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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Thursday, May 9, 2019
Monday, May 6, 2019
Mabel’s Memories, part 2
This is part 2 of the memories taped by Mabel Wahlquist and transcribed and edited by me. Part 1 consisted of memories of stories about the antecedents of her family.
Chapter 1: The Campbells and the Wahlquists (continued)
Later the whole family moved into Heber City, and my father, I think at that time, became the county clerk of Wasatch County. The first house they lived in, in Heber City was a house on the northwest corner of the block where the Wasatch High School now stands. My mother’s sister, Mary, lived on Main Street, probably less than a block from Mother. It must have been wonderful for these two sisters to be able to renew the close association that they had had as girls. Aunt Mary had married much younger than Mother did. She married James W. Clyde, who was a budding sheep man, and who had by this time become very successful, and they were quite affluent. But this didn’t hinder Mother and Aunt Mary, or Aunt Mamie as we called her, being very, very close. The older sister, Agnes, also lived in Heber. Her husband was Richard Jones, also a prominent sheep man. It seems strange to think that they might not have been so close during the years that Mother lived out at Daniels (or Buysville), but we have to remember that in those days the only mode of travel was horse and buggy or riding a horse, and since neither Mother nor Aunt Mary nor Aunt Agnes ever learned to do either, I’m sure they didn’t see each other a great deal except on special occasions.
Mother and Aunt Mary both had very pretty voices and as girls they had sung together a great deal in church and various places, and this they began doing again, singing at church and Relief Society and social functions in Heber. They continued this even—I can remember as a child going with Mother when they went to sing at various places. It was not until Mother had a large goiter removed and was unable to sing any more that they ceased to do this.
After they had lived in this little house for a few years (Roy and I were born there), my dad was able to buy the old Campbell home from which he had taken my mother as a bride. I’m sure it was with a great deal of pleasure that she was able to return to the lovely Campbell home. It must have given my father a wonderful sense of satisfaction to be able to buy it for her.
It probably would not be classed as one of the best homes in Heber, but it was certainly one of the better homes. It is a two-story red brick home. I’m sure most of you have had it pointed out to you. It was built in a T-shape; there were three large bedrooms upstairs, and downstairs there was one large bedroom and what seemed to me as a little girl an immense kitchen and dining room area, and of course the parlor. The parlor didn’t have any furniture for a long time, I’m sure. In fact, I can remember when some of the pieces for it were bought. It had a nice rag rug that had been sewed and woven, as they did in those days. Somewhere along the way there had been a frame summer kitchen and porch built across the back, and our cellar went down from this summer kitchen, and I do remember that we sometimes spent our summers living in this summer kitchen. But certainly the most important room in the house was this big kitchen/dining room area that I mentioned. The family lived in this house until we went to Myton in 1917, except for two years that were spent in Provo when my father was the juvenile judge there.
I don’t know how much acreage there was, but I do know that there was a lovely area south of the house where my mother had her roses and there were lilac bushes there, and my mother always had sweet peas all along the front fence. North of the house was an area that I mostly remember as being the place where we played and where ball games were held and so on. Of course there were the usual number of sheds and a corral for the cows and a pig pen which afforded an amusing story about Jack, which I’ll perhaps tell you at a later time. There was also a very good granary which I would guess might have been part of the original home. This house had been built on the original homestead. Back of the house, or east of the house was a large garden area, and my father raised everything that you can imagine in his garden. He loved to get new things and hunt in seed catalogs for unusual things and to see what he could raise. We always had a big garden, and I’m sure this afforded us a great deal of our living. We also had cows, and further east of the garden was a pasture area where the cows were kept. A stream ran all of the way through the yard. It was a creek which we called Lake Crick, and depending on the time of the year and the weather, it was anything from a small creek we could walk across rather precariously on the rocks, or it could be a rather booming stream. My memory is that it afforded most of the water that we used on our gardens.
But I’m getting ahead of myself because I’m not even there yet. Roy and I were born in this home, I think. Mother had one other child—a baby named Ruth who was what was called then a blue baby and who died at the age of 14 days, depriving me of a sister that I would very much liked to have had.
My father continued to gain prominence in the community, both in church and in civic offices. I was too young to remember many of the offices he held, but I do recall that he worked on the Stake Sunday School Board and that at the time we left Heber to move to Myton, that he was president of the Wasatch Stake High Priest Quorum. He served several terms as county attorney of Wasatch County, and he was very prominent in the Republican party. He always insisted that if we were to have good government, that good men must be interested and active in politics, and he always took a very active part and encouraged all of his family to take an active part in politics.
My father was a very good lawyer and felt very strongly about the law, but he was also a very compassionate man. I’m sure he suffered many times over actions that it was necessary for him to take as a prosecuting attorney. My mother tells of one case where he had a young man from a small town in his court, and the boy’s mother had come to be with him. They had no money and no place to stay, so my father brought them home and they stayed in our home during the time that he was being prosecuted in my father’s court. On their return home, this mother had been so grateful for what had been done that she sent my mother a lot of old clothing that she could use for carpet rags, because my mother was in the process of making a carpet during the time that they had stayed with us.
It’s rather ironic that in later years Jack was playing in the granary and got into the boxes where these carpet rags were, and did a little dressing up and not too long after that came down with a severe case of diphtheria. On investigating, it was found that this family had had diphtheria the year before this young man had been prosecuted. So apparently this sweet lady who had sent Mother the clothing had also sent along her family’s diphtheria germs. Needless to say, the granary was a very fun place. Many’s the occasion when I and my friends have dressed up in the old clothes that we used to find there in the granary. We used to have shows there and charge pennies or pins or whatever as admission, and we had a great many wonderful times in that old granary. It just happened that Jack was the unfortunate one in this particular case. Fortunately, none of the rest of us had diphtheria, and to my knowledge that was the only unhappy thing that ever happened as a result of all of the fun that we had in that dear old granary.
I had planned here to start telling some of my early recollections of my life in Heber City, but I keep thinking about a couple of dreams that my mother told me about shortly after my father died, and so I think I’ll tell you about them here, before I go on with anything else. My father had always been a strong, healthy man. I don’t ever recall him spending a day in bed. On the other hand, my mother had always been very frail. Though she worked hard, she was not well, and I’m sure in her wildest imagination that it never occurred to her that my father would precede her in death. His death came as a very great shock to her when he died quite suddenly with a massive heart attack, and she was so inconsolable that we were very concerned about her. But one morning she woke up and told me about a dream that she had had, and I think that putting her dream together with one that he had told her about helped her a great deal. I had never heard my father’s dream—perhaps my brothers have, I don’t know—but until she told it to me at this time, I had never heard it.
It seemed that shortly after he came home from his mission he had this dream. In it he and two other young men were in a room with three somewhat older men. As dreams have a way of doing, things just sort of developed gradually so that he realized that these young men and himself were being set apart to go on missions and that the three older men who were there with them were men of great authority, so great that he gradually realized that the missions to which they were being called were not missions of this world, and that these men were not men from this world. He gradually gained the impression that the man in charge was none other than the Prophet Joseph Smith. The other fellows were set apart first. As they came to my father, he said to them that he had just returned from a mission, that he was twenty-eight years old, and that he had wanted very much to be married and have sons of his own. He told them that he was the only son of an only son and that he was the last of his name, and that if he were not allowed to marry and have sons, the name would die with him, and that he wanted very much to have sons to carry on his name and to carry on the work of the Church for which his mother had sacrificed so much. Well, it seemed that he was told that his call would be reserved for a later date and that he would be given the opportunity to marry and to have a family.
When he awoke, the dream was very vivid to him, so much so that he sought out an old man who lived in Heber who had joined the Church very young, who knew many of the hardships of Missouri and Nauvoo, and who remembered the Prophet’s martyrdom. Without telling him anything about the dream, he simply told this man that he was going to describe someone to him, and then would this old gentleman please tell him whom he had described? So he described the man whom he thought, or whom his impression had been was the Prophet Joseph. After he had described him, the old gentleman said to him, “You’ve described the Prophet Joseph Smith.” My father said, “Well he doesn’t look—the description does not fit his pictures.” The old gentleman said that he did not look like the pictures of our current day.
I guess the dream stayed with him very strongly and became even stronger when in the course of the next short period (a year or year and a half, or some such matter) the two young men who had been in the room with him both died. I’m sure that this dream had a great deal of influence on my father. As his sons came along, I’m sure it helped him have greater determination to bring them up as righteously as he could.
After his death, my mother apparently had this dream given to her, she thought, to help her with her own problem. She dreamed that she was in a room with a long counter running through it, and she was on one side of the counter and on the other side of the counter she saw my father with a group of other people working very busily. Now this counter could easily be accounted for, because in my father’s office there was a long counter, it having been, I think, a real estate office before he rented it. Of course we didn’t pay any attention to the counter—we just walked around it and on into his office. But she had the impression that she must not walk around the counter, she must wait, so she stood there waiting. Finally my father looked up and saw her there and smiled, but he didn’t offer to come to her. Well, she stood her ground; she was not used to being treated this way by my father, and she waited even though she had the feeling that she was supposed to go away. In a little while he looked up again and saw her still standing there, and this time he smiled again but shook his head and went on with what he was doing. She still remained waiting, and after a while, he finally looked up again and saw her waiting and walked over to her, and with a gentle smile that he reserved only for her, he said to her, “Lizzie, I can’t talk to you now. As you can see, we are very busy here.”
With that she awakened, but she awakened with the feeling that what he said, that “I can’t talk to you now” was an assurance that they would talk again. While this didn’t relieve her of her grief—she still grieved greatly for him—it did make her grief more bearable and was a great consolation to her, and she was determined to continue her own life in a manner that would help to make it so that they could talk again.
For many years, both before and after my father’s death, my mother was president of the little Relief Society in Myton, which is quite different, I think, from being a Relief Society president nowadays, since her dominion extended several miles in each direction of town. As I said once before, Mother never learned to drive a horse and buggy, so when she heard that someone was ill, if there was no one there to take her, she simply gathered up everything she could carry and started out to walk. When we saw her again, we knew that the person had either recovered or that Mother, perhaps with the help of some other neighbor ladies, had washed and prepared the body for burial. This was very hard on my gentle little mother, but she was a very good Relief Society president and took her responsibilities very seriously.
There were some funny sides to it too. I remember once her being very upset because she had gone to visit a lady who had a new baby, and her bed was filthy with a very ragged quilt, and Mother came home to get clean linens. As she was going out the door, she came back to take a brand-new quilt that she had just finished making, which she was very proud of, so that the lady might have a pretty bed when people came to see her. The following day, on Sunday, my father and she went to see the lady, and the dirty quilt was back on the bed, and the brand-new quilt was out in the yard in the dirt with the kids playing on it. Well, with all her gentleness, my mother could get really upset, and that’s one time when she was, and my father had to repeat several times, as he often did, that poor people had poor ways.
