Mabel’s Memories, part 6

This is part 6 of the memories tape-recorded by Mabel Wahlquist in the 1970s and transcribed and edited by me. Part 1 can be accessed here. The stories of Mabel’s youth in Myton, Utah begin in Part 4 and continue in Part 5. The family had moved from Heber City to Myton in late 1915 when Mabel was almost twelve and lived there over ten years.


Chapter 3
Growing up in Myton (continued)

I just came in from hanging a batch of clothes in my usual haphazard way, which I tell Elizabeth is a rebellion of the many, many years that I had to do it the “right” way. So maybe I might take the time to tell you about a typical wash day in Myton.

Our old washer had broken down before we left Heber, and so by the time we got out to Myton, we had to do our washing on the board. As I’ve said before, Mother was not in good health. She had sciatic rheumatism, which made it impossible for her to wash on the board, so doing the washing fell mostly on me. It was not the easiest job in the world, with all of the heavy clothes that we had in those days. I don’t mean to imply that Mother didn’t work hard, because she did. The washing on the board just happened to be one of the things she couldn’t do, but she did many other things on wash day. She always sorted all of the clothes and got them ready to wash. You must remember that in those days we didn’t have permanent press and drip-dry and all of the things that we have today.

We had mostly white clothes. Our sheets were all white, no pretty stripes or flowers; our towels were all white, and our underclothing was white. The men’s dress shirts were all white, no pretty colors like we have now. So most of the washing consisted of white things. Then there were the boys’ work shirts and their overalls and their socks, which were black, and of course Mother’s and my stockings were black too, black lisle, and that—and our handkerchiefs of course were white—and that was mostly what our washing consisted of.

Mother always sorted the clothes for me and got them ready to wash. The sheets and the pillow cases all went in a pile, and then the underwear in a pile, and each thing in its own little pile in the order that I was to wash them. I’ve often thought that Noah could have used Mother very nicely when he was putting the animals into the Ark, because she certainly had an orderly mind, and I’m certain that she wouldn’t have gotten any of the animals mixed up. There seemed to be a law in those days exactly how a washing should be arranged. I don’t know whether it was handed down from mother to child or not, but if it were, I’m afraid Mother failed to get it handed down to me. Why it should make such a big difference whether a handkerchief should get mixed up with a shirt is something I’ll never understand, I’m afraid. I’ll have to hand it to Mother, she certainly tried, and even though I don’t do it to this day, I have a real sense of guilt if I don’t get that washing out the way that Mother taught me that it should be done. I’ll have to admit that Mother had a real knack that all things must go like things together, and if a white nightgown happened to get mixed up with the sheets or vice versa, it would have been a most terrible thing to her.

While she was sorting the clothes, I was busy getting the water. First I would have to stoke up the stove. If it were 100º F. in the shade, which it sometimes was in the summertime, the old stove had to be stoked up as hot as we could get it. The only way you could keep all those white things clean was to boil them. We would put the boiler on—I’m sure most of the older ones of you have seen a boiler, the others, I can’t really describe it to you—it was a large tub-like, oblong-shaped thing that covered the two front burners of the stove. We also had a water heater on the side of our stove, and then of course we put on as many pans and buckets and whatnot, on top of the stove as we could, of water. You mustn’t forget that this water I carried from the hydrant that I told you about, which was on the far end of the block where we lived, a bucket in each hand. Many trips were required to get the water to do a week’s wash.

The boiler would be filled with water and when the other water was warm, a tub would be filled with water and I would start to scrub, beginning with the sheets and going in Mother’s proper order down through the various types of clothing. I would scrub them on the board and then they would be wrung out by hand and put into the boiler. We couldn’t put too much in the boiler at a time, because it had to be loose enough in there so that it could be stirred around with a stick and all of it be properly boiled. After it had boiled a few minutes, it would be taken out with the stick into a pan and from there transferred to the tub of water again, and there it would be rinsed thoroughly to get all of the lye soap out of it and to be checked to make sure there weren’t any spots left that had been missed. Then it would be put from that tub into another tub of clear water with some bluing in it. The only bleach that we had at that time was this bluing. When that was done, then it would be ready to hang. It would take several boilers full to get all of the white clothes done. After the white clothes were done, then you started scrubbing the colored clothes on the board. They didn’t go in the boiler; they were simply washed in the hot water with the lye soap and scrubbed on the board. Then they were wrung out by hand and put into the clear bluing water and wrung out by hand again. Then they were ready to go on the line.

