Mabel’s Memories, part 7

This is part 7 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 Parts 5 and 6. 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’ve mentioned these pot-bellied stoves a number of times. I think I’ll tell you an experience Fred had that at least I think was partly, at least, due to the pot-bellied stove. I guess this probably happened after Father died, because I know I had helped Fred milk the cows that morning, and I didn’t learn to milk the cows until after Father’s death when Fred was the only one at home. I had to milk cows that winter in order to help him get his chores done in time to get to school. It was on a Sunday, a fast Sunday, and he had been asked to go up to one of those little communities up that way, I think it was Neola, anyway it was to speak at a funeral. It was rather an upsetting thing for him, because the funeral was for a young man who had committed suicide, and I’m sure it was Fred’s first experience with something of that sort. I didn’t know the young man myself, and I really don’t know how Fred happened to know him, unless it was through his stake MIA [Mutual Improvement Association] work. I would imagine that he had gotten acquainted with him in some way through that. Anyway, he had been asked to speak at the funeral.

We had done the chores and gone to Sunday School and come home, and it being fast day, Mother had urged Fred to eat something, but he wouldn’t. She had quietly suggested to me that I might suggest to Fred that I would like to go with him. I did, and he consented, and so I went along. I’m sure he didn’t know that Mother had made such a suggestion. Mother and I got into cahoots on a lot of things that the boys didn’t know about. We left, and my impression is that we went in the buggy with old Buttermilk, but I can’t imagine why we would have done that, because I know we had my father’s famous car by that time, unless it was out of order. Anyway, it was an extremely cold day and we were just simply frozen before we got there. There was a bad wind blowing, and if you’ve ever been out on North Myton Bench in the middle of the winter in a wind storm, you know how very cold it can be. When we got there we were both just frozen.

We got there just about time for the funeral to begin. I was real happy that they had put Fred rather close to the pot-bellied stove, because we were both just frozen stiff, and I thought at least he would be a little bit thawed out before it was time for him to speak. I was at the back of the hall, and I couldn’t feel any heat at all and was still chilled through. When it came time for Fred to get up and speak, I guess he had gotten too warm beside this pot-bellied stove, or at least he had gotten warm too fast, and with a stomach which was too empty to churn, he was quite upset. He seemed very calm as he started to speak, but I noticed that he began to get whiter and whiter, and his voice began to get slower and slower, and I could tell that he was having trouble keeping his thoughts in order, and I realized that he was going to faint. No one seemed to be very concerned; the people behind him of course couldn’t see. As I saw him start to sway, I started running down the aisle, and just then someone back of him caught him before he fell. They asked for some water, and of course there wasn’t any there, and they sent someone after some to the closest neighbor, and he finally got back with some about thirty minutes after Fred had fainted. Fred was unconscious for quite awhile, and I was terrified.

After he came to, we were taken to the bishop’s home, and he rested there awhile, and I’m quite sure we were given something to eat there. They did finish the funeral, and we did go to the cemetery, and with it all, we were very late getting back. Mother was beside herself with worry by the time we arrived home, and Fred had me sworn to silence by that time that I was not to tell her what had happened and worry her further. I’ve always thought that it was that pot-bellied stove and getting so close to it after being so cold, and getting the heat from it so quickly that caused him to have that experience.

I’ve had one other experience with a person who committed suicide. In those days it was not customary to have the funeral for a person who had committed suicide held in a chapel, and on this occasion it was held in the family home. This man had been ill a long time and had become very despondent, and while his wife was away at work he had shot himself. As I’ve told you before, I usually played the piano for all of our church activities, and this was no exception. There was a piano in the home, and Father of course was conducting the funeral, and I went along to play the hymns. Most of the people from our branch were there in attendance. I have always thought my father was very wise that day in the choice of music. Apparently the wife had been so very disturbed that she had not been any help in making any of the arrangements, and Father had made the arrangements. The song that we sang was “Nay, Speak No Ill,” and we never sing that hymn in church but I don’t think of that particular incident. I remember how right I thought that song was for that occasion.