My mother had many interesting experiences as a Relief Society president. Perhaps when I get to the Myton part of my story I’ll tell you some more of them. With her natural shyness and her retiring spirit, I’m sure some of the things that she had to do were very difficult for her. She would always much rather be in the background than in the limelight, and she would always much prefer to listen than to speak. Perhaps it’s too bad she didn’t have more of her own mother’s natural love for nursing and for the care of the sick and such things, but this was not the case.
My father, on the other hand, was a natural with people. He loved people. He loved to be in the center of any group. He loved to express what he thought, and he loved to listen to what others thought. He enjoyed a good argument, and he could have a good argument without anger. He could be very gentle with people.
Again, to mention slightly the Myton era, I know that when we first went there and he was setting up his law practice, he was also the Branch president (it was not a ward at that time) and he had his office in our home. I can remember thinking to myself that we’d starve to death because towards many couples who came to him for divorces, he saw his duty first as that of Branch president, and he tried to counsel and help and save the marriage. Many people, I’m sure, who came expecting to file for divorce went away determined to make their marriage work, and in most cases I’m sure it did.
People sensed this love for them in my father and came to him with their problems, and for help. I don’t know of anyone, really, who didn’t love him. In that respect, he was very much like my brother Roy in his years as a bishop, and I’ve often thought of the similarity between them. They were very, very different in so many ways, but they both had that ability to draw people to them. They both had a marvelous sense of humor and a sense of the ridiculous, and they both had such compassion for people.
Chapter 2
Childhood in Heber and Provo
I will try to tell you some of the things that I remember as a small child. I’m sure that none of them will be very eventful, but they might give you some idea of our family life at the time that I was growing up.
I was born in Heber in 1904, on the seventh of January. Now this is probably the only fact that you’ll get, and the things that I tell you will probably not be in chronological order.
Aside from my father and mother, probably the first thing I remember was that big combination kitchen and dining room that I mentioned before. It was probably a very plain room, but to me it seemed like a beautiful room. I well remember the geraniums in the wide windowsills, and it seemed to me they were always in bloom. I remember the white lace curtains that were starched stiff and dried on the curtain stretchers.
I remember my bird, my Dickie, who sang in his cage above the geraniums. My Aunt Maude Campbell raised canaries and sold them, but somehow or other she always managed to provide me with one. I’m sure there were a series of “Dickies,” but they all seem like one to me, except for one time. Someone had apparently left the door open on this occasion when they fed Dickie, the door to his cage, and he got out, and my cat who was ever watchful, got to him before I did and killed him. I was able to salvage the body and give it a proper burial. Dickie was buried in a shoebox under a tree by Lake Crick, between the pasture and the garden, and it was a very lovely funeral. All of the kids came with bunches of wildflowers, and we cried copious tears. I recall that there was almost immediately another Dickie there and I don’t remember any serious grief after that funeral.
Another thing I remember about that room was the big, black, kitchen stove. It stood out a ways from the wall, at least far enough so that Roy and I could crawl in behind it on cold days with the latest Sears-Roebuck Catalog and play our game of “I’ll take this page and you take that page,” which we did by the hour. From the oven of that big old stove my mother used to take beautiful brown loaves of bread, which she would always allow us to break, at least one, while they were warm, to eat with butter and honey and jam. That was a wonderful feast.
I suppose the focal place of the room would be the big dining room table, where the seven of us sat down three times a day to eat, and I mean three times a day. Somehow we all understood that everybody was to be there at mealtime. My father came home for lunch from his office, and we came home from school. In the morning and in the evening we had family prayer, and we all took our turn giving the prayer, from Father down to me as soon as I was eight years old. I remember being coached at that time and being prepared to take my part in family prayer.
I don’t remember our seating arrangement at the table except for Roy and I. My father sat at the head of the table with Mother on his left—I guess that was closest to the stove—and me next to Mother and Roy on the other side of Father. That probably saved some arguments, because for some reason or other we only needed to be able to look at each other or kick each other under the table to send us both off into giggles, and sometimes it was necessary for us to be sent away from the table. But on the whole, our mealtime was a very happy time at home. Each of us had an opportunity to tell the events of our day and my father and the older boys discussed politics and current events and religion.
Since I never did finish high school, I’ve always maintained that I gained my education around our dining room table.
Above the dining room table hung a coal oil lamp which provided most of the light in the room. There were probably other coal oil lamps scattered about, but I don’t remember them; I do remember the one above the table.
I must tell you one funny thing that happened when we were having family prayer. We had in Heber, oh, not more than a half dozen families who were not members of the LDS Church, and they had a little mission church—Southeast Something—I don’t remember the name of it. One family who attended it were quite close neighbors of ours and friends of ours, and we did visit the church occasionally. I liked to go because we were always given a little picture with some religious scene. They liked still better to come to our church because we had “play dinner.”
Back to the prayer. One night we were ready for dinner and one of the little boys in the family was there to play with Roy, and since he had had his dinner, he was told that he might wait while Roy ate. Of course before we ate, we all knelt down to have family prayer. I don’t recall who was giving the prayer, but during the time that the prayer was being given, all of a sudden a little voice piped up [from] down on the floor by us saying, “If you’ll tell me what you’ve lost, I’ll see if I can help you find it.” Well, I’m sure it cracked up most of us, but somehow we got through it without the little boy having his feelings hurt or probably even knowing what had happened.
After dinner, in the evening, the dining room table was still pretty much the focal point because that’s where the light was. That’s where the boys studied, and that’s where my father sat to read his paper and where Mother sat to read her book (she was very fond of reading), and where I sat to do my coloring and painting. So we grew up pretty much around that dining room table.
I imagine we were a noisy bunch. Sometimes Mother used to slip away to go over to Aunt Maron Campbell’s for a short visit, probably to get away from us while Father was there to see that things were kept quiet. Aunt Maron was my Uncle John’s wife. He was the one who had owned the sawmill from which the lumber part of our house came, and had at one time owned the house. He died very young and Aunt Maron was left with two daughters, Jenny and Maisie, or I guess to put it correctly, Maisie and Jenny. They had also had a boy, younger, but he died as a small child. Aunt Maron was a lovely person and she and my mother were very fond of one another. My father was very good to Aunt Maron, and I’m sure she appreciated him greatly. I should call her Aunt Marion, but we didn’t, we called her Aunt Maron.
As I started to say, Mother would slip over there in the evenings to visit with Aunt Maron, but before she could be there more than a few minutes, she said one by one we would all come traipsing in. Since Aunt Maron was a very careful housekeeper, Mother shooed us out back home where we belonged. Aunt Maron earned her living sewing. She did beautiful sewing. My mother was not a sewer. She loved to make quilts and rag rugs and things of that nature, and she did make our house dresses and she made some of my school dresses. But my best dresses were always made by Aunt Maron. I remember many times going over to have my dresses fitted, and on Sunday morning running over to have Aunt Maron tie my sash so it would look right before I left for Sunday School.
One very funny thing that happened was on the Fourth of July, or 24th, I don’t know which. I had been given a nickel to spend and I had the nickel in my mouth when I went over to Aunt Maron’s to have her tie my sash. In the course of events, I swallowed the nickel. By the time I got home all of the family had left, Father and the boys. Mother was still there.
Mother very rarely went with us to the parade. She usually stayed home and made chicken and dumplings and green peas. We always had green peas and chicken on the 24th of July. That was the first time that my father permitted the potatoes to be dug, because he thought, in his good, practical way that we had to wait until they got big enough, but we could dig some nice new potatoes to have with our peas on the 24th of July. That, with homemade ice cream and cake, made a wonderful dinner when we came home hot and tired from the parade.
When I got home, why, the boys, as I say, had gone. My father always gave each one of them something to spend while they were downtown. Come to think of it, Jack had not gone, because he’s the main character in this story. I mustn’t forget that. Jack was still there, and I was crying because I had swallowed my nickel. Mother said to Jack, couldn’t he give me one of his nickels so that I would have something that I could spend for candy? But Jack, being of a good, solid, practical nature, said, “Well Mother! She’s got her nickel!” He wasn’t about to give me one of his. I kidded Jack about this in California just a few years ago, and he declares that he can’t remember it. I don’t know that I blame him for not remembering.
I just happened to think, so I’ll mention here that I remember as a little girl standing in my nightgown and my bare feet out on the back porch with my hand in my father’s watching Halley’s Comet, and remembering my father saying that we wouldn’t see it again for such a long time that he would probably never see it again. He felt that it was worthwhile to wake us all up so that we might come out to see it.
My father and I had a very close relationship. He somehow had the idea that everything I did was funny. I remember, too, that whenever I got in a bit of trouble during the day, that I used to watch for him to come home at night, and as I saw him coming down the street I would run down to meet him, and with my hand in his walking home, I’d have my side of the story all told before we got home to Mother. Somehow he thought this, too, was funny.
I’m not going to take very long, and everybody’s fussed so about it, I’ll just do it and get it over with. But now that I’ve started, the memories keep coming in so fast that I can’t sort them out. I don’t have anything chronologically, and I really can’t think how quite to put them together, so I’m just telling you things as they come to my mind. If they’re where they fit, fine; if they’re not, I’m sorry.[1]
Somebody said, why don’t you tell something about school, but that’s the last thing I want to tell you anything about. Everybody else can remember their teachers, they can remember what they did at school, they can remember who were in their rooms, they can think about their pictures in their minds and all, and I don’t remember a thing about school until I was in the sixth grade. I can’t remember a teacher I had. I can’t remember anything that I did except recess, playing ball, and I wasn’t very good at that.
I remember going to school in the cold winter mornings after a snowstorm with us all strung out in a row, Keith first, then Fred, John, Roy, and me at the very end. Of course my legs weren’t quite as long, so I sometimes got stuck, and Keith had to come back and lift me over the rough spots. Then I can remember as it got colder that we could walk on top of the snow in Heber, and sometimes right across the tops of the fences. I can remember walking home that we used to throw ourselves with our arms out back in the snow to make angels. I can remember all sorts of intelligent things like that, but nothing about what happened in school.
I do remember something that happened in Provo, but I’m not supposed to be in Provo yet; in fact, I don’t know where I’m supposed to be really. I was in the second grade, I guess, when we were in Provo, and I do remember that they had fire drills. To show you how smart I was, there was one house between our house and school. There were three doors in our school, I can remember that, and I can remember the building. Keith was in junior high school then, but the other three boys were in the same school I was. I just never did learn—when we got a fire drill, why, I would get out as quickly as I could, run around to all of the doors and see that all of my brothers were out, and then I would run home to tell Mother. Well, I’m sure Mother wanted to know. She was always worried about everything that everybody did, so maybe that was what I was supposed to do.