Hanging the clothes on the line was something that I just simply never did quite learn to accept. I think a woman’s character was judged by how she got her washing on the line. The sheets must hang absolutely evenly, the corners must be pulled straight and square. Everything had to go in its order: the shirts must all be together, all the white shirts together and all of the tails had to hang exactly to the same length, no deviation whatsoever. The towels had to hang exactly the same length; they all had to be together. For a towel to show up between two shirts would have been as bad as an elephant and a cow getting into the Ark together. Even after you got the white clothes all out in their exact order and all hanging evenly at the bottom, then you started on the colored ones the same way. All of the blue shirts must be together, all of the aprons together, not an apron between two house dresses; that would never do. Finally, down to the very end would come the black socks. Every sock must be exactly even at the bottom. When it was all done, it was really a work of art, and it would take me all day, let me tell you that.

When you got through with the washing, you had all the nice, soapy lye suds left, and that made a marvelous opportunity to scrub the kitchen and the room next to the kitchen. That room we used—we had a bed in it, but we also had our dining table in it and we ate in there on Sunday and at times when there were too many of us at home to eat at the kitchen table. Those two floors were bare wood and they had to be scrubbed on your knees with this lye soap. It made the bare wood floors a beautiful, clean white, just as white as your hand. Well no, not as white as your hand, because your hands were red by that time. When you got that done, of course the porch had to be mopped because that was where we did all of our taking care of the milk, and that’s where the separator was, so that had to be scrubbed and kept nice and clean too. This was really quite a day, wash day.

The only other difficulty about wash day was those darned cows. We always took our cows down east of McKuen’s place, about a quarter of a mile, in the summertime, to graze. It was open land down there; there were no farms. Since McKuen didn’t raise any crops on his land, there was no obstruction and we could see from our back door where the cows were. If they would stay where they belonged, why it was fine, but every once in a while they would start to roam in various directions. If they went in one direction, they could get into the cemetery, and if they went in the other direction, north, they could get across the river. If they did that, and I didn’t have a horse at home, I was in trouble. So we’d have to keep watching the cows, and if they started wandering too far in one direction or the other, I would have to take my dog, Tip, and we would run through McKuen’s field, about a quarter of a mile down to round up the cows and get them back together again, and then come the distance back home to continue with our work.

We watched and rounded up cows all summer. I don’t know, it might have been more than a quarter of a mile, it could have been a half a mile. It certainly sometimes seemed ten miles to me. Sometimes on a real hot day, I used to get so tired that I would have to lie down and rest coming back. Later we discovered that by that time I had already gotten my low thyroid, which left me with very little energy.[1]

The day after wash day was always ironing day, and it was almost as interesting as wash day. We didn’t have an electric iron. We did have electricity by that time, but we used the old flatirons that maybe you have seen in museums, or maybe some of you have them for relics. The kind that we had were the old black flatirons, not the kind that had the handle you could take off or on. We set up the ironing board and proceeded the next day to iron all of these things we had washed the day before.

We had no no-iron or permanent press things, as I said before, so everything had to be ironed. I shouldn’t say everything. We didn’t iron our sheets, but of course we had to iron the pillow cases. We had to iron all of these white shirts that my father wore to the office and the white shirts that the boys wore on Sundays, because they were just cotton shirts. The aprons and the house dresses had to be ironed. We had quite a few aprons and quite a few house dresses, because my mother, in all of the years that I can remember, when we got all of our work done for the day, before night came and my father came home from the office and the boys home from their work, my mother always had on a clean apron, and if needed, a clean house dress. When she sat down to do her mending after we finished the ironing, it would be in a clean apron. That usually took a good day, to get our ironing and mending done. This took care of two good days of our week.

