nice dresses for me out of them. Mother appreciated this very much, but I didn’t. I disliked it. I just did not like those castoffs, as I called them. I suppose the reason for it was that if we got into a group and got into an argument and I wasn’t on Bessie’s side, she would invariably say, “Look at the dress she’s got on, that used to belong to my sister Nina, or Hazel, or Laura, or somebody.” You can imagine what that did to me. I was just humiliated to death, and so I always hated those castoffs. But with it all, we usually got along extremely well and were very, very good friends.

I do remember when Aunt Mary’s castoffs almost spoiled what turned out to be one of the very best 24th of Julys I can ever remember spending. In those days in our little town of Heber, we always had a parade on the 24th of July, and one of the most important floats in it was Utah’s Best Crop, which of course was the children. The different wards took turns preparing this float. There were three wards in Heber at that time. We were the Third Ward, and it came our turn to do it. I was among the children who were selected to ride on this float. We all had to be dressed in white. I had a nice white dress, which by the way was a hand-me-down, but I was willing to accept that. In addition, we all had to have white shoes. Well, it was the 24th of July, nearly time for school to start, and my parents intended to buy me shoes for school, but they certainly didn’t intend them to be white. Since I had had already one pair of white canvas shoes that summer which I inadvertently ruined out at Aunt Sophi’s place one time when I went out in the corral and stepped where I shouldn’t have, and Mother was never able to get the stains off of them, I couldn’t wear those. My father thought it would be very foolish to buy another pair of white shoes that near time for school. I think my mother understood and felt very badly. Probably Father understood too, but my father could’ve worn a pair of black shoes if everybody else on the float had white shoes and it wouldn’t have bothered him at all, and I guess he couldn’t see why I couldn’t. But of course I couldn’t.

Aunt Mary came to the rescue as usual with a pair of white shoes that one of her girls couldn’t wear. They fit very nicely except that Aunt Mary’s girls didn’t have this funny little place on the side of their foot that the Wahlquist kids have, a little bone that sticks out, so right there they were too tight and they hurt. Mother was going to have to cut a little slit in them there so that I could wear them. That was the last straw, and I immediately lost interest in being Utah’s Best Crop. Why did anybody want to be in a silly old parade anyway? I decided that I wasn’t going to be in it, and I didn’t care, and I was very anxious that everybody not think that I care. I’m sure Mother knew that I cared, and so did Father.

The morning of the 24th of July, Mother got ready to go to the parade with us, which she didn’t often do. She usually stayed home because I know she got very tired. This morning she got ready, and she and Father and I all went down to the parade together, and we watched it from the window of his office, which was an ideal place to watch from. I’ll admit that I had a little pain when Utah’s Best Crop went by, but it was soon forgotten when Mother got out the lunch which she had prepared, and which was all of the things that I liked best: crackers and cheese and sardines and chocolate cake. After stuffing ourselves—or at least I stuffed myself—we went over to back of the old tabernacle where the children were playing games, and I participated in a number of the relay races, and the potato race, and the sack race, and so on. I’m sure I didn’t distinguish myself, but I felt all right about it because my father’s praise was very worthwhile, so far as I was concerned. It was really all that mattered. After the races, as we began to get tired, we went to Luke’s Confectionery and sat on those cute high chairs at those high ice cream tables that you children have probably never seen anywhere but in museums, and I ate my very first ice cream soda. After that, the day was complete, and my father and mother and I walked home together hand in hand. It still to me remains the very best 24th of July I ever spent.

Bessie Clyde was also responsible for my first, well, and only, really, big birthday party. It was when we first came back from Provo, and Mother didn’t even have the house straightened yet, and I was to be nine years old. She had told me that I could bring home Bessie and Lizzie Fisher and I think one or two others and she would make a plain cake with whipped cream, which I liked very much, and we could have a treat, but I couldn’t have a party. When I told Bessie about coming, she thought we ought to have more people than I had planned, and she suggested this one and that one, and her enticement was how many presents I would get if I invited all these people. Finally, by the time we got through, we had invited everybody in our class, which as I recall, was about thirty. When we got home and the children started coming and my mother finally pinned me down to how many I had invited, she made a beeline to the telephone, and with an SOS call to my father. Pretty soon he came home with a big piece of ice and got out the old ice cream freezer and went to work, and Mother got another cake in the oven. We had ice cream and cake and everything went very well. We had our fun, playing our games and listening to records, and everything seemed to be a very enjoyable time for everybody, except from the wary look in my mother’s eye, I rather had the feeling that things were not going to be quite right when it was all over, and I was just a little bit leery about what I had done. But apparently my father had been so amused by it all that nothing happened and the day was saved.