Somehow school didn’t mean a great deal to me until the sixth grade, as I said. Then I got Atty Wooton for a teacher, and he woke me up and from then on, school was really lots of fun. I had an experience that I remember in one of the grades when a little Moulton boy broke his arm and we all took nickels to school to buy him some oranges. I had never had an orange then, but I took my nickel and we bought this bag of oranges and the whole class went down to see him. My, those oranges did look good! I stumbled over everything I could see for a week afterwards, but I just was not lucky enough to break anything.
Well, that ought to take care of school for awhile. We’ll pick it up when I’m a little further along and I can tell you something just a little bit more complimentary, at least to me.
I remember saying that I could remember some of the furniture that went into our parlor. So maybe I could tell you about a couple of things that I do remember. I remember when we got our phonograph. Oooh—that was really a big day. That summer we had been sitting out on the bank of Lake Crick listening to [the] Jones’s phonograph. They got theirs before we did. I remember their favorite record, or at least my favorite record of the ones they had was “Red Wing.” They had a big old black horn on theirs; it wasn’t very pretty. When ours came, it was a beautiful red horn. It had big pink roses all over on the inside. The records were cone-shaped. I’m sure some of you have seen that type of phonograph in museums and probably down at Pioneer Village or somewhere. It was just the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my whole life. We got several records with it. I remember there were some Harry Lauder records with it that my mother and father could laugh and laugh over. There was “Sweet Alice Ben Bolt,” some religious records, and I guess the one that impressed me the most was the one about who threw the overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder.
The other thing I remember coming into our parlor would be several years later, but it was when my father bought my piano for me when I was eleven years old. That was really a wonderful day, too. Who says advertising is new? My father saw an ad in the Deseret News. I am 72 now and I was 11 when I got it, so that was 61 years ago.[2] He saw this ad in the Deseret News that had a coupon, and if he took it into Dayne’s Music Store in Salt Lake, they would allow $50 on a piano. I didn’t know I was to get it, but he was going to Provo and I guess on to Salt Lake, at least he did go on to Salt Lake and looked over all of the pianos. He didn’t know a thing about music and couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, but he was a good shopper, and he looked them all over and picked out the one that he liked. He was not the most trustful soul, apparently, because he went back to the piano and made a little mark on it so they couldn’t gyp him. I remember when we uncrated the piano when it came, that the first thing he did was to go around the back of the piano and look for his little mark, and then he was satisfied that he had gotten the one he had picked out. It was a lovely piano and it did have a beautiful tone.
I took lessons from Nellie DeGraff, my Aunt Mary Clyde’s oldest daughter. I don’t remember how many I took, but I must have learned something; at least I learned how to play the hymns. My father was quite insistent that that be part of my learning process, and it did stand me in good stead, because in later years I played the hymns in church for many years.
I remember an incident of coming home at night, getting home before Mother and Father did from church. None of the boys were home, and I was kind of frightened, but I didn’t want to show that I was frightened by going outside or running to the neighbors or over to Aunt Maron’s or anywhere. So I sat down and played a hymn, and when Father and Mother came home I was playing hymns. Of course I confessed to Father that I had been frightened and that that’s what I had done. I will always remember how pleased he was. He at that time said that he couldn’t think of anything one could do better if they were frightened than to play a hymn.
When I mentioned sitting on the bank of Lake Crick listening to the Jones’s phonograph, it made me think of a couple of other times when Lake Crick and the Joneses played quite a part in my life. I remember one time when Lake Crick was a rather roaring torrent. My brothers and some other boys got a tub and fastened a rope on each handle of the tub. One stood on each bank of the creek and one would get into the tub and they would pull each other across. Well, I thought it would be fun to ride, and so did my friend Lizzie Fisher, who lived at the Jones’s (I think she was their niece; she had always lived with them as her mother died when she was a baby, and I always thought of her as a Jones). Anyway, we thought we would like to do it, but we were littler than they were, and of course we were pushed aside as little kids are, but we were not defeated. So we went over to our old granary and found an old tub of my mother’s and took it out to Lake Crick. We couldn’t agree which one would get in first, and anyway we had no ropes to pull one another across, so we both got in and started down the stream. We soon found that the tub we had chosen had a hole in the bottom, plus the fact that the stream was much swifter than we had anticipated. Fortunately, we were able to yell loud enough so that the boys heard us and we were rescued before we came to the bridge.
The other story I’m thinking of is when the Jones’s house caught on fire. It was on a Sunday. We had had Sunday School, and we were hurrying with our dinner to get back to the 2 o’clock Sacrament meeting. My father hadn’t changed out of his brand new suit, which he was wearing for the first time. Suddenly, Lizzie Fisher came running up to the front door screaming, “Our house is on fire!” My father and my brothers went on the run. We had no telephone then, so Father told us [Lizzie and me] to run up and down the street as hard as we could and as fast as we could screaming “Fire!” We had no fire department either in Heber at that time; it was a voluntary fire department. Well, we did this, we ran and ran and ran, until we both were exhausted—fell onto the ground exhausted—and we didn’t realize until afterwards that neither one of us had said a word.
The men who did see the fire formed a water brigade, each with a bucket, passing it along one to the other from Lake Crick to the Jones’s house. They did have a hydrant and a hose, and they finally did get to use them, but they didn’t for quite a while because the oldest of the Jones girls, Annie, had been putting up fruit—she had put the fruit upstairs. She had immediately run upstairs and started throwing the fruit out the window! It was landing on the sandstone walk below and the bottles were breaking and the glass was flying so hard that the men couldn’t get near the house with the hose. But finally, the fire was put out and everything turned out well, except my father’s suit.
I don’t know how old I was when we got our first telephone. I was never, ever allowed for a long time to forget my first phone call on it. I came home and I was so excited about it. When it got around to my turn to use it, why, I called one of my friends to tell her that we had a telephone. In the course of the conversation, she said to me, “What are you doing?” and I said, “We’re making fudge, can’t you smell it?”
I also remember the first moving picture I went to. It was a silent film, of course. My brother Keith took me to it. Keith was my idol for many years. He was the oldest one in the family and so he was enough older than I was that he would take me places, where Roy wouldn’t because he was afraid somebody might think he was taking a girl. Jack and Fred were too involved in other things, but Keith would very often feel sorry for his little sister and take me somewhere, and he did take me to this picture show. I remember the show was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The show house was right next to the livery stable, which made a very nice setting for it, I’ve thought since, because it was in the middle of the summer, and the fragrance from the livery stable fit in very nicely with the mood of the show.
I remember the first doll that I got that opened and closed its eyes, and I still remember the shudder that went through me when it did that. It just didn’t seem natural to me to see this doll do such an unnatural thing. My mother said I never did play with the doll, but it did have some nice clothes and they fit my cat rather well. I used to dress my cat up in the clothes and wheel it around in my doll buggy. It was much more satisfactory than the doll because the cat would cry and of course if it didn’t I could always pinch its tail. I did get in a little trouble one time when I dressed my father’s new Rhode Island Red pullets that he had sent away for in the doll clothes and wheeled one of them around in my doll carriage on its back. I discovered to my horror that they don’t live very long on their backs. That’s one time when I rather think my father didn’t think I was funny, but I don’t recall that even then he punished me. I didn’t play very much with dolls except when I played with the other girls in the neighborhood—Lizzie Fisher and the Duke girls who lived just a little further along the block and who were also very good friends during the years that I was growing up.
I did love to play with the boys and go up in the pasture where they were digging roads and doing all sorts of interesting things. But they had their own way of getting rid of me, when my mother would, after I had pestered her long enough, insist that they take me. When we’d get almost up there—they knew that I was terribly afraid of spiders—when they’d hear a hoot owl (and we had loads of hoot owls in the trees up there) they would say to each other, “Did you hear that spider?” That’s all it took, and I would turn and run for home as fast as I could go. The boys knew they were pretty safe, because when Mother would ask me why I had come back, I’d always say, “There was a spider.” She knew that I was afraid of spiders, so that took care of that. They didn’t ever get into any trouble over it. I don’t think they even recall the incident. To this day I can’t hear a hoot owl without thinking about spiders.
A dear little German lady lived a few houses from us, who made her living selling flowers. We always got our flowers from her at Decoration Day, and she always brought flowers every Sunday to church, to Sunday School. Everyone loved her. Roy and I got in a little trouble one time because of what we did, and I think we learned our lesson that time on honesty. We wanted to butter our mother up a little bit for something, I don’t even remember what it was we wanted her to do, but we thought it would be nice to take her some flowers. So we were going by Mrs. Schank’s place, and it occurred to us that we could pick a nice bouquet of flowers just by taking flowers whose heads were sticking through the fence. They weren’t in Mrs. Schank’s yard at all, they were outside the fence. We picked a nice bouquet of flowers, and we took them home to Mother. It didn’t take Mother long to figure out what had happened. I never will forget us going back with Mother right behind us, taking us back over to Mrs. Schank’s to tell her and to apologize and to explain to her that we had taken the flowers. She explained to us that that was how she made her living and said all of the things that she should have said, being a very wise little old lady, but then she brought us each out a great big sugar cookie. It was one of the best cookies I think I ever ate, and I think that it was also one of the best lessons I ever learned.
I don’t want to come to the end of this cassette in the middle of anything, and I’m sure that I’m almost through with it, so I don’t think I’ll start anything of any great length. I might tell you younger people who think “home evenings” are new that they are not. One of the very first things that I can remember is family home evening, which was a weekly occurrence in our home. I remember that one winter we read a children’s version of the Book of Mormon. I also remember our home teachers. Those days they were called ward teachers. They used to come regularly and it was part of the evening for each of the children to take some part in the lesson when they came. You children today have Primary, and we also had Primary then, but in addition to Primary, we also had religion class. That was also a weekly meeting, and one which we were expected attend each week. As I recall, I enjoyed religion class fully as much as I did Primary.
I was too much of a tomboy to be very domestic, but I do remember how proud I was the summer I was ten when I won a prize in baking bread. I guess I was particularly proud of myself because I had a cousin, Lavina Campbell (she was Aunt Maude and Uncle Jim Campbell’s daughter—we used to visit with them a great deal), and Lavina could just cook anything. They were very proud of her and whenever we’d go there for dinner, why, Aunt Maude would say, “Lavina made the biscuits,” or “Lavina made the pie,” or “Lavina did this.” My mother would look at me and say, “See what Lavina can do,” and it was years before I could learn to really appreciate or like Lavina.
The nice thing about bread was the homemade yeast that we had to work with. I don’t suppose any of you can remember what fun it was when your mother ran out of yeast to be sent to the neighbor’s to get a fresh start, and how much fun it was to carry it home, and how good it tasted to stick your finger in it and then put your finger in your mouth. The next thing you knew you were taking a little sip and another little sip, until sometimes by the time you got home, why, it was rather obvious that you had been doing quite a bit of sipping. It was a whole lot better tasting than the yeast that we have today, and it did make darned good bread.