One thing I think I’ll always remember about home, though, was our evenings. Sometimes they began a little bit late, because we had the cows to milk and the chores to do and dinner to get over with and the dishes to wash and all of that sort of thing, but we always managed somehow to have some evening. There was never any work done in the evening. I’ve noticed—and I’m sure it’s because so many women work nowadays—that the evening is spent in doing the things that we would get done in the daytime. All of the housework that we were going to do, all of the fruit we were going to put up, anything that we were going to do was done during the day. When evening came, we sat down as a family and enjoyed our evening in reading, or visiting, or playing Flinch or Rook together, or just plain talking, or singing around the piano while I played the piano. We always spent our evening as a family. I think it will be always one of my very best memories of my growing up years.

Talking about scrubbing those floors till they became white with the lye soap reminded me of the summer that Max was born.[2] Keith and Eva were going to come out and stay with us that summer as soon as school let out, and Mrs. Maxwell was going to come down and be with Eva when the baby was born. He was to be the very first grandchild on both sides of the family, so it was quite an event. Mrs. Maxwell would have to bring her baby with her; she had a baby girl and a little boy named Carl, a little over two years old.[3]

We had a bit of a dilemma of what we were going to do with all of these people in our little four-room house. We always pitched a tent outside in the summer, where Fred and Roy liked to sleep, and so that would relieve the sofa bed inside, so that would make one more bed available inside. After thinking about it a good deal, my father hit on the idea of renting this old hotel-house next door to us that we had lived in when we first went to Myton, and fixing up a main floor bedroom for Keith and Eva. So that’s what he did. I imagine he was able to get it pretty cheap—it hadn’t been lived in since we had moved out of it. Guess who got to clean it up? I was sixteen that summer, and so with my scrub brushes and buckets and rags and what not, I spent the better part of a week over there cleaning out this room, with Mother making occasional inspections to make sure that I was doing it properly. We had an extra bed that we put up over there, and from somewhere Mother got some scrim. The nearest thing I can describe scrim as, is a pretty good grade of starched cheesecloth, white. It was used quite a bit in those days for an inexpensive curtain. She made curtains for the windows with this white scrim, and with one of her nice quilts on the bed, and when I finally got that floor to a good, clean white to suit her, and the windows washed, and the woodwork washed, and I’m not sure, but it seems to me that we calcimined (put white calcimine on) the walls, anyway it was rather a pleasant room with some of Mother’s braided rag rugs on the floor.

We decided that Keith and Eva could sleep over there, and Mrs. Maxwell and her baby could have the bed at our house, and Roy and Fred could sleep out in the tent, and everybody could take their meals at our house. When Eva had the baby, her meals could be taken over to her on a tray. That way everything was arranged very nicely. We even had a crib for the new baby.

This crib had given me a lot of trouble and I was glad when it finally was able to be used. My father had had a client who had come in one day and said that he was unable to pay his bill, but that he did have a small bed—if Father would like it, he could have it. I’ve already told you that I slept on a cot in the front room. Father, when the man said “a small bed,” he immediately envisioned a single bed that Mabel could have, and he said that would be just fine. When the bed arrived, however, instead of being a single bed, it was a very nice crib. I had been kidded about that crib a great deal. Father insisted it would come in handy some time, and it had been put away carefully. It must have been in pretty good condition, because I think it saw Max and Grant and Frank all through their babyhood. So, that in the room too made things quite complete.

Keith and Eva arrived, and they were very happy with the arrangements, and in due time Mrs. Maxwell and baby Grace and little Carl arrived, and they were very happy with their arrangements. Eventually, Max arrived, and I’m quite sure he was happy with his arrangements, too. The only person who wasn’t really happy that summer was Mabel. I was very happy about baby Max. He was a cute baby, very dark and big black eyes, and a real sweet little baby. Even though I did tend him a great deal, I didn’t mind that at all. The only thing that I was unhappy about was Carl.

He was two years old and he was really a little terror. He became my sole responsibility while his mother was taking care of Eva. He did get me into quite a bit of trouble, the least of which was getting into my mother’s very best tub and stomping up and down until he managed to get a hole in it. He was always getting away from me, and I was having to run after him before he fell in the canal or got into the corrals or climbed into the pigpen or got into the bullpen or anyplace else a little two-year-old boy could think of to get. I spent, it seemed to me, my whole summer chasing that kid.

All in all, it was a happy time. It was one time when we were all home again, except Jack, and we all enjoyed one another and we were all so thrilled with this little grandson, the first in both sides of the family.