As the boys were growing up, my father had a very clever way of keeping them at home nights. He used to take a lot of magazines, Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, and several of the other popular magazines of that time. He always had them come to his office. On Friday night he would arrive home with a big armful of magazines, and there would be a great scramble for them because the whole family grew up loving to read, and by the time they had finished their favorite articles, it would be too late to go anywhere.

When they were in high school, Keith and Fred were distinguishing themselves, Keith in debating, and Fred in basketball. I remember going with Father and Mother to hear Keith debate. I don’t remember a great deal about the debates, but of course I could see how very proud they were of him. They were equally proud of Fred’s activities, and Father and the boys went to all of the games. Mother didn’t go, she was too afraid that she might see Fred get hurt.

On those nights occasionally, or on Monday night, which was Priesthood Meeting night in Heber, Mother and I would go to the movies while Father and the boys were going to be away. It was 5¢ for me and 10¢ for Mother, and of course there was always a nickel for candy. These were very eventful evenings. Mother was very nervous about being out after dark without Father, and so she used to hustle me home as quick as we could get out of the show. I remember one night her rushing me around the block to avoid one of Heber’s two drunks. Poor fellow, I’m sure he was perfectly harmless. I think it was that same winter that on his way home one night he fell over the fence and was either too sleepy or too drunk to get up, and froze to death before morning.

Back to the boys. Keith was dating a good bit by this time, and Fred would have been if the girls had had their way. Big basketball heroes were quite as popular in those days as they are now, but Fred was a very shy boy, and somehow he managed to avoid the girls at all times, even the braver ones who came to the house occasionally on some pretext, hoping to get to see him. My mother always laughed at the way he could slip out the back door as they came in the front.

As I said before, Mother was never very well, and so the boys had to help some with the heavy work. I remember once Fred being just furious with Mother because he had mopped this big dining room–kitchen room of ours, and Aunt Mary had come to see Mother and said what a beautiful job it was, and Mother had told her that it was Fred who had done it. Fred was just sure that Aunt Mary would go back and tell Don, her son, who was Fred’s age, and he would tell the other guys and that would just be the limit. But I guess Aunt Mary was discreet, because I never heard anything more about it.

We used to have an old washing machine, I remember, that, in the summertime at least, stood outside. It was one that you had to crank by hand, around and around, and the boys used to have to take their turns doing that. I was sorry when it wore out, because from then on it was pretty much Mabel and the washboard.

When Keith got to be older and dating and thought he was pretty sharp, he was very careful of his appearance. I remember one time our summer kitchen caught on fire. It was on a wash day, and Mother had the fire booming and apparently some sparks had gone up and the roof had caught fire. She screamed for Keith to run across to Aunt Maron’s and borrow her hose to put it out, but Keith couldn’t go because a bee had stung him on the eye and it was all swollen, and he couldn’t possibly let Aunt Maron’s girls or any girls who might be visiting them see it. So the younger boys had to go and get it.

I suppose we had had financial problems before, but the first that I remember of any hardship or being conscious of any hardship in the family was after Keith had gone on his mission. It would be the year that President Wilson swept the country into office on his slogan, “Wilson Kept Us Out of War.” He swept the Democrats into every office and my father was defeated for the first time as county attorney. He was always proud of the fact, I remember, that he did run ahead of his ticket, but he was quite upset too, that he was elected [she meant to say defeated] by a young whippersnapper, Clay Montgomery, who had graduated rather recently from law school. He was a real lawyer, whereas my father was a correspondence school lawyer. I think that rather hurt.

Keith hadn’t been out in the mission field too long until he began to have a numbness in one of his arms. As I recall it, it was the right arm, and it wasn’t long until he was unable to carry his briefcase. The mission president had him go to a doctor, and they learned that one of the vertebrae in his neck had grown longer than it was supposed to, and it was pressing on a nerve. They decided that the only thing that would help would be to go in and saw this vertebrae off and release the pressure on the nerve. So he had to undergo an operation. My mother was frantic, Keith being so far away, and the folks couldn’t possibly have attempted a trip to Chicago, which was not necessary I suppose anyway. So he had this surgery performed. They went in from the front, and he always carried a long scar about five or six inches, just above his collar bone.

This scar was to keep him out of the army for quite some time, much to his dismay. Later, when they started the draft, he was drafted regardless of it. The latter part of Keith’s mission was rather unhappy because he was shown white feathers on frequent occasions after the Americans went into the war and was even driven out of small towns when he and his companion went out tracting in the summertime; they were asked why they weren’t in the army instead of in the mission field. This had hurt his pride a great deal. When he came home, he immediately tried to enlist, but of course because of this recent, or fairly recent operation, they refused him, very, very much to his disgust.