There might be time on this [cassette] to tell Myrna and Kristin about another room in our house, and that was the clothes closet. It was a big clothes closet underneath the stairs in the house. Of course, where the stairs were at the top, it was a nice, high ceiling and was a big closet, but as the stairs went down to the ground floor, so did the ceiling, so the back of the closet was very low. Back here my mother used to keep her baskets and where she kept her rug rags. Someone had told her that lightning wouldn’t strike if you sat on a feather tick or on rags or clothing of some sort. She was very, very frightened of lightning, and of course because she was, I was too. We did have very, very bad electrical storms. I remember spending many hours in that dark closet with my mother, sitting on these baskets and rags, waiting for an electrical storm to get over with. It seemed like sometimes they lasted a long time. The storms would go down and around the mountains of that little valley and keep coming back into the town. We’d hear the thunder crash and we’d hold tight to each other and sit back there on the sacks of rags.
It has just occurred to me that in telling these experiences, that I have fallen right into a pattern of calling my parents “Father” and “Mother.” Somehow, some children did, I don’t remember, but we never did call them “Mom” and “Dad.” When we were little children we said “Mama” and “Papa,” but when we were too big to say that, we said “Father” and “Mother.”
I’ve been wondering why this cassette hasn’t run out, but I just noticed that it’s thirty minutes on each side instead of fifteen as the others that I have, have been. So there might be time to tell you what I promised, as to why my father was so against practical jokes. With all of his sense of humor and with all his love of fun, that was one thing he did not like, was a practical joke.
It had to do with the death of his youngest sister, Esther. She and her husband had just recently come to Utah and neither one of them spoke English,[3] and she was about to have her first child. They lived in a little house in the mouth of Daniels Canyon. I guess it would be the last house before the canyon. At that time, well, and I suppose today, the sheep men take their sheep up the canyon in the springtime where they graze in Strawberry Valley, and then in the fall they bring them down either to be slaughtered or to be taken out west to the winter range. On this particular night, three young men were bringing a herd of sheep down the canyon, and they were getting near home, and I guess drinking a bit, and they thought it would be great sport to play a joke on this immigrant family. They were trying to think what they might do when suddenly they realized that one of their dogs had torn one of the sheep’s legs quite badly, and it was bleeding quite profusely. They got the idea to cover blood, or to smear blood over one of the men, and then the other two men carried this man into the house. They came yelling and banged on the door, and Aunt Esther’s husband opened the door, and they came in with this man all covered with blood. Perhaps when the young men saw what they had done, they were sorry, I don’t know, but she immediately went into labor. Before help could be brought, the baby had been born alive, but she had died from shock. The baby was named Charles, I suppose after my father, and as a young man and boy, he was quite close to our family. I’m sure I’ll tell you something about him later. But my father always felt that this was such a senseless death, and it was one of the reasons, I’m sure, why he abhorred practical jokes.
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Notes:
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Go to Part 3.
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Chapter 1: The Campbells and the Wahlquists (continued)
Later the whole family moved into Heber City, and my father, I think at that time, became the county clerk of Wasatch County. The first house they lived in, in Heber City was a house on the northwest corner of the block where the Wasatch High School now stands. My mother’s sister, Mary, lived on Main Street, probably less than a block from Mother. It must have been wonderful for these two sisters to be able to renew the close association that they had had as girls. Aunt Mary had married much younger than Mother did. She married James W. Clyde, who was a budding sheep man, and who had by this time become very successful, and they were quite affluent. But this didn’t hinder Mother and Aunt Mary, or Aunt Mamie as we called her, being very, very close. The older sister, Agnes, also lived in Heber. Her husband was Richard Jones, also a prominent sheep man. It seems strange to think that they might not have been so close during the years that Mother lived out at Daniels (or Buysville), but we have to remember that in those days the only mode of travel was horse and buggy or riding a horse, and since neither Mother nor Aunt Mary nor Aunt Agnes ever learned to do either, I’m sure they didn’t see each other a great deal except on special occasions.
Mother and Aunt Mary both had very pretty voices and as girls they had sung together a great deal in church and various places, and this they began doing again, singing at church and Relief Society and social functions in Heber. They continued this even—I can remember as a child going with Mother when they went to sing at various places. It was not until Mother had a large goiter removed and was unable to sing any more that they ceased to do this.
After they had lived in this little house for a few years (Roy and I were born there), my dad was able to buy the old Campbell home from which he had taken my mother as a bride. I’m sure it was with a great deal of pleasure that she was able to return to the lovely Campbell home. It must have given my father a wonderful sense of satisfaction to be able to buy it for her.
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| The home in Heber City |
It probably would not be classed as one of the best homes in Heber, but it was certainly one of the better homes. It is a two-story red brick home. I’m sure most of you have had it pointed out to you. It was built in a T-shape; there were three large bedrooms upstairs, and downstairs there was one large bedroom and what seemed to me as a little girl an immense kitchen and dining room area, and of course the parlor. The parlor didn’t have any furniture for a long time, I’m sure. In fact, I can remember when some of the pieces for it were bought. It had a nice rag rug that had been sewed and woven, as they did in those days. Somewhere along the way there had been a frame summer kitchen and porch built across the back, and our cellar went down from this summer kitchen, and I do remember that we sometimes spent our summers living in this summer kitchen. But certainly the most important room in the house was this big kitchen/dining room area that I mentioned. The family lived in this house until we went to Myton in 1917, except for two years that were spent in Provo when my father was the juvenile judge there.
I don’t know how much acreage there was, but I do know that there was a lovely area south of the house where my mother had her roses and there were lilac bushes there, and my mother always had sweet peas all along the front fence. North of the house was an area that I mostly remember as being the place where we played and where ball games were held and so on. Of course there were the usual number of sheds and a corral for the cows and a pig pen which afforded an amusing story about Jack, which I’ll perhaps tell you at a later time. There was also a very good granary which I would guess might have been part of the original home. This house had been built on the original homestead. Back of the house, or east of the house was a large garden area, and my father raised everything that you can imagine in his garden. He loved to get new things and hunt in seed catalogs for unusual things and to see what he could raise. We always had a big garden, and I’m sure this afforded us a great deal of our living. We also had cows, and further east of the garden was a pasture area where the cows were kept. A stream ran all of the way through the yard. It was a creek which we called Lake Crick, and depending on the time of the year and the weather, it was anything from a small creek we could walk across rather precariously on the rocks, or it could be a rather booming stream. My memory is that it afforded most of the water that we used on our gardens.
But I’m getting ahead of myself because I’m not even there yet. Roy and I were born in this home, I think. Mother had one other child—a baby named Ruth who was what was called then a blue baby and who died at the age of 14 days, depriving me of a sister that I would very much liked to have had.
My father continued to gain prominence in the community, both in church and in civic offices. I was too young to remember many of the offices he held, but I do recall that he worked on the Stake Sunday School Board and that at the time we left Heber to move to Myton, that he was president of the Wasatch Stake High Priest Quorum. He served several terms as county attorney of Wasatch County, and he was very prominent in the Republican party. He always insisted that if we were to have good government, that good men must be interested and active in politics, and he always took a very active part and encouraged all of his family to take an active part in politics.
My father was a very good lawyer and felt very strongly about the law, but he was also a very compassionate man. I’m sure he suffered many times over actions that it was necessary for him to take as a prosecuting attorney. My mother tells of one case where he had a young man from a small town in his court, and the boy’s mother had come to be with him. They had no money and no place to stay, so my father brought them home and they stayed in our home during the time that he was being prosecuted in my father’s court. On their return home, this mother had been so grateful for what had been done that she sent my mother a lot of old clothing that she could use for carpet rags, because my mother was in the process of making a carpet during the time that they had stayed with us.
It’s rather ironic that in later years Jack was playing in the granary and got into the boxes where these carpet rags were, and did a little dressing up and not too long after that came down with a severe case of diphtheria. On investigating, it was found that this family had had diphtheria the year before this young man had been prosecuted. So apparently this sweet lady who had sent Mother the clothing had also sent along her family’s diphtheria germs. Needless to say, the granary was a very fun place. Many’s the occasion when I and my friends have dressed up in the old clothes that we used to find there in the granary. We used to have shows there and charge pennies or pins or whatever as admission, and we had a great many wonderful times in that old granary. It just happened that Jack was the unfortunate one in this particular case. Fortunately, none of the rest of us had diphtheria, and to my knowledge that was the only unhappy thing that ever happened as a result of all of the fun that we had in that dear old granary.
I had planned here to start telling some of my early recollections of my life in Heber City, but I keep thinking about a couple of dreams that my mother told me about shortly after my father died, and so I think I’ll tell you about them here, before I go on with anything else. My father had always been a strong, healthy man. I don’t ever recall him spending a day in bed. On the other hand, my mother had always been very frail. Though she worked hard, she was not well, and I’m sure in her wildest imagination that it never occurred to her that my father would precede her in death. His death came as a very great shock to her when he died quite suddenly with a massive heart attack, and she was so inconsolable that we were very concerned about her. But one morning she woke up and told me about a dream that she had had, and I think that putting her dream together with one that he had told her about helped her a great deal. I had never heard my father’s dream—perhaps my brothers have, I don’t know—but until she told it to me at this time, I had never heard it.
It seemed that shortly after he came home from his mission he had this dream. In it he and two other young men were in a room with three somewhat older men. As dreams have a way of doing, things just sort of developed gradually so that he realized that these young men and himself were being set apart to go on missions and that the three older men who were there with them were men of great authority, so great that he gradually realized that the missions to which they were being called were not missions of this world, and that these men were not men from this world. He gradually gained the impression that the man in charge was none other than the Prophet Joseph Smith. The other fellows were set apart first. As they came to my father, he said to them that he had just returned from a mission, that he was twenty-eight years old, and that he had wanted very much to be married and have sons of his own. He told them that he was the only son of an only son and that he was the last of his name, and that if he were not allowed to marry and have sons, the name would die with him, and that he wanted very much to have sons to carry on his name and to carry on the work of the Church for which his mother had sacrificed so much. Well, it seemed that he was told that his call would be reserved for a later date and that he would be given the opportunity to marry and to have a family.
When he awoke, the dream was very vivid to him, so much so that he sought out an old man who lived in Heber who had joined the Church very young, who knew many of the hardships of Missouri and Nauvoo, and who remembered the Prophet’s martyrdom. Without telling him anything about the dream, he simply told this man that he was going to describe someone to him, and then would this old gentleman please tell him whom he had described? So he described the man whom he thought, or whom his impression had been was the Prophet Joseph. After he had described him, the old gentleman said to him, “You’ve described the Prophet Joseph Smith.” My father said, “Well he doesn’t look—the description does not fit his pictures.” The old gentleman said that he did not look like the pictures of our current day.
I guess the dream stayed with him very strongly and became even stronger when in the course of the next short period (a year or year and a half, or some such matter) the two young men who had been in the room with him both died. I’m sure that this dream had a great deal of influence on my father. As his sons came along, I’m sure it helped him have greater determination to bring them up as righteously as he could.