I hate to leave this on a dreary note, so maybe I can tell you about the time Harold Eldredge rode down the middle of Myton Main Street in the hearse. They had a little hearse at the hardware store. He got somebody to drive it and he stretched out in it, and they drove down Main Street. Just when they got in front of the saloon, Harold sat up. You should have seen those drunks scatter.

There was one time when the branch people didn’t go along with my father. I guess medicine or superstition or something has come a long way since that time. It was learned that there was an old man living out by himself who was very ill, and when my father went down to see him, it was discovered that he had syphilis. He was wearing LDS garments and he maintained to the end of his life, which was really only a few days after Father found him, that he was innocent.[1] When it came time to get him to prepare him for burial, no one would come near because of the danger of syphilis. It fell to my father to prepare him for burial. As I’ve told you before, we had no undertaker, and when someone passed away, it would usually fall to friends and neighbors and branch members to prepare the bodies for burial. When Father had dressed him, he put his garments on, because the man had been wearing them all of these years, and some people were very upset. Father said that was between the man and the Lord. If he had felt innocent enough to wear them all of those years, as far as he was concerned, the Lord could make the final judgment. But the people in the branch did refuse to have the service in our chapel. I remember it was on a Thanksgiving morning that Fred and Father hitched up the wagon and went and got the man’s body. They had a grave dug and they took it to the cemetery and buried the body and dedicated the grave. Since the men who had dug the grave weren’t sticking around for fear of what might happen to them, Father and Fred filled in the grave and then came home. Mother had a good supply of hot water for them to use and they washed and cleaned up and changed their clothing before our Thanksgiving dinner. I know that we today can’t realize the things that people believed and the lack of knowledge that people had at that time.

Charles John Wahlquist

It was in April 1923 that my father died. I was nineteen at the time. He died on a Sunday afternoon from a massive coronary thrombosis type of ailment.

He had been in Vernal for a few days on a case, and we learned later from Mrs. Richardson, where he always stayed, that he had not felt well on Saturday. He hadn’t finished up at court early enough on Saturday to drive home, and she said he had been ill again in the night, Saturday night. On Sunday morning she had tried to persuade him to stay over and not attempt the drive home, but he had smiled and said no, that if he was going to be sick, he wanted to get home so Mama could take care of him. He had had rather a bad trip home—it had taken him about five hours to make the trip. It had been raining, or snowing, sort of a slushy April storm, and the roads were quite slick. Some people who had passed him reported that he smiled and waved to them. One person said that when he passed him, he was stopped with his engine stalled and was trying to crank his car. Of course, stalling his engine was not an unusual thing for my father. We don’t know how ill he was or how much pain he may have suffered.

As I said, it was on Sunday, and when it came time for Sacrament meeting, Mother said for Fred and me to go to Sacrament meeting, and she would stay home to be there when he got home and get him something to eat. We could tell of course that she was getting worried about him by this time, and of course we were too.

I suppose in the years that Mother was sick so many, many times, so seriously ill, we had given some thought to her death and to what our reactions might be and what we would do. In fact, I know my father worried a great deal about her when he had to be away, because whenever he was leaving, when he was giving me my goodbye hug, his last words to me were always, “Take good care of Mama.” I don’t think any of us had ever thought in terms of Father’s death. He was only 57 and he was an unusually healthy person. I don’t ever remember him being sick enough to stay in bed all day. He could out-work almost anybody and was always very cheerful and very happy and very eager in everything that he did-he had a real zest for living. And I don’t think that the thought of his not being with us had ever occurred to any of us.

Fred and I had gone to church, and after the meeting we had a committee meeting to plan some program for Mutual that we were working on. We had looked out the back door of the chapel and could see our father’s car in front of the house, so we knew that he was at home. We hadn’t worried and had stayed as long as we needed to. But when we were coming home, we just came up over the brow of the bench from Old Town where our chapel was and saw Mother standing on the porch calling to us and waving her apron, and of course we knew that something was wrong, and we started to run.