Charles Wahlquist and his eldest grandson

Mabel and little Max

Maybe there might be time left on this cassette to tell you about two of my favorite horses. They were Buttermilk and Topsy. Buttermilk was Topsy’s mother. I don’t know just why we called her Buttermilk, whether it was because she was as slow as buttermilk, or whether it was her looks. She was almost the color of buttermilk, white with yellow spots that looked like chunks of butter on her. We used Buttermilk in our single buggy most of the time, and she was a most exasperating little animal, but we did love her. You’d give her a flick of the whip and she’d start out at a real good pace, but she would just keep gradually slowing down and slowing down, until if you’d let her, she would be stopped dead still in the road, sound asleep. She would have been a very safe horse for my mother to use, but Mother never did drive her. I don’t know that she would have been so good for Mother, because she’d never use the whip, and I guess she’d have spent most of her time sleeping by the roadside unless Mother got impatient and got out and walked. We had Buttermilk a long time.

She had, oh, probably many colts, but the two that I remember, we called Bill and Topsy. Bill was sort of an ordinary horse. He was a trotter and he was also a good workhorse, and as he grew up, he made part of one of the teams. But Topsy was something else again. She was a little pacer, a beautiful little bay animal. I don’t know who her father was, but he must have been something special. The boys were all just crazy about Topsy. Before Keith went on his mission, the craze came in for horse racing, and I don’t know what you call those little tiny carts that they rode on and the horse pulled in the races, but anyway, Keith and Fred made themselves one.[4] They used to love to get Topsy pulling this and go around the big square that I suppose had been the original 160-acre homestead, which by this time had been broken up into many parts.

Mother would just be frightened to death when they would do this, and she and I used to go upstairs and she went from one window to the other upstairs and watched their progress. We could see their cart with Topsy pulling it flash by between the trees here and there along the way, and she would heave a big sigh of relief when they finally got back. I don’t know if Keith ran Topsy in any races or not, but he certainly did use her a lot that way.

One time when we were upstairs watching, Mother cut her hand very badly on a broken window. We always had at least one broken window—with four boys and their friends and baseballs, I suppose that was inevitable. Mother’s hand was badly cut and it bled profusely, and she always had the scar from that cut.

Speaking of broken windows, I remember we had an earthquake before Keith went on his mission, and it cracked a place right on the front of our house. Keith had to have a picture of that. It wasn’t until the picture was developed that anybody noticed the rag that someone had stuffed in the broken window until it could be fixed, in the window right above the crack. If we’d taken the rag out, we could have blamed it on the earthquake. As it was, it was inevitable that it was a baseball. Mother was always so embarrassed about that rag in that window.

Back to Topsy. One spring Topsy was stolen. We knew that she had been stolen because we knew that she wouldn’t have left on her own. It was a very sad summer without her. Then toward fall, one morning when the boys went out to do the chores, there stood Topsy with her head over the corral gate, with a rope hanging from her neck that she had apparently broken in order to get loose. She had been treated very badly while she was away and was very thin. Apparently whoever had had her had beat her a great deal about the head. She was never quite the same horse after that. When you pulled on the reins quickly, she would stop immediately, or if you would by accident touch her around the head, she would stop dead, trembling. She had learned to be afraid.

I haven’t mentioned yet that I used to love to ride Topsy, but I didn’t very often get a chance—my mother was very frightened and very nervous for me to ride Topsy. But occasionally I did. While she loved to have the boys ride her, and she would run, just gallop, and jump ditches, and anything that she could, and just have a glorious time, when I got on her she was very sedate. I would have to kick and tug and pull and work very hard to get her up to a canter at all, and she would jump only very small ditches with me and never a fence. When I would come back with her and my dad would take me off, he always patted Topsy and said, “Well, you knew you had precious cargo that time, didn’t you girl?”

After Topsy had come back and we had gone to Myton, I used to ride her sometimes when I would be going after the cows. I remember one time when I was riding her, and I think I said that someone had treated her very roughly. I remember one time I learned about this, to my sorrow. I was chasing the cows and I did have her going a fairly good speed. I was riding her bareback and I sort of started to lose my balance, and I reached forward to put my arms around her neck, and as I did that, she stopped short, and I went over her head and landed in a bunch of cactus. I’m sure Topsy was very sorry about it. She stood right still and waited for me to get myself picked up and brushed off the best I could and to climb back on her and go on our way.