After his death, my mother apparently had this dream given to her, she thought, to help her with her own problem. She dreamed that she was in a room with a long counter running through it, and she was on one side of the counter and on the other side of the counter she saw my father with a group of other people working very busily. Now this counter could easily be accounted for, because in my father’s office there was a long counter, it having been, I think, a real estate office before he rented it. Of course we didn’t pay any attention to the counter—we just walked around it and on into his office. But she had the impression that she must not walk around the counter, she must wait, so she stood there waiting. Finally my father looked up and saw her there and smiled, but he didn’t offer to come to her. Well, she stood her ground; she was not used to being treated this way by my father, and she waited even though she had the feeling that she was supposed to go away. In a little while he looked up again and saw her still standing there, and this time he smiled again but shook his head and went on with what he was doing. She still remained waiting, and after a while, he finally looked up again and saw her waiting and walked over to her, and with a gentle smile that he reserved only for her, he said to her, “Lizzie, I can’t talk to you now. As you can see, we are very busy here.”
With that she awakened, but she awakened with the feeling that what he said, that “I can’t talk to you now” was an assurance that they would talk again. While this didn’t relieve her of her grief—she still grieved greatly for him—it did make her grief more bearable and was a great consolation to her, and she was determined to continue her own life in a manner that would help to make it so that they could talk again.
For many years, both before and after my father’s death, my mother was president of the little Relief Society in Myton, which is quite different, I think, from being a Relief Society president nowadays, since her dominion extended several miles in each direction of town. As I said once before, Mother never learned to drive a horse and buggy, so when she heard that someone was ill, if there was no one there to take her, she simply gathered up everything she could carry and started out to walk. When we saw her again, we knew that the person had either recovered or that Mother, perhaps with the help of some other neighbor ladies, had washed and prepared the body for burial. This was very hard on my gentle little mother, but she was a very good Relief Society president and took her responsibilities very seriously.
There were some funny sides to it too. I remember once her being very upset because she had gone to visit a lady who had a new baby, and her bed was filthy with a very ragged quilt, and Mother came home to get clean linens. As she was going out the door, she came back to take a brand-new quilt that she had just finished making, which she was very proud of, so that the lady might have a pretty bed when people came to see her. The following day, on Sunday, my father and she went to see the lady, and the dirty quilt was back on the bed, and the brand-new quilt was out in the yard in the dirt with the kids playing on it. Well, with all her gentleness, my mother could get really upset, and that’s one time when she was, and my father had to repeat several times, as he often did, that poor people had poor ways.
My mother had many interesting experiences as a Relief Society president. Perhaps when I get to the Myton part of my story I’ll tell you some more of them. With her natural shyness and her retiring spirit, I’m sure some of the things that she had to do were very difficult for her. She would always much rather be in the background than in the limelight, and she would always much prefer to listen than to speak. Perhaps it’s too bad she didn’t have more of her own mother’s natural love for nursing and for the care of the sick and such things, but this was not the case.
My father, on the other hand, was a natural with people. He loved people. He loved to be in the center of any group. He loved to express what he thought, and he loved to listen to what others thought. He enjoyed a good argument, and he could have a good argument without anger. He could be very gentle with people.
Again, to mention slightly the Myton era, I know that when we first went there and he was setting up his law practice, he was also the Branch president (it was not a ward at that time) and he had his office in our home. I can remember thinking to myself that we’d starve to death because towards many couples who came to him for divorces, he saw his duty first as that of Branch president, and he tried to counsel and help and save the marriage. Many people, I’m sure, who came expecting to file for divorce went away determined to make their marriage work, and in most cases I’m sure it did.
People sensed this love for them in my father and came to him with their problems, and for help. I don’t know of anyone, really, who didn’t love him. In that respect, he was very much like my brother Roy in his years as a bishop, and I’ve often thought of the similarity between them. They were very, very different in so many ways, but they both had that ability to draw people to them. They both had a marvelous sense of humor and a sense of the ridiculous, and they both had such compassion for people.
Chapter 2
Childhood in Heber and Provo
I will try to tell you some of the things that I remember as a small child. I’m sure that none of them will be very eventful, but they might give you some idea of our family life at the time that I was growing up.
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| Mabel as a child |
Aside from my father and mother, probably the first thing I remember was that big combination kitchen and dining room that I mentioned before. It was probably a very plain room, but to me it seemed like a beautiful room. I well remember the geraniums in the wide windowsills, and it seemed to me they were always in bloom. I remember the white lace curtains that were starched stiff and dried on the curtain stretchers.
I remember my bird, my Dickie, who sang in his cage above the geraniums. My Aunt Maude Campbell raised canaries and sold them, but somehow or other she always managed to provide me with one. I’m sure there were a series of “Dickies,” but they all seem like one to me, except for one time. Someone had apparently left the door open on this occasion when they fed Dickie, the door to his cage, and he got out, and my cat who was ever watchful, got to him before I did and killed him. I was able to salvage the body and give it a proper burial. Dickie was buried in a shoebox under a tree by Lake Crick, between the pasture and the garden, and it was a very lovely funeral. All of the kids came with bunches of wildflowers, and we cried copious tears. I recall that there was almost immediately another Dickie there and I don’t remember any serious grief after that funeral.
Another thing I remember about that room was the big, black, kitchen stove. It stood out a ways from the wall, at least far enough so that Roy and I could crawl in behind it on cold days with the latest Sears-Roebuck Catalog and play our game of “I’ll take this page and you take that page,” which we did by the hour. From the oven of that big old stove my mother used to take beautiful brown loaves of bread, which she would always allow us to break, at least one, while they were warm, to eat with butter and honey and jam. That was a wonderful feast.
I suppose the focal place of the room would be the big dining room table, where the seven of us sat down three times a day to eat, and I mean three times a day. Somehow we all understood that everybody was to be there at mealtime. My father came home for lunch from his office, and we came home from school. In the morning and in the evening we had family prayer, and we all took our turn giving the prayer, from Father down to me as soon as I was eight years old. I remember being coached at that time and being prepared to take my part in family prayer.
I don’t remember our seating arrangement at the table except for Roy and I. My father sat at the head of the table with Mother on his left—I guess that was closest to the stove—and me next to Mother and Roy on the other side of Father. That probably saved some arguments, because for some reason or other we only needed to be able to look at each other or kick each other under the table to send us both off into giggles, and sometimes it was necessary for us to be sent away from the table. But on the whole, our mealtime was a very happy time at home. Each of us had an opportunity to tell the events of our day and my father and the older boys discussed politics and current events and religion.
Since I never did finish high school, I’ve always maintained that I gained my education around our dining room table.
Above the dining room table hung a coal oil lamp which provided most of the light in the room. There were probably other coal oil lamps scattered about, but I don’t remember them; I do remember the one above the table.
I must tell you one funny thing that happened when we were having family prayer. We had in Heber, oh, not more than a half dozen families who were not members of the LDS Church, and they had a little mission church—Southeast Something—I don’t remember the name of it. One family who attended it were quite close neighbors of ours and friends of ours, and we did visit the church occasionally. I liked to go because we were always given a little picture with some religious scene. They liked still better to come to our church because we had “play dinner.”
Back to the prayer. One night we were ready for dinner and one of the little boys in the family was there to play with Roy, and since he had had his dinner, he was told that he might wait while Roy ate. Of course before we ate, we all knelt down to have family prayer. I don’t recall who was giving the prayer, but during the time that the prayer was being given, all of a sudden a little voice piped up [from] down on the floor by us saying, “If you’ll tell me what you’ve lost, I’ll see if I can help you find it.” Well, I’m sure it cracked up most of us, but somehow we got through it without the little boy having his feelings hurt or probably even knowing what had happened.
After dinner, in the evening, the dining room table was still pretty much the focal point because that’s where the light was. That’s where the boys studied, and that’s where my father sat to read his paper and where Mother sat to read her book (she was very fond of reading), and where I sat to do my coloring and painting. So we grew up pretty much around that dining room table.
I imagine we were a noisy bunch. Sometimes Mother used to slip away to go over to Aunt Maron Campbell’s for a short visit, probably to get away from us while Father was there to see that things were kept quiet. Aunt Maron was my Uncle John’s wife. He was the one who had owned the sawmill from which the lumber part of our house came, and had at one time owned the house. He died very young and Aunt Maron was left with two daughters, Jenny and Maisie, or I guess to put it correctly, Maisie and Jenny. They had also had a boy, younger, but he died as a small child. Aunt Maron was a lovely person and she and my mother were very fond of one another. My father was very good to Aunt Maron, and I’m sure she appreciated him greatly. I should call her Aunt Marion, but we didn’t, we called her Aunt Maron.
As I started to say, Mother would slip over there in the evenings to visit with Aunt Maron, but before she could be there more than a few minutes, she said one by one we would all come traipsing in. Since Aunt Maron was a very careful housekeeper, Mother shooed us out back home where we belonged. Aunt Maron earned her living sewing. She did beautiful sewing. My mother was not a sewer. She loved to make quilts and rag rugs and things of that nature, and she did make our house dresses and she made some of my school dresses. But my best dresses were always made by Aunt Maron. I remember many times going over to have my dresses fitted, and on Sunday morning running over to have Aunt Maron tie my sash so it would look right before I left for Sunday School.
One very funny thing that happened was on the Fourth of July, or 24th, I don’t know which. I had been given a nickel to spend and I had the nickel in my mouth when I went over to Aunt Maron’s to have her tie my sash. In the course of events, I swallowed the nickel. By the time I got home all of the family had left, Father and the boys. Mother was still there.
Mother very rarely went with us to the parade. She usually stayed home and made chicken and dumplings and green peas. We always had green peas and chicken on the 24th of July. That was the first time that my father permitted the potatoes to be dug, because he thought, in his good, practical way that we had to wait until they got big enough, but we could dig some nice new potatoes to have with our peas on the 24th of July. That, with homemade ice cream and cake, made a wonderful dinner when we came home hot and tired from the parade.
When I got home, why, the boys, as I say, had gone. My father always gave each one of them something to spend while they were downtown. Come to think of it, Jack had not gone, because he’s the main character in this story. I mustn’t forget that. Jack was still there, and I was crying because I had swallowed my nickel. Mother said to Jack, couldn’t he give me one of his nickels so that I would have something that I could spend for candy? But Jack, being of a good, solid, practical nature, said, “Well Mother! She’s got her nickel!” He wasn’t about to give me one of his. I kidded Jack about this in California just a few years ago, and he declares that he can’t remember it. I don’t know that I blame him for not remembering.
I just happened to think, so I’ll mention here that I remember as a little girl standing in my nightgown and my bare feet out on the back porch with my hand in my father’s watching Halley’s Comet, and remembering my father saying that we wouldn’t see it again for such a long time that he would probably never see it again. He felt that it was worthwhile to wake us all up so that we might come out to see it.