Fred beat me home and we hurried into the house. Father was on the bed in the room right next to the kitchen, which I have described before, just lying on top of the bed. Mother told us afterwards that when he got home, she had told him she would fix him something to eat, and he had told her he felt rather tired and he thought he would lie down for a few minutes, and so he had gone in there. She had stepped out into the kitchen and was doing something when she heard a little sound and hurried back into the room, and he was unconscious. She couldn’t revive him, and she had run out onto the porch hoping she could see someone to help her and had seen us coming.

When we went into the room, his face was a deep purple, and I don’t know what anyone else did; I went directly through the door from that room into my parents’ bedroom and knelt down and started to pray. The only words that I seemed to be able to say were, “Please let my father live!” I said this over and over again, sometimes I guess pleading and sometimes I’m afraid almost demanding. I didn’t seem to be able to close my prayer—I wanted to and to get back into the room where he was—then suddenly it occurred to me that I must pray as my father had taught us to, and say, “Thy will be done.” With this realization I also realized that if I said those words my father would die, and so I was determined that I would not say that. I don’t know how long I was there—it could have been seconds or minutes—it seemed quite awhile to me. Finally I was able to say the words, “Thy will be done,” and I knew when I got up and went back into the other room that he would be gone. As I stepped into the door into the other room, Mother put her arm around me and said, “He’s going.” The purple had cleared out of his face and he looked very peaceful and natural.

I’m afraid I can’t tell you much about those next few days. I do know that Harold came; I don’t know who told him, perhaps somebody passing by the house; we didn’t have a telephone and neither did he, but I know Harold was there, and other members of the branch were there. They washed my father and prepared him for burial, and a casket was brought and he was placed in the front room. In those days the body was not taken to the mortuary as it is now, it was just prepared by family and friends, and the body remained in the home until time for the service. I know that people came; I couldn’t tell you who, except the story that I have already told you about Mr. Cook.

I don’t remember going to the funeral. I know that it was held in the opera house and that it was full. I don’t remember any flowers, but I know the articles telling about the funeral say that there were many beautiful floral offerings. I’ve saved all of the clippings about the funeral and I will attach them to this when it’s transcribed so that you may know what happened. I know that Congressman Don B. Colton, who was a close friend of my father’s, spoke, though I don’t remember him speaking. I don’t remember going to the cemetery, or leaving the cemetery, but I know that I did.

I don’t remember when Jack and Keith came, but I know that they did. I don’t remember when they left, but I know they and my brother Fred cleared out my father’s office. I suppose among them they determined that Roy was to remain on his mission—he had been gone just eight months when my father died—but they probably arranged among them how they would support him. I just don’t remember anything about any of it, except worrying about my mother for fear she would not be able to bear up under it. But she did, surprisingly well. I know that the boys came out by way of Price, because Daniels Canyon was closed with snow that late in April, and that was the reason that my father wasn’t brought to Heber for burial and was buried in Myton. It was about 15 years later, after my mother’s death, that the four boys went out together and brought his body back and buried it beside my mother.[2] As I say, I’ll have to let you depend on the newspaper articles for the details of my father’s funeral.

Because of the snow in Daniels Canyon and through Strawberry Valley, none of my mother’s family were able to come to Father’s funeral, which would have been a real comfort to her, I’m sure. The following summer the two sisters, Aunt Mary and Aunt Agnes, and her brother Jim, who were the only three living then, did each come and spend a few days with her. I’m sure she derived a great deal of comfort and pleasure in visiting with them.

The period after his death I suppose we got back to normal living, as people do at such times. I know that the following Sunday we were all in our places at church, me playing the piano and Fred up in front directing the Sunday School. I suppose we went ahead with our life pretty much as before, though it hardly seemed possible that such a thing could happen, that life could go on without my father there to direct us. Mother continued in her work as president of the Relief Society and Fred and I were extremely busy in our church work. I was president of the Mutual at that time and I think Fred was still president of the Young Men’s.