It was always Topsy that Fred rode when we lived in Myton and he was making his long rides, morning and night, to the schools where he taught. She was a very sure-footed little animal and certainly a trustworthy, wonderful little friend to all of us. As far as I can remember, she was still alive and Fred was still using her for a riding horse when Mother and I left Myton.[5]

I’ve mentioned the Church a time or two on some of the other recordings. I thought maybe I might tell you just a little bit more about it now. I think I’ve told you that my father was the branch president and Mother was the president of the Relief Society most of the time that we were there. All of the family were very active in the Church. Certainly a great many of my memories of Myton revolve around our activities in the Church.

I think I told you that Myton was the non-Mormon town in the Uintah Basin. There could’ve been several reasons for that. The first was the fact that it was headquarters for the government Indian Agent. He lived there and the people who worked with him, and the people who were there to serve those people, the stores and the post office, the barbershop and laundry, and most of the business people were non-Mormon people. Also, the land around Myton was not the best land for farming, and there weren’t too many farms around. Most of the farming people were the LDS people who came out from Salt Lake and vicinity and took up or homesteaded land there and farmed. Most of them were near to Duchesne or Roosevelt, and that’s where they went for church. Practically all of our congregation was from the farming areas outside of Myton. I don’t recall any families, really, from town, except us and Harold Eldredge, who were LDS.

I think I’ve said that we met in what had been the Old Town Hall down in what was called Old Town. It was a very small building. I remember it as being adobe, but I could be wrong; it might have been frame. It certainly had never been painted. It had inside, along one end of it, a raised platform about a foot high, I guess, from the main part of the floor, and there was a wire across that from one wall to the other and a curtain could be drawn across. We used it as a stage, as I suppose that’s what was intended at the time it was built. We also curtained it off to use for a classroom for Sunday School. Down the center of the hall on either side there were about, oh, maybe six or eight handmade benches down the aisle. The floor was bare, and it had the usual pot-bellied stove in one corner that gave off a lot of heat to the people who were in the first two or three rows next to it and didn’t do very much for those of us who might be at the other end of the room. I don’t recall that there were any windows in the building. There was just an ordinary-sized door at back and at the front. It was not built on a foundation, it just sort of squatted there in the dirt. There was no lawn around it and there were no trees. There was no sidewalk in front of it; it just was there along that windswept lot, and there was a muddy old road that went along in front of it. It held marvelous memories for us. We did have some wonderful times there.

We had Sunday School at 10 o’clock and Sacrament Meeting at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. That gave the farmers time to get home to do their chores at night. In the wintertime we held Mutual and in the summertime we held Primary, if we could get enough children there. Primary in the wintertime was impossible because the children came from so many different directions and could not get there in time after school to get their parents to get them back home before dark. They were so far away that their parents would have had to bring them. In the summertime we did attempt to have Primary, and a parent would gather up a number of children and bring them in. It was a very small group. I’m sure we would have considered it very unusual had we had more than fifty people in attendance at a meeting; that would include all of the children. Usually we just had two classes: the little children up on the stage and the rest of us in one class down in the main part of the hall.

Eva and her boys

I remember once after Max and Grant and Frank were all born, Eva was staying with us one summer and she had little pongee suits for the children.[6] I don’t know if all of you know what pongee was, or is (I suppose it still is used some), but it’s the raw silk from China that hasn’t been converted into anything else, just a very lightweight tan material. She had made little suits for the boys; they were sort of the middy type, middy top and little short pants. When she got them ready that morning I thought that she was asking for trouble, because all of the children that came to Sunday School just came in their overalls and their heavy work shoes. That was probably all of the clothes that they had, their little dark blue work-shirts, or little homemade shirts from gingham or calico. Anyway, certainly that morning the teacher had taken the children outside. As I said, there was no lawn or trees or anything, so they were just out there in the dirt. They were playing out there during the class period, and all of a sudden I heard a great howling and bustle go on, and I knew what had happened, so I went out. All of the farm kids in the class had ganged up on these three little guys dressed up in their city clothes. But Max and Grant and Frank had held their own. Mother and Eva for some reason had not come that morning, and when I went home with them, they were so bedraggled looking, their clothes were torn and their faces were dirty and one of them had a black eye, and they really did not look like they were returning from Sunday School.