My father and I had a very close relationship. He somehow had the idea that everything I did was funny. I remember, too, that whenever I got in a bit of trouble during the day, that I used to watch for him to come home at night, and as I saw him coming down the street I would run down to meet him, and with my hand in his walking home, I’d have my side of the story all told before we got home to Mother. Somehow he thought this, too, was funny.
I’m not going to take very long, and everybody’s fussed so about it, I’ll just do it and get it over with. But now that I’ve started, the memories keep coming in so fast that I can’t sort them out. I don’t have anything chronologically, and I really can’t think how quite to put them together, so I’m just telling you things as they come to my mind. If they’re where they fit, fine; if they’re not, I’m sorry.[1]
Somebody said, why don’t you tell something about school, but that’s the last thing I want to tell you anything about. Everybody else can remember their teachers, they can remember what they did at school, they can remember who were in their rooms, they can think about their pictures in their minds and all, and I don’t remember a thing about school until I was in the sixth grade. I can’t remember a teacher I had. I can’t remember anything that I did except recess, playing ball, and I wasn’t very good at that.
I remember going to school in the cold winter mornings after a snowstorm with us all strung out in a row, Keith first, then Fred, John, Roy, and me at the very end. Of course my legs weren’t quite as long, so I sometimes got stuck, and Keith had to come back and lift me over the rough spots. Then I can remember as it got colder that we could walk on top of the snow in Heber, and sometimes right across the tops of the fences. I can remember walking home that we used to throw ourselves with our arms out back in the snow to make angels. I can remember all sorts of intelligent things like that, but nothing about what happened in school.
I do remember something that happened in Provo, but I’m not supposed to be in Provo yet; in fact, I don’t know where I’m supposed to be really. I was in the second grade, I guess, when we were in Provo, and I do remember that they had fire drills. To show you how smart I was, there was one house between our house and school. There were three doors in our school, I can remember that, and I can remember the building. Keith was in junior high school then, but the other three boys were in the same school I was. I just never did learn—when we got a fire drill, why, I would get out as quickly as I could, run around to all of the doors and see that all of my brothers were out, and then I would run home to tell Mother. Well, I’m sure Mother wanted to know. She was always worried about everything that everybody did, so maybe that was what I was supposed to do.
Somehow school didn’t mean a great deal to me until the sixth grade, as I said. Then I got Atty Wooton for a teacher, and he woke me up and from then on, school was really lots of fun. I had an experience that I remember in one of the grades when a little Moulton boy broke his arm and we all took nickels to school to buy him some oranges. I had never had an orange then, but I took my nickel and we bought this bag of oranges and the whole class went down to see him. My, those oranges did look good! I stumbled over everything I could see for a week afterwards, but I just was not lucky enough to break anything.
Well, that ought to take care of school for awhile. We’ll pick it up when I’m a little further along and I can tell you something just a little bit more complimentary, at least to me.
I remember saying that I could remember some of the furniture that went into our parlor. So maybe I could tell you about a couple of things that I do remember. I remember when we got our phonograph. Oooh—that was really a big day. That summer we had been sitting out on the bank of Lake Crick listening to [the] Jones’s phonograph. They got theirs before we did. I remember their favorite record, or at least my favorite record of the ones they had was “Red Wing.” They had a big old black horn on theirs; it wasn’t very pretty. When ours came, it was a beautiful red horn. It had big pink roses all over on the inside. The records were cone-shaped. I’m sure some of you have seen that type of phonograph in museums and probably down at Pioneer Village or somewhere. It was just the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my whole life. We got several records with it. I remember there were some Harry Lauder records with it that my mother and father could laugh and laugh over. There was “Sweet Alice Ben Bolt,” some religious records, and I guess the one that impressed me the most was the one about who threw the overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder.
The other thing I remember coming into our parlor would be several years later, but it was when my father bought my piano for me when I was eleven years old. That was really a wonderful day, too. Who says advertising is new? My father saw an ad in the Deseret News. I am 72 now and I was 11 when I got it, so that was 61 years ago.[2] He saw this ad in the Deseret News that had a coupon, and if he took it into Dayne’s Music Store in Salt Lake, they would allow $50 on a piano. I didn’t know I was to get it, but he was going to Provo and I guess on to Salt Lake, at least he did go on to Salt Lake and looked over all of the pianos. He didn’t know a thing about music and couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, but he was a good shopper, and he looked them all over and picked out the one that he liked. He was not the most trustful soul, apparently, because he went back to the piano and made a little mark on it so they couldn’t gyp him. I remember when we uncrated the piano when it came, that the first thing he did was to go around the back of the piano and look for his little mark, and then he was satisfied that he had gotten the one he had picked out. It was a lovely piano and it did have a beautiful tone.
I took lessons from Nellie DeGraff, my Aunt Mary Clyde’s oldest daughter. I don’t remember how many I took, but I must have learned something; at least I learned how to play the hymns. My father was quite insistent that that be part of my learning process, and it did stand me in good stead, because in later years I played the hymns in church for many years.
I remember an incident of coming home at night, getting home before Mother and Father did from church. None of the boys were home, and I was kind of frightened, but I didn’t want to show that I was frightened by going outside or running to the neighbors or over to Aunt Maron’s or anywhere. So I sat down and played a hymn, and when Father and Mother came home I was playing hymns. Of course I confessed to Father that I had been frightened and that that’s what I had done. I will always remember how pleased he was. He at that time said that he couldn’t think of anything one could do better if they were frightened than to play a hymn.
When I mentioned sitting on the bank of Lake Crick listening to the Jones’s phonograph, it made me think of a couple of other times when Lake Crick and the Joneses played quite a part in my life. I remember one time when Lake Crick was a rather roaring torrent. My brothers and some other boys got a tub and fastened a rope on each handle of the tub. One stood on each bank of the creek and one would get into the tub and they would pull each other across. Well, I thought it would be fun to ride, and so did my friend Lizzie Fisher, who lived at the Jones’s (I think she was their niece; she had always lived with them as her mother died when she was a baby, and I always thought of her as a Jones). Anyway, we thought we would like to do it, but we were littler than they were, and of course we were pushed aside as little kids are, but we were not defeated. So we went over to our old granary and found an old tub of my mother’s and took it out to Lake Crick. We couldn’t agree which one would get in first, and anyway we had no ropes to pull one another across, so we both got in and started down the stream. We soon found that the tub we had chosen had a hole in the bottom, plus the fact that the stream was much swifter than we had anticipated. Fortunately, we were able to yell loud enough so that the boys heard us and we were rescued before we came to the bridge.
The other story I’m thinking of is when the Jones’s house caught on fire. It was on a Sunday. We had had Sunday School, and we were hurrying with our dinner to get back to the 2 o’clock Sacrament meeting. My father hadn’t changed out of his brand new suit, which he was wearing for the first time. Suddenly, Lizzie Fisher came running up to the front door screaming, “Our house is on fire!” My father and my brothers went on the run. We had no telephone then, so Father told us [Lizzie and me] to run up and down the street as hard as we could and as fast as we could screaming “Fire!” We had no fire department either in Heber at that time; it was a voluntary fire department. Well, we did this, we ran and ran and ran, until we both were exhausted—fell onto the ground exhausted—and we didn’t realize until afterwards that neither one of us had said a word.
The men who did see the fire formed a water brigade, each with a bucket, passing it along one to the other from Lake Crick to the Jones’s house. They did have a hydrant and a hose, and they finally did get to use them, but they didn’t for quite a while because the oldest of the Jones girls, Annie, had been putting up fruit—she had put the fruit upstairs. She had immediately run upstairs and started throwing the fruit out the window! It was landing on the sandstone walk below and the bottles were breaking and the glass was flying so hard that the men couldn’t get near the house with the hose. But finally, the fire was put out and everything turned out well, except my father’s suit.
I don’t know how old I was when we got our first telephone. I was never, ever allowed for a long time to forget my first phone call on it. I came home and I was so excited about it. When it got around to my turn to use it, why, I called one of my friends to tell her that we had a telephone. In the course of the conversation, she said to me, “What are you doing?” and I said, “We’re making fudge, can’t you smell it?”
I also remember the first moving picture I went to. It was a silent film, of course. My brother Keith took me to it. Keith was my idol for many years. He was the oldest one in the family and so he was enough older than I was that he would take me places, where Roy wouldn’t because he was afraid somebody might think he was taking a girl. Jack and Fred were too involved in other things, but Keith would very often feel sorry for his little sister and take me somewhere, and he did take me to this picture show. I remember the show was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The show house was right next to the livery stable, which made a very nice setting for it, I’ve thought since, because it was in the middle of the summer, and the fragrance from the livery stable fit in very nicely with the mood of the show.
I remember the first doll that I got that opened and closed its eyes, and I still remember the shudder that went through me when it did that. It just didn’t seem natural to me to see this doll do such an unnatural thing. My mother said I never did play with the doll, but it did have some nice clothes and they fit my cat rather well. I used to dress my cat up in the clothes and wheel it around in my doll buggy. It was much more satisfactory than the doll because the cat would cry and of course if it didn’t I could always pinch its tail. I did get in a little trouble one time when I dressed my father’s new Rhode Island Red pullets that he had sent away for in the doll clothes and wheeled one of them around in my doll carriage on its back. I discovered to my horror that they don’t live very long on their backs. That’s one time when I rather think my father didn’t think I was funny, but I don’t recall that even then he punished me. I didn’t play very much with dolls except when I played with the other girls in the neighborhood—Lizzie Fisher and the Duke girls who lived just a little further along the block and who were also very good friends during the years that I was growing up.
I did love to play with the boys and go up in the pasture where they were digging roads and doing all sorts of interesting things. But they had their own way of getting rid of me, when my mother would, after I had pestered her long enough, insist that they take me. When we’d get almost up there—they knew that I was terribly afraid of spiders—when they’d hear a hoot owl (and we had loads of hoot owls in the trees up there) they would say to each other, “Did you hear that spider?” That’s all it took, and I would turn and run for home as fast as I could go. The boys knew they were pretty safe, because when Mother would ask me why I had come back, I’d always say, “There was a spider.” She knew that I was afraid of spiders, so that took care of that. They didn’t ever get into any trouble over it. I don’t think they even recall the incident. To this day I can’t hear a hoot owl without thinking about spiders.
A dear little German lady lived a few houses from us, who made her living selling flowers. We always got our flowers from her at Decoration Day, and she always brought flowers every Sunday to church, to Sunday School. Everyone loved her. Roy and I got in a little trouble one time because of what we did, and I think we learned our lesson that time on honesty. We wanted to butter our mother up a little bit for something, I don’t even remember what it was we wanted her to do, but we thought it would be nice to take her some flowers. So we were going by Mrs. Schank’s place, and it occurred to us that we could pick a nice bouquet of flowers just by taking flowers whose heads were sticking through the fence. They weren’t in Mrs. Schank’s yard at all, they were outside the fence. We picked a nice bouquet of flowers, and we took them home to Mother. It didn’t take Mother long to figure out what had happened. I never will forget us going back with Mother right behind us, taking us back over to Mrs. Schank’s to tell her and to apologize and to explain to her that we had taken the flowers. She explained to us that that was how she made her living and said all of the things that she should have said, being a very wise little old lady, but then she brought us each out a great big sugar cookie. It was one of the best cookies I think I ever ate, and I think that it was also one of the best lessons I ever learned.