Roy was still on his mission, and Keith and Jack were both married and living on the outside.[3] They were both teaching school at that time. There were just Mother and Fred and I at home. Fred was to teach school in Myton that year. I think that was the first year that he taught in Myton, before that he had made these long horseback rides, as I’ve told you about before. I sort of wished that I could teach school, but there wasn’t any way that I could go away to school, because Mother was not well enough, though she was well enough so that I could leave her during the daytime. The School Board offered to let Fred and I teach together in a little school called Antelope, between Myton and Duchesne. It would be about ten miles from Myton and we would have had to ride that distance morning and night all through the winter, or else stay up there. We knew we couldn’t stay up there because we had to come home and milk cows and it would have been impossible to have left Mother home alone at nights, and we knew the worry that it would be to her to know that we were making that long trek morning and night, which under the conditions at that time would really have been quite a trip.

We were debating about this, but we decided I would have to stay home. The winter after Father died Mother’s health was not too good, and the decision was made that I would stay at home. That’s the year I learned how to milk cows. Up until that time, with four men, four boys in the family, Mother had never thought that I should learn to milk the cows. As I told you, I herded the cows, and I went and got them at night and brought them home, ready so they would be there to milk when the boys came home, but I had never milked them. My only experience of being around the cows when they were milked was as a little girl standing with my tin cup while Father squirted warm milk from the cow into my cup for me to drink.

I do remember one frantic experience when my mother, who didn’t know any more about the cows than I did at that time, had to stick a cow. I’m sure you don’t know, all of you, what I mean by that, but when the cows in the springtime would eat certain grass or alfalfa, they would bloat. There is a spot in a cow where if you insert a knife, the air and gas and whatnot from what the cow has eaten will come out. It wasn’t an uncommon practice for Father or the boys to have to stick a cow, but Mother had never done this. One afternoon we found that one of the cows was down and was bloated badly and would die if it were not helped. Mother very fearfully went out with the butcher knife and inserted it where she had been told it was supposed to be done, and I went along with her for moral support. Somehow or other we must have done it all right, because the cow got well.

Anyway, back to my milking. I did learn to milk the cows that winter, and I milked six cows in the morning and at night all of that winter, and Fred milked the other six. As I recall, we were milking twelve. I don’t know what we were doing about the milk then; my impression is that we were probably separating the milk and selling the cream, but I’m not sure. Anyway, helping in the house because Mother’s health was failing and she was particularly miserable that winter, and helping Fred with the chores was a good part of my day.

We did have a boarder that winter. That’s the first time we ever did anything like that. A young fellow named Ernest Bramwell, who had come out there to teach school for his first year’s teaching, lived with us. He slept with Fred and was with us the whole winter. He was a very nice young fellow and very pleasant to be around. He was very fond of my mother and she was fond of him, and in fact, we were all fond of him and enjoyed the experience of having him stay with us.

The first job that I had was in Phillips’ Store. It was a very small department store, about three doors down from Waugh’s. I don’t remember just how I got the job, whether I asked for it or whether they asked me. Mr. and Mrs. Phillips ran the store themselves without any help, but for some reason they decided to take in a clerk, so I was hired. I don’t recall just how long I stayed there and I don’t remember anything very exciting about it. They were lovely people and I enjoyed my experience there. After, oh, I think just a few months, I got a chance to go to Waugh’s Store and I decided that I would like to do that. The Phillipses asked me if I knew someone who would like the job, and so I suggested Loreen. She was delighted with the idea of coming; she was going to live at our house. They hired Loreen, and she went to be their clerk when I went to Waugh’s.

We had quite a laugh about this the other night; Fred and Loreen were here visiting and I asked Loreen how I got acquainted with her, because I really don’t know when I met Loreen. She didn’t know either. We decided that it must have been just through the fact that both of us worked in the Mutual. Loreen lived up at Ioka, a little community, well, I don’t know how far from Myton, but it could have been to the end of the world the way traveling conditions were at that time. Anyway, I had grown to like her, and we had become quite well acquainted at Mutual leadership meetings, and when we had taken plays up to Ioka to Mutual, and they had brought programs to our ward, and so on. There wasn’t anyone in our branch who was my age; I didn’t have a girlfriend, and I thought it would be so nice to have Loreen come down and we could be friends.