One thing about Mutual was that we always waited to have our opening social until after school started. It was always a watermelon bust down at Brother Musser’s. We depended heavily on the school teachers for Mutual. There would be three, or when Fred was not teaching in Myton, there were four who would come besides Fred, and usually there would be young people from out Salt Lake way who were coming out there to get their first years of experience. We rarely got the same ones back the next year; they would move on to something just a little better. We’d wait anxiously for the news to come as to who was to be our teachers. We were always delighted if they were young LDS people, because they were a great deal of help to us in our Mutual.

In Mutual we pretty much had one class, though we did make an attempt one year to have a Beehive class [the class for 12- and 13-year-old girls], which I taught. I was president of the Mutual Young Ladies for quite awhile, and Fred, as I told you before, was president of the Young Men’s. Most of our Mutual was activities. We did have a lot of dances and parties in that little building. We had all of the old-fashioned things that you won’t remember. We did a lot of square dancing and Virginia Reels, and we had a fellow who could play the fiddle, and some waltzing, and that was the type of dancing that we did, mostly. Oh, and I used to just love when I could schottische with my dad. He was a marvelous dancer and when he came down the hall in a schottische, the floor really jumped.

Another thing we’d have was home dramatics. We nearly always put on one or two plays during the year. I loved that very much. My father was a real ham, and I guess I must have taken after him. Father was never in any of our home dramatics in Myton, he was always much too busy, but I do remember that in Heber he was very active in home dramatics and usually took a character part in almost everything that was done in Heber, sometimes much to my mother’s embarrassment. One night I remember, though, in Heber, she was too frightened to be embarrassed. In the part that he was taking, he was to be killed in the second act, and when the guy shot the gun that was to kill him and the smoke went flying in all directions, and Father hit the floor the way you’d expect Father to hit the floor, just as hard as he could. When they carried him off, there was real blood dripping all down the side of his head and Mother was really frightened. She thought that they had forgotten to take the bullet out of the gun. But it just so happened that Father went down with such a bang, and he hit his head on a nail that was sticking up out of the board, that was what caused all of the blood.

I was much like Father in that I liked character parts too, and I did take part in a number of our plays. A lot of our evenings I’m sure were spent rehearsing, rather than in any other Mutual activities, I suppose. We used to take our plays around. We used to take them up to Ioka, where Loreen’s family lived, and we used to go up to Roosevelt and various places with them, and it was a lot of fun.

Mother had a counselor in the Relief Society whose name was Sister Palmer. She was a dear little soul. I shouldn’t say she was a dear little soul—she was a dear big soul; she was a very large woman. She had a son named Arch and she really doted on Archie. Archie wasn’t fond of religion, but he was fond of dramatics. Another thing he was a little too fond of was the bottle. Every winter we always got Archie to come to Mutual by having him in one of our plays. I don’t know when we went out of town to take our plays just how Arch always knew where to find a bottle, but he always seemed to find one. That was the only problem with him, was trying to keep him sober throughout the play. One year we gave him a part of a fellow who was supposed to be a drunk in the second and third acts. I’m telling you that Arch gave a marvelous performance that year. By the second act he was always in real good form. The amazing part about it was he could always remember his lines. Well, not really remember his lines as such, but he could always remember the content. He could go along beautifully with the play, and it was just a little bit hard for the person who was playing opposite him to know exactly what their cue was. I’ve often wondered what became of Arch. He was an awfully nice guy and we all liked him very much and would have liked to have seen him be more active with us in other things than just in dramatics.

Another thing we did in the way of activities was dances. We had various types of box lunches that were popular to do in that day. The girls prepared a box lunch and you were supposed to disguise your box as much as you could so that no one would know whose box it was. We devised various ways of raffling off these boxes. Sometimes they were simply raffled off, and other times they were done by weight of the girl. The fellow had to guess the weight of the girl, and the one who came the closest to her weight got her and her box. We did all sorts of things of that nature to make our dances interesting, and we really had just an awfully lot of fun.