I don’t want to come to the end of this cassette in the middle of anything, and I’m sure that I’m almost through with it, so I don’t think I’ll start anything of any great length. I might tell you younger people who think “home evenings” are new that they are not. One of the very first things that I can remember is family home evening, which was a weekly occurrence in our home. I remember that one winter we read a children’s version of the Book of Mormon. I also remember our home teachers. Those days they were called ward teachers. They used to come regularly and it was part of the evening for each of the children to take some part in the lesson when they came. You children today have Primary, and we also had Primary then, but in addition to Primary, we also had religion class. That was also a weekly meeting, and one which we were expected attend each week. As I recall, I enjoyed religion class fully as much as I did Primary.
I was too much of a tomboy to be very domestic, but I do remember how proud I was the summer I was ten when I won a prize in baking bread. I guess I was particularly proud of myself because I had a cousin, Lavina Campbell (she was Aunt Maude and Uncle Jim Campbell’s daughter—we used to visit with them a great deal), and Lavina could just cook anything. They were very proud of her and whenever we’d go there for dinner, why, Aunt Maude would say, “Lavina made the biscuits,” or “Lavina made the pie,” or “Lavina did this.” My mother would look at me and say, “See what Lavina can do,” and it was years before I could learn to really appreciate or like Lavina.
The nice thing about bread was the homemade yeast that we had to work with. I don’t suppose any of you can remember what fun it was when your mother ran out of yeast to be sent to the neighbor’s to get a fresh start, and how much fun it was to carry it home, and how good it tasted to stick your finger in it and then put your finger in your mouth. The next thing you knew you were taking a little sip and another little sip, until sometimes by the time you got home, why, it was rather obvious that you had been doing quite a bit of sipping. It was a whole lot better tasting than the yeast that we have today, and it did make darned good bread.
There might be time on this [cassette] to tell Myrna and Kristin about another room in our house, and that was the clothes closet. It was a big clothes closet underneath the stairs in the house. Of course, where the stairs were at the top, it was a nice, high ceiling and was a big closet, but as the stairs went down to the ground floor, so did the ceiling, so the back of the closet was very low. Back here my mother used to keep her baskets and where she kept her rug rags. Someone had told her that lightning wouldn’t strike if you sat on a feather tick or on rags or clothing of some sort. She was very, very frightened of lightning, and of course because she was, I was too. We did have very, very bad electrical storms. I remember spending many hours in that dark closet with my mother, sitting on these baskets and rags, waiting for an electrical storm to get over with. It seemed like sometimes they lasted a long time. The storms would go down and around the mountains of that little valley and keep coming back into the town. We’d hear the thunder crash and we’d hold tight to each other and sit back there on the sacks of rags.
It has just occurred to me that in telling these experiences, that I have fallen right into a pattern of calling my parents “Father” and “Mother.” Somehow, some children did, I don’t remember, but we never did call them “Mom” and “Dad.” When we were little children we said “Mama” and “Papa,” but when we were too big to say that, we said “Father” and “Mother.”
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| Mabel’s parents, 1914 |
I’ve been wondering why this cassette hasn’t run out, but I just noticed that it’s thirty minutes on each side instead of fifteen as the others that I have, have been. So there might be time to tell you what I promised, as to why my father was so against practical jokes. With all of his sense of humor and with all his love of fun, that was one thing he did not like, was a practical joke.
It had to do with the death of his youngest sister, Esther. She and her husband had just recently come to Utah and neither one of them spoke English,[3] and she was about to have her first child. They lived in a little house in the mouth of Daniels Canyon. I guess it would be the last house before the canyon. At that time, well, and I suppose today, the sheep men take their sheep up the canyon in the springtime where they graze in Strawberry Valley, and then in the fall they bring them down either to be slaughtered or to be taken out west to the winter range. On this particular night, three young men were bringing a herd of sheep down the canyon, and they were getting near home, and I guess drinking a bit, and they thought it would be great sport to play a joke on this immigrant family. They were trying to think what they might do when suddenly they realized that one of their dogs had torn one of the sheep’s legs quite badly, and it was bleeding quite profusely. They got the idea to cover blood, or to smear blood over one of the men, and then the other two men carried this man into the house. They came yelling and banged on the door, and Aunt Esther’s husband opened the door, and they came in with this man all covered with blood. Perhaps when the young men saw what they had done, they were sorry, I don’t know, but she immediately went into labor. Before help could be brought, the baby had been born alive, but she had died from shock. The baby was named Charles, I suppose after my father, and as a young man and boy, he was quite close to our family. I’m sure I’ll tell you something about him later. But my father always felt that this was such a senseless death, and it was one of the reasons, I’m sure, why he abhorred practical jokes.
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Notes:
- By this time in the taping of these stories, two of Mabel’s brothers had visited and heard her stories, and as people from the same family with different memories will do, they each disputed with her over details of her stories, certain that she was remembering things wrong.
- This was 1976, when Mabel had been taping her stories for over two years.
- Esther came to Utah from Sweden with her mother and little brother in 1877 and married much later, so this story had acquired details that were not quite right by the time Mabel retold it. But Esther did die when her first child Charles Bjorkman was born.
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| Mabel, second from right on top row, as a sixth-grader, age 11 or 12 |
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Go to Part 3.
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Sunday, May 5, 2019
Mabel's Memories, part 1
During the summer of 1974, Mabel Wahlquist had cataracts that left her unable to do handwork or to read or to watch tv while she waited to have the operations. To keep her occupied, her niece Elizabeth Wahlquist bought her cassette tapes, and Mabel started to think out the stories that would become her own life history. She continued taping stories for about three years, in all about 20 hours of recordings. Part of that time she was laid up nursing her phlebitis. She always meant to tape more but somehow never did.
She hired a transcriptionist who typed all but the last two tapes. The last tape Mabel kept back, never meaning to have it typed. The second-to-last tape was left with the transcriptionist to finish but somehow was lost. Now both tapes are lost, alas.
She originally meant to tell only the family story so that her nieces and nephews, especially the children of her brother Keith (who died when the children were young) would be better acquainted with their father and older relatives, but Mabel’s own story throughout becomes the inadvertent focus. Her story is one of perseverance, intelligence, patience, and above all, love. Her dedication to her family may have seemed to her no more than expected under the circumstances, but her sense of duty reached a standard equaled by few.
My role in transcribing her story began when Elizabeth took me to Ogden one Thanksgiving when my holiday plans had fallen through. I met Mabel the night before Thanksgiving. The next day she told her nephew Keith that he should marry me. She was very happy to attend our wedding the following summer. A week after that same Thanksgiving, she fell and broke her hip, making it necessary that she move to a nursing home where she became very popular among the staff and other residents. She wanted this book to read there, and Elizabeth felt it would be best if she took a copy instead of the original, so I took the book and made two photocopies of it. Elizabeth and Mabel had never been satisfied with the transcription of the book; they had meant to correct it sometime, and I offered to listen to the tapes and compare them to the transcription, so Elizabeth gave me all the tapes.
It was faster to retype the manuscript than to correct all the problems. I listened to the eighteen hours of tapes, comparing them with the original transcription, and I made corrections as I created the electronic version. The length is around 130,000 words.
One of Mabel’s horrors was using poor grammar. Generally she was a very careful speaker in that regard. She told Elizabeth that she wanted all her “bad grammar” corrected; however, with the exception of providing a word or two in brackets that may clarify or complete a thought, I haven’t needed to change much of anything. She made penciled corrections to her copy of the transcript which I used as footnotes originally, but in this edition I typed her corrected version, unless in listening to the tapes I found that her original words were clearer but had not been transcribed correctly.
I realize the photographs are balanced heavily on the side of Mabel’s brother Keith’s family, but those are the ones we have in our possession. I had wanted to include at least one appearance by every grandchild of Charles and Elizabeth Wahlquist but missed a few.
Several professors whom I worked with when writing my doctoral dissertation saw this book and urged publishing it. Part of Chapter 3 was published in the Utah State Historical Society’s Beehive History, 19 (1993): 2–8. The article included photographs now missing and some we never had; especially interesting are those from the Vernal Library that include photographs of Waugh’s Store in Myton.
The original edition appendices included living people and have been omitted from this edition.
I am planning to post about 5,000 words in each section here, but the length will really depend upon where a natural story break occurs.
Marci Wahlquist
April 20, 2019
Chapter 1
The Campbells and the Wahlquists
As our Sunday School teacher said yesterday, I hope there is something to do in the next world besides genealogy, so I’m not going to attempt any dates or make any effort to be authoritative about anything that I am going to say—just to tell you some of the things that I remember from the stories that my mother used to tell to me and then to tell you some of the things I remember in our own family during my lifetime. Those of you who want facts and dates and figures can find them in a book entitled How Beautiful Upon the Mountains, which was compiled by the Wasatch Chapter of the Utah Pioneers—Daughters of the Utah Pioneers. I know there is one in each of your family libraries because Julia Anderson, Edwin’s wife, helped to compile the book and she pressured me into buying four copies, which I gave to Jack and Fred and Roy and kept one for myself which is here.
As far as I know, the first of our family who joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was my grandmother, Elizabeth Davis, a sixteen-year-old girl in Scotland. Now, I do know that somewhere along the way when I was a little girl there used to be a Johnny Davis come to see us whom I remember as being my mother’s distant cousin, but where he fits in I don’t really know. Grandma Campbell, Grandma Elizabeth Davis Campbell, joined the Church in Scotland at sixteen as I said, and a few years later was married to Thomas Campbell who had joined the Church I think about a year previous to that time.
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| Elizabeth Davis Campbell |
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| Thomas Campbell |
There is some discrepancy between my memories and those of the Wasatch Pioneer ladies of the DUP as to what they did when they arrived. According to the story as my mother told it, they went to Sanpete County and took up a homestead there. I think they were probably a little above the average people in Scotland. My grandfather was a miner. I’m not sure that he was a mining engineer, but at least he was quite knowledgeable. He was a very intelligent man and very well read. My grandmother was a practical nurse, so she had been very helpful along the way with the things that she was able to do.