We laughed the other night; she accused me of playing Cupid, but that really wasn’t in my mind, and I was amused when she said that she had already decided that Fred was the boy that she was going to go after. It was a result of her having seen him play ball at Ioka, and she had been impressed by him. I’m sure she had also met him at leadership meetings in Roosevelt, too. I was sort of surprised when she said that, because I really don’t think I had thought in terms of Fred and Loreen at that time. I was delighted when they did fall in love and get married, but Loreen was such a vivacious, popular, pretty girl—she had her beautiful auburn-red hair and her big sparkly brown eyes, and she was very lively and not shy, but popular and a good dancer, and all the things that I wasn’t. I think it rather surprised me that she would think in terms of quiet Fred, who didn’t dance and who didn’t go to many of the parties or things of that sort and was not very much interested in girls. However, he admitted in this same conversation that he had had his eye on Loreen, having met her over at Roosevelt and having heard her speak, and so he was quite delighted when I had this brilliant idea of having Loreen come down to work at Phillips’. Which all goes to show that the wheels of the gods or whatever-it-is they say, grind slowly and things do work out for people.

When Loreen came to stay with us, she and I of course were very good friends, and it was a very happy time for me. We made dresses together and we could go to church together and do so many things together. I don’t know when she and Fred did their romancing; I wasn’t conscious of it. Maybe Mother was, though if she was, she didn’t tell me, and I’m quite sure she would have done.

I well remember the night that Loreen was going to go home for the weekend and how shocked Mother and I both were when Fred announced he was taking her home. They left, and the next morning about 5 o’clock, when Mother awakened thinking it was time for Fred to be up to milk the cows, she discovered that Fred had not arrived home. The only thing she could think of at all was an accident, and so in our usual manner we were out ready to start hiking for Ioka until we found him, when suddenly we saw him coming up through Old Town in the car, and he arrived home very sheepishly to tell us that he and Loreen were engaged to be married.

Fred and Loreen’s marriage changed our lives a great deal.[4] Fred had some land leased out south of Myton about a mile. lt was where we had kept the cows pastured that summer. There was a house on this land and he and Loreen were to live in it. They went into Salt Lake to be married and then had a honeymoon trip down to the canyons in Southern Utah. I remember my part of it all was to be very careful that no one should know when they returned home, because one thing Fred was not going to have was a shivaree. Perhaps you do or don’t know what a shivaree is, or was. Whenever a couple got married, all of the other young people in town would try to get them when they got home the first night and usually separate the girl and the fellow, sometimes taking the fellow away for the whole night, or the girl, and just generally making things very unpleasant. Fred was going to have none of that, so I kept it a very deep, dark secret when they were to be home. When they did get home, they stayed with us the first night. Anyway, they managed to get themselves settled before people knew that they were at home.

They took the cows out there, and this left Mother and I alone, which was a brand-new experience for us and a rather frightening experience for Mother, I’m sure. I know it was a frightening experience to me, because it gave me the full responsibility of Mother. Mother was always very nervous about us being there alone, but our good old dog, Tip, was a good watchdog and took very good care of us. You remember me saying about how much we came to appreciate our neighbor, McKuen, the medicine man. It wasn’t any time after Fred left until McKuen came by one day and said to Mother, “Me watch,” and he always did, bless his old heart. We always knew that in McKuen we had a good friend, and that if anything very seriously went wrong, we could go to him for help and he would be there.

I seem to have done things wrong. Sometimes I think I should never have started this, because whenever one of my brothers is here, they say I’ve got things wrong. Fred insists that Roy was at home when he got married and that Mother and I were not home alone, but the more we talked about it, he couldn’t figure out just how Roy could have been home.[5] Roy had, as I’ve said before, gone on his mission to the southern states, and he was there his full two years and an extra three months. He came home and after he had been home a short time there was a letter came, sent out to all wards and branches in the Church, asking for missionaries, asking each ward to furnish a missionary, preferably one with some experience, to go into the mission field for a special drive that they were doing. These were just to be six-month missions. We really had no one in our ward to send except Roy. He was about the only experienced, well he was the only returned missionary we had in the branch, and so he volunteered to go. The branch theoretically was supposed to support him, but my judgment is that Fred probably provided most of the money. In fact, Fred admitted that when he was here. I think that’s where he was when Fred got married, but Fred thinks he had returned, but we won’t argue about it, and I’m not going to do the record over.