Half of the fun of that type of a dance was the funny combinations that you came up with for your lunch. Very often the fellows would get a glimpse of their girl’s basket or box, and so they would know what they were bidding on. Sometimes they wouldn’t, and you would see some real young boy eating with an elderly lady, or a young girl with some elderly man or such. That was one of the wonderful things about a little branch like that. I don’t know of any place you could live where you really are closer than in a small branch of our Church. No matter how it turned out, everybody was just there in a little group, almost like a family, and everyone could laugh together and enjoy the joke on one another or on themselves and have a glorious time together.

You would think that our Sacrament meetings might be rather dull with so few people to choose from for speakers. Maybe it was because they got so much practice, but really, we had some very good speakers. You could always count on a good talk from Brother Musser or from Harold or Fred or Roy, and of course my father was a very fine speaker. At least I thought so. He did his speaking with the same zest that he did everything else, and sometimes he would get very emotional and have to get out his handkerchief and blow his nose and wipe his eyes and harumph a few times ‘til he got his voice cleared and could go on, much to the embarrassment of my mother and Roy. I loved his spirited talks, and he did understand the gospel and could explain it most beautifully.

I think this is the first time I’ve mentioned Brother and Sister Musser to you, so I think I’ll tell you just a little bit about them. They were really wonderful people. He was a well-educated man, and so was his wife. I think they had both taught school before they were married. I don’t know, but my impression is that they might have married a little older than usual when they were married. Maybe it’s just because people aged faster than usual out in that dry, hot country that I think that, but they always seemed a little old to me for as young of children as their family were. They had only two children that I remember, a girl named Mattie who was much, much younger than I, and I can’t remember the boy’s name. I don’t know when they went out to the Basin, but it was much sooner than we did, but in all of the time that I knew them, they lived in two tent-houses. They had built floors in the tents and built them partway up the walls, probably three or four feet, and then the tents over the top. They had one for their living area and one for their sleeping quarters. Sister Musser was a fabulous, fabulous housekeeper. I don’t think the finest of mansions could ever have looked any cleaner or prettier or more homelike than she had made those two tent-houses look. She was a wonderful cook too. I remember when she used to come to church—they either came in their buggy or very often they walked; they lived about a mile down from the edge of town where we lived—but she always came in a dark skirt and a white blouse. Those blouses were the whitest white I’ve ever seen, and they had tucked fronts and ruffled lace fronts. I don’t know how many of them she had, but they were all made the same way. I’ve heard my mother so many times marvel at how beautifully she had ironed those blouses, the tucks and the ruffles were just so perfect. She always looked just like she had stepped out of a bandbox. You couldn’t believe that she had come from that long, dreary, hot, dusty trip from their place up to church. She was a very good speaker too, as was he. She was, I’m not positive about this, one of Mother’s counselors [in the Relief Society presidency]. I know that she was one of the people we depended on a great deal in the branch, because as I say, she was well-educated and a very intelligent person and a very sweet person.

I remember one amusing thing about Mattie. They were at our place for dinner one time and Sister Musser kept saying to Mattie, “Now Mattie, don’t eat so much. You’re going to be sick. You’re going to have a stomach ache.” Mattie was not easily discouraged and she ate a hearty meal. A little later she was lying on the floor crying, and her mother said, “I told you, Mattie, that if you ate so much you would have a stomach ache.” She said, “Well, that’s not why I’m crying. I’m crying because I’ve got the stomach ache so I might just as well have eaten all I wanted anyway.”

I just played this over and decided that maybe a few explanations might be in order so that you’ll understand it better. For example, you might wonder why Eva and the children were with us that summer and not Keith, but this was not too unusual. Keith got all of his college education during the summertime. He would teach in the winter and then go to summer school all summer. Eva usually spent at least part of her summer with us or with her parents up at Altonah. Some summers they rented a place in Salt Lake and stayed there, but more often he simply rented a room and the family came out to the Basin. Jack did this too. Both Jack and Keith spent most of their summers in school, and that also accounts for why I mentioned Fred and Roy in talking about our activities in the ward. It was always a great event when either Keith or Jack came out. We had them for speakers at our church meetings the same as it was an event when some of the stake presidency or some member of one of the stake boards should happen to visit us. They could always count on speaking.