In spite of the war, Keith enjoyed his mission very much. He spent quite a lot of his time in the university area of Chicago, working with university students and professors, and met some very interesting and intellectual people. He was able to spend some time in the big libraries in Chicago and in some of the art galleries, and it was a very educational experience as well as a spiritual one. I’m sure that he was a very good missionary. I do remember his letters. They were so full of so much, and I’m sure my father’s letters to him were very wonderful too. In fact, I know they were, because I’ve read some of them that he brought home.

They had the experience, he and his companion, of finding a black man who was extremely interested in the Church and a very, very bright man. They had visited with him a number of times before they discussed it with their mission president. Keith was quite upset at that particular time when the mission president recommended that they not try to convert this man. I’m sure that at that time at least, the man was not baptized.

We had moved to Myton by the time Keith came home, but there is one story that I’d like to tell that happened while we were still in Heber. That was the winter that Fred had pneumonia. It was the same year, of course, as the election that everything seemed to go wrong at our house, and Fred was very, very ill. He had been playing basketball and he didn’t wait to shower this particular night and had run home. He had a cold and had gotten a chill and became ill. It became a regular thing to see the doctor’s horse and buggy in front of the house when we came home at night. There were several weeks that he was in critical condition. I remember that each night it was my job to take a dollar and go down to the drugstore and get some little powders that were wrapped in paper, twelve of them, which he took. I don’t know what they were; I’m sure it was before any antibiotics, so I don’t know what it was, but it had to be made up fresh each day, and it was a dollar for them, and it was my job each evening to go to the drugstore to get this.

I remember when he was getting well that he was to have an orange every day, and that too was quite a thing, because that was the first time we had oranges at our house. Of course they were for Fred, but Roy and I used to stand while Mother peeled the oranges, and then we’d love to eat the white part of the orange rind. The rest of the orange was very carefully broken into sections for Fred to eat.

Fred was a long time recovering from this illness, and actually it was not until he had the flu in 1918 that he finally coughed up a lot of the goop that was down in his lungs. As we all know, even to this day he has never had the full use of his lungs. He has probably a quarter of his lung that he has not used.

When Father had been defeated in the election, he had set up his own law practice. But Heber being a good law-abiding little community, I’m sure his practice was not very great, and I’ve often wondered just how we got along. I’m sure Mother’s butter and eggs really came in handy at that time, and also the vegetables and things that we had raised in the summer and that were stored in our cellar. I’ve heard my father say that the best insurance that a person could have was a son in the mission field, because by some means or other, every month when it was time to send that money to Keith, it was there. Though all of us, I know, felt the pinch, we were able to manage in spite of Fred’s illness and Father’s defeat and Keith’s mission.

I do remember that I didn’t have a coat. I remember I wore Keith’s old sweater for about two years, though I don’t remember minding it, because I liked that old sweater. It came clear down to my knees, I think, and it was a real favorite of mine. Anything that was Keith’s was a favorite of mine. I’m sure on windy days it could not have been very warm. And we did have to do a lot of skimping in other ways.

It was at that time, I’m sure, that Father made up his mind that he would not be able to support his family in Heber, and he began giving some thought to moving to Myton. He had bought land out in Uintah Basin earlier. The Uintah Basin was open for settlement—it was an Indian reservation—it was open for settlement in 1904. That would be the year I was born. My father, being in the county clerk’s office, of course, was there when land was opened up and people were permitted to choose tracts of land and buy. My father had selected a tract of land up around a little area called Altonah, and he had also bought an area near Myton. I’m sure he thought the land near Myton would be profitable; it wasn’t as good a land, though he didn’t know that at the time. Myton was the center of the government agencies and I’m sure my father thought that it would be a better town for us to settle in.

Well, I must have gotten sleepy on this roll, because I seem to have made several mistakes, in rereading it. I notice that I’ve said Aunt Sophi’s son was named John—his name was Edwin. Aunt Sophi’s husband’s name was John, but I don’t remember him. I also said Aunt Sophi’s oldest sister lived down the road from her place, and I should have said her oldest daughter. Further on, I don’t know whether it’s just that my words are not clear, but I can’t tell whether I said my father and mother did or did not drink coffee, but they did not. My father drank Mormon tea, which is hot milk with cream and sugar in it. My mother, in her declining years, under doctor’s prescription or orders, drank tea, and prior to that time she drank Postum. I also spoke of when my father was elected by Cummings, the attorney Cummings; I should have said he was defeated by him.


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Go to Part 4.
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