Now, to tell something about Roy and his romances, I don’t know how I got acquainted with Maude either. I assume it was through Loreen.[6] I remember meeting her at Pack’s one time when I went up to visit with them for a few days. That was when I got my hair cut.

Mabel after her hair was bobbed

I think I was the last person in the world to get their hair cut, and I don’t know why, because I never liked my hair long. It was very heavy and it always gave me headaches, and I didn’t do it very attractively. They had already had theirs cut, and they talked me into letting them cut my hair. Very reluctantly, I did. They first cut off the big braid that I had hanging down the back, and then they proceeded to hack off the rest of it. They wouldn’t let me look to see what was going on, and they didn’t let me look into the mirror until after they had it all curled and ready for inspection. I was very pleased with it, and thought it looked very nice. When we went home that night to Myton, there was a dance or ward function of some sort, and I knew Mother would be there. We were so late getting down there that we didn’t have time to go home first, so the first that Mother saw me with my hair cut was on the dance floor, and she was very shocked. However, she liked my hair, and everything turned out very well on that score.

Another time I remember spending with Maude was when I had the first of my many benign tumors removed. I’d had this tumor in my leg for, oh, many years, since I was just a very young girl. We had never thought much about it; my father didn’t worry about it, but it suddenly started growing quite rapidly, and it got so it showed quite badly on my leg beneath my dresses, and also my leg had got so it ached quite badly. I went over to Roosevelt (I don’t know who with at that time), to Dr. Miles, who was a woman doctor, rather a good doctor, and also a surgeon. She said that it should be taken out because it might be attached to the bone in my leg and might cause serious trouble. So Maude invited me to stay with her at her place while I had it out.

I think she and Roy were probably going together by this time (he had returned home). I went and I had the surgery done that day, and that night I went to Maude’s. She was going to be extra nice to me, and they had a very wide windowsill in their living room. Now, I don’t know whether they didn’t have the extra bed—I’m sure they did—but I think she must have thought that would be a pleasant place for me to be, so I could sit up and look out this window. She put a feather tick on the seat of the window—it had no pad on it—and that was where I slept. It was real soft and comfortable and cozy when I first went to bed, but during the night my leg ached quite a bit, and of course the windowsill was a little short for me, being rather tall, and by morning the feathers had all gone to both sides and were all over me in all directions, and I was sleeping on just the fabric of the tick under me on this hard window seat. I didn’t say anything to Maude, because I knew that she was trying to be very kind.

We went to the doctor the next day—I’m sure we must have walked—and of course Dr. Miles’ office was on the second floor of the building, and we climbed the stairs, and with it all I had torn several of the stitches and the wound had begun to hemorrhage. I had quite a little trouble getting it to heal up, and I did stay there in Roosevelt for three or four days before I returned home. It healed fine eventually, and instead of having a lump show underneath my dress, I had a nice long scar for many years.

Another time I remember being with Maude before she and Roy were married, I went with her over to Fort Duchesne for the U.B.I.C. That’s the Uintah Basin Industrial Convention, which used to be held every year, and I think still is. Fort Duchesne was quite an interesting place. It was built very much on the same pattern as Fort Douglas in Salt Lake, and the officers’ homes were really very nice homes—nice two-story buildings, and they were in rather a sort of a semi-circle. There were the long barracks for the soldiers that stayed, though there were no soldiers there at that time, and some of the officers’ homes were occupied by families there at the fort. There was a store there and a few other government offices, and these government men lived in the homes that had been the officers’ homes. That was my first time, I think, of going to Fort Duchesne to stay.

U.B.I.C. in 1926 when Mabel and Maude attended.