I might say that you could get the impression that those boys being in silk suits meant that they were in something expensive, but pongee was about the cheapest thing that one could buy. At that time it would probably be about 25¢ a yard. Many years later when I was clerking in Ogden, it was 49¢ a yard. So they weren’t living beyond their means; it was just that Eva had dressed them as she would in Salt Lake City, and not as she perhaps should have dressed them in Myton. I did make the comment that there were no people in Myton who were members of the Church, to speak of, but there were just a few. One that I remember was Mrs. Holder, who always helped us with our dramatics. In the summertime a family named Stewart from Spanish Fork used to come out there. They had bees out in that country, and I couldn’t forget them, because Merle, their daughter, was just my age, and one of the very few people who were my age, one of the few girlfriends that I had in Myton.

It seemed that, like I suppose in most small places, we didn’t worry a great deal about age. Everybody was together. I don’t remember more than two or three people being my age. Les Maxwell’s wife Fern is about my age, and she lived in our ward for a few years. I guess my first friend in Myton was a girl named Susie Twitchell, who we thought was carried off by a traveling salesman, but many, many, many years later we discovered that she had gone with him quite willingly.[7] She never did let her family know where she was, and they grieved very much about her. Many years later when she wanted to go to Europe, she wrote them for her birth certificate, and that was the first that they had known that she was alive. It did do one good thing, I guess: it put a scare into all of the rest of us never to get into a car with a stranger, which is what the story had it for many years that Susie had done.

I remember one disastrous experience that Merle Stewart and I had together. It was a 24th of July celebration and we were in charge of the lemonade. Instead of making some sort of a base with the lemons and the sugar to start with, we filled up the milk cans that we were going to use for the lemonade with water and then started squeezing the lemons in one at a time. I don’t know, it seems to me an awfully lot of lemons went into each can before we could even tell that we had put a lemon in it.

Another thing that I remember, thinking of Jack and Keith being at home in the summertime, one time after church on a Sunday, the four boys went down to the river for a swim. There was supposedly a good swimming hole down there and the weather could get very hot, and our little church could get very hot. I think I’ve told you that there wasn’t a window in it, and when you came out if it, you felt like you had been in a steam bath sometimes. So they headed for the river, which wasn’t very far from church, and went in for a swim. The Duchesne River was rather a treacherous thing [before the dams were built]. There really wasn’t a lot of water in it at that time of year, I don’t believe, but there were a lot of eddies and whirlpools in it and undercurrents that one wasn’t aware of. Suddenly they discovered that Fred was in one of these and was not able to get himself out. And Fred was having a problem with his breathing—and as you know, his lungs were not very good to begin with—so Keith decided to get him out. He went for him first—he was the first one to notice it I guess—and he got into the same hole, and he got in trouble. Then it fell to Jack, who was by far the best swimmer of the bunch, to get them both out, which he was miraculously able to do. Fred was in pretty bad shape by the time they got him out, and it took quite a time for them to get the water out of him and get him conscious again. I’ll never forget when they brought him home, how frightened my mother was and how awful Fred looked.

I’ll also never forget my father’s reaction to criticism. My father was a very practical person, as I’ve said many times. He was very, very religious, but he was not fanatically so. When somebody criticized the boys for going swimming on Sunday, he said well, it was too bad, but the thing that was really too bad was that he’d had that meeting after church that he’d had to have with somebody, or else he’d have been with them and it wouldn’t have happened at all. I remember how shocked whoever it was that he said it to was. I do remember in all the years of our growing up that my father was like that. I remember he used to play ball with the boys between Sunday School and church. When it came time for church, why, he’d say, “Well, fellows, I’ve got to go to church. Is anybody going with me?” Can you imagine four boys staying behind when a father had played with them through the afternoon until church time came? I think he was a much smarter father than a lot of people realized.


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Notes:

1. Mabel had low thyroid and took medicine for it all her life.
2. June 19, 1920.
3. The baby girl was Grace, born the previous July.
4. This was in Heber City.
5. Topsy would have been at least 12 years old by then, probably more.
6. 1924 or 1925; Frank would have been the youngest at age 2 or 3.
7. Mabel herself found out Susie’s true fate when she discovered by accident that a nephew’s wife was related to Susie’s people and knew about it because when Susie won “Queen for a Day” in Hollywood and needed a passport to claim her prize, she had contacted the family after decades of silence. Susie’s parents had died before then, so they never did know what had become of her.

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Go to Part 7.
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