I’d been through there once before, and it was my first experience of going over to what was called “The Strip.” I don’t know exactly how to explain that, but apparently there was a narrow piece of land that did not belong to the fort and did not belong to the Indian reservation and did not belong to Uintah County, so it was not really under any legal jurisdiction. During the time that the fort had been in operation, apparently it had been a very wild spot, with many saloons and gambling places. It had been the place for wild life for the soldiers and many others, but at that time there was very little there except the Chinaman’s Store. The Chinaman had an Indian trading post there and it was quite a large store, I guess about the biggest thing around. He had just everything in the way of clothing and groceries and what-have-you, and did a very lucrative business. He got business from everywhere; everyone went over to the Chinaman’s because he had the reputation that if he couldn’t get you to buy it any other way, he would make you a deal. As I say, that was another experience I had with Maude.

I liked Maude and I was happy when she and Roy were married.[7] At the time Roy and Maude were married, Fred and Roy divided up the cows and the horses and the farm implements and everything they had worked with in common. Roy had leased some land down on the river, just across the river, really. There was a house on the land, an old log house, that they lived in. It wasn’t too far from the grist mill, which was run by a man named Waterson or Waterman, who was their closest neighbor.

Roy and Maude didn’t quite escape the shivaree; they weren’t quite as lucky as Fred and Loreen. It was just a few of us who went out there the evening that they got home, I think the four schoolteachers and myself and few others, I don’t even recall who. They didn’t have anything to give us to eat—they hadn’t gotten groceries much into the house yet—so the fellows disappeared and in a little while they came back with a couple of chickens and a couple of nice, big watermelons. The chickens still had their feathers, but not their heads, so we had to pull the feathers off the chickens and clean them and cook them before we had our midnight supper. I’m sure neither Roy nor Maude was very happy about this, because it was quite obvious to all, though nothing was said, that they had not bought the chickens, nor had they bought the watermelons. I guess Roy thought that it was better than being taken off somewhere to walk home through the night in his bare feet, and Maude thought it was better than being left alone. Nothing was said and we cooked the chickens and we had a nice dinner in lieu of a shivaree.

The next day—I was working at Waugh’s by this time—and the next day, Mr. Waterson came in to the store and he was just as mad as a hatter about young people having gotten into his chickens and stolen two of the chickens and also taken some of his watermelons. I tried very hard to look as innocent as I could; I don’t know how well I succeeded. I finally managed to escape to the basement. I didn’t fool Harold; he immediately caught on and kidded me about it afterwards and kidded Roy about it afterwards. These teachers who had come from outside had had such a hilarious time and it had been such an experience for them that they could not feel sorry about it. We all just sort of said nothing and I’m sure Mr. Waterson knew who got his chickens and his watermelons, but though he said he was going to make a great fuss about it, he didn’t.

I guess I’d better tell you about the “outside” and the “inside.” When you lived in Uintah Basin at that time, if you were living in the Uintah Basin, you were living “inside,” and if you lived outside Uintah Basin, you lived “outside.” I don’t know how that came about, unless it was just that so many people in earlier days maybe didn’t either want to explain or couldn’t explain or didn’t want to say, “I came from New Jersey (or New Mexico, or wherever it might be)”; they just came from the outside. So that was the term that was always used. If you didn’t live in the Basin, you lived on the outside.

When I played this record for Maude the other day, she assured me that Roy had gone to Mr. Waterson and confessed all and had paid for the chickens and the watermelons.


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Notes:

1. For faithful Latter-day Saints, the garment they wear as underwear symbolizes their commitment to covenants with God. Once a church member is authorized to wear the garment, only a complete removal from church membership requires that the garment no longer be worn by that person. Charles Wahlquist was right to leave the choice to the man himself.
2. Mabel’s brothers went to Myton to get their father’s body between 1935 and 1938.
3. Jack had married Grace Dorius that summer, August 30, 1923.
4. Fred married Loreen Pack on August 26, 1925.
5. Roy was gone from October 1922–March 1925 and November 1925–March 1926; so he was home for Fred’s wedding.
6. Maude and Loreen were first cousins.
7. Roy and Maude were married on October 20, 1926.

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Go to Part 8.
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