It soon became known that my grandfather knew something about mining, so Brigham Young called them to go to Southern Utah where they were trying to develop some coal mines. They went, considering it a mission and planning to come back to Sanpete County. I don’t know how long they were down there, but for some time. They lived in dugouts and did most of their cooking over an open fire. They were down there during the Mountain Meadows Massacre , and I’ve heard my mother say that Grandma wanted desperately to buy a kettle to cook over the open fire that was sold at auction along with the other articles that were sold from the people who were killed in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. But my grandfather refused to let her buy anything from the auction.[2]
I know that they were also down there during the Black Hawk Indian War period. The boys by this time were young teenage boys, and they acted as scouts and as runners, and the oldest boy even as a fighter in the Black Hawk Indian War. I remember going down to Springville for Black Hawk Indian War veterans’ conferences or whatever you call them with the folks at one time. I might tell you something about that later. As usual, I got into lots of trouble.
They had some other children while they were down there; all told, they had ten children. They had the four before they came. Mother was the youngest and I think the only one born in Heber, though Uncle Jim Campbell might have been, so they were down there quite a while.
But when they gave up the idea of the mines down there, I suppose that they might have stayed and helped to build up the area down there like many people did, except that they thought they had this land in Sanpete County. When they came back, however, they discovered that another family had moved onto the land and were developing it. Of course in those days there was nothing but squatters’ rights, so they were unable to take their land back. They were quite desperate when they came back; they had nothing at all.
I don’t know why they went to Heber, unless it was that there were a lot of Scotch people there, and some of them were people they had known in the old country. Heber, in my mind, was mostly populated by people from England and Scotland, English-speaking people. The Swiss people went over to Midway and there were a few Scandinavian people, but not very many to my knowledge.
When they got to Heber, my grandfather and the older boys worked on the old tabernacle there. You remember there was quite a fuss to save it a few years ago and people who have been from Heber were called upon for donations. I remember sending a donation; I think I did it mostly from nostalgia, remembering that one time when we were very small youngsters, we were there at a conference and President McKay, then an apostle, was giving a talk and he wanted to bring out a point. I don’t remember even what the point was, but he said, “What makes more noise than a pig caught in a fence?” And a shrill little voice came from the balcony, “Two pigs.” That little voice was Roy. We all thought it was very funny, and Jack went around mad for about a week because he hadn’t thought of it first. But that’s another story.
When Grandpa and the boys had worked a time, Grandpa asked for their money. They were told that it was to be labor tithing. Of course he explained that they had no money for food and he must have money for his family. The stake president who was in charge of the building told him that they could get food from the Bishops’ Storehouse, but they could not have money. Well, he was an old Scotchman too, and I guess two old Scotchmen, particularly when one was a Campbell, didn’t make out so well. So finally, my grandfather got the money, but he was told that he would never get any more work if this particular stake president had anything to do with it. In those days stake presidents were pretty powerful individuals.
This was probably a very unfortunate thing, because my grandfather then took his boys and went to Park City to the mines that were being developed at about that time. Thus, as a family, they did become quite financially well situated. One of the boys developed a lumber mill, and they homesteaded a very good piece of land right on the edge of Heber City and were quite well-to-do. My grandfather was only angry at the stake president, not at the Church, but it was unfortunate because it did cause his boys to lose their faith and interest in the Church. Grandmother and the girls still continued in their activities in the Church. That’s the beginning of the Campbell branch of our family.
Now, my dad and his mother came much later to Heber. I would guess that Grandma and Grandpa Campbell came during the '50s, during the early '50s, and Grandma Wahlquist and my father came after the railroad, I think the first year after the railroad.[3]
I had planned to leave the Campbells here and pick them up again later, but I’ve decided that perhaps for those who are doing some serious genealogical research, that perhaps I should say that there is a Campbell organization. I suppose our contact with them would at this time be my cousin, Jenny Campbell, who lives in Orem, Utah. Roy and I received invitations to attend their Campbell conference a time or two, and we talked about going, but we never quite made it. Apparently it is a large group, and many members of the family are very active in it. I know that Fred attended once or twice, and I know that Jack was there at least once, because I remember him being very impressed at finding Governor Rampton there and learning that Governor Rampton’s wife had been a Campbell.
Perhaps the older members of the family knew, but I didn’t, that my Grandfather Campbell had an older brother, Alexander, who also joined the Church and who came to Utah and settled in Southern Utah. Whether this was the result of the research or whether the older members of the family knew it at that time, I don’t know. He had a large family and most of the Campbells or perhaps all of the Campbells in North Ogden are members of that family. Presumably Governor Rampton’s wife was descended from that family.
I’ve noticed in listening to this that I have said that Governor Rampton’s wife was a Campbell. It was not so—it was his mother who was a Campbell, so that made him a direct descendent of the Campbell line. Well, let’s go on.
Now, to go on, I’ll go back and say a little something about my grandmother and grandfather on my father’s side. My father, as you know, was Charles John Wahlquist, an only son. He had two older sisters, Sophia and Esther.[4] We called Aunt Sophia “Aunt Sophi.”[5] Esther had died much earlier in childbirth and we did not know her. This is another story that I’d like to tell a little bit later on and was the reason for my father being very much opposed to practical jokes.
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| Sophia Walquist Anderson, her husband and children |
My father’s father’s name was Anders Frederick Wahlquist, and of course he also was an only son. I seem to have the impression that he was not a large man. He was a cooper by trade, that is, a barrel maker, and apparently dipped a little bit too often into the barrel, which made for rather an unhappy marriage with my grandmother. His father was the elusive Olaf in our genealogy. He must have been a large man, or at least a tall man, because he was a member of the King’s Guard. It was at this time that he was given the name Wahlquist, which of course was pronounced Valqvist, and which my father changed to its present spelling and pronunciation when he came to the States much later.
We used to think Wahlquist was rather an unusual name, but apparently there are quite a number of Wahlquists about. My doctor in Minneapolis was named Wahlquist, and he had a brother who was a scientist who worked on the atom bomb, who had a famous son, Grant, of basketball fame. Elizabeth occasionally gets a note from a Mark Wahlquist in Australia who had happened to read Jack’s name in a book somewhere. Andrew received a letter from a lady in the southern states somewhere who had been a Wahlquist before her marriage, and she had seen his name in a publication and was interested. Of course there is the Wahlquist family in Salt Lake who came to America about the same time that my father came, and they have a large family, but we have never been able to make any connection and the fact that the name was given to my great-grandfather doesn’t make it logical that any of these people would be a part of our genealogy, but it would be very interesting to find out.
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| Anna Cristina Walquist |
Apparently Grandmother and my father had a pretty rough time the first years that they were in Utah, living in a country where they didn’t know the language and where they were not prepared to do any work. My grandmother worked in people’s homes as a housekeeper and kept my father with her when she could. He very often was able to do the chores for his board and slept in the barns. One of the first jobs he did have was herding cows in the pastures west of Heber City. It was there that he came in contact with other boys his own age who gave him rather a rough time because of his lack of English. I would imagine that he was rather a novelty to them and they thought he was very funny and they did tease and torment him. He had a very quick temper and I’m sure many fights ensued which made it more fun for the tormenters, but it also increased his determination to learn the language and to better himself and to show these boys up.
It seems that his father had begged him to stay in Sweden and had told him that if he would stay there, that he would mend his ways and would provide him with the best education that he could receive in Sweden, so I suppose he felt a certain obligation to his father too, but in any event, he did work very hard at trying to improve himself. He studied nights and took correspondence courses and became a well-educated person. In fact, he was teaching school before he went on his mission. I suppose that was—probably he went on his mission when he was around 25. Before this time, he and his mother had homesteaded land out at Daniels, near the mountains there south of Heber City, and had been instrumental in bringing his sisters’ families here. He had grown up very young and had worked on a construction crew in helping to build the road through Daniels Canyon in Strawberry Valley. He had also worked over on the Moulton Ranch between Park City and Heber, but he had never gone into the mines as my uncles on my mother’s side of the family had done.
He was a very fun-loving fellow, and I’ve heard him say that he had worked all day in his gum boots and walked over to Wallsburg, a distance of several miles, and danced until midnight and walked back, still in his gum boots, which was all he had. His tuition [admission] for the dance had been a few carrots or potatoes or any other produce that he was able to take from the farm.
It’s always seemed rather peculiar to me that he could have lived in this small town of Heber and not known my mother up until the time when he returned from his mission. Perhaps it’s because they moved in different social circles, because my mother’s family were fairly well-to-do, and my father, being an immigrant and of a nationality that was not very well known in Heber, and being very poor, probably had not attended many functions in Heber but had gone more to Charleston and Wallsburg and Daniels and places where the people of his nationality and of his social standing went.
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| Charles John Wahlquist |
I’ve thought it was odd that my father and my mother should have lived in the small community of Heber so long and not ever met one another, and I’ve been thinking, perhaps the reason that they didn’t meet was not so much his, as her circumstances. Mother was a very pretty girl, but she was also very shy, and I’ve heard her laughingly say that she usually got the first date with the fellow, but that when he returned it was to pick up her more lively and vivacious sister, Mary. And too, being the youngest in the family, she probably found herself at an early age, probably her late teens, as the one left at home to care for her aging and ailing parents.
Grandfather Campbell had always been a very sensitive person, and I’m sure the rigors of pioneer life had been very hard on him, and in his older years he was not well. He had a bad stomach; probably nowadays we’d say he had an ulcer. He had bad migraine headaches and was just generally not well. He spent his declining years reading his books and puttering in his garden. He died several years before my grandmother did. My grandmother, on the other hand, was a very strong¬ natured, determined woman, and you know I’ve mentioned before that she was a practical nurse. She was very well known in the community because she had brought many babies into the world. She had a certain knack with herbs and teas and poultices and such, which caused people to call on her very frequently in illnesses.
At about this—well, I guess probably before my grandfather died, she developed cataracts. My mother took her to Salt Lake for surgery, and the surgery was a success, but during the time of the healing process she developed an infection. Of course in those days there was nothing to fight infection, and it spread very rapidly from the one eye to the other, and she became totally blind and was blind for seventeen years before her death. Mother has told me many times how very courageous her mother was, how determined she was not to let her affliction keep her from doing the things that she liked to do. With Mother leading her, she still called on the sick and did all that she could to help alleviate their problems, and she insisted on attending all of her meetings. After my grandfather’s death, she considered herself very much the head of the house, and if there was a noise outside, she was up and out to investigate. I remember Mother telling once of going out to find her and she was standing right on the edge of an open cellar that they had been having dug for their winter vegetables. She didn’t dare to call to her, but somehow she was able to reach her before she fell into the cellar and was injured. I’m sure all of this added to my mother’s own very nervous state and made her the nervous person that she was throughout her life.
Another of Mother’s duties of course was to read to Grandma, and my grandmother loved to hear her read the Wasatch Wave, the weekly paper. The minute it came into the house, it had to be read from cover to cover. About this time, my father was a missionary in the Scandinavian mission and he spent a good deal of his time in Copenhagen. He wrote for the Eastern Star and he traveled a great deal, and he wrote a letter home each week to the Wasatch Wave. His letters were more in the nature of a travelogue, as he told about the people and their customs and their dress and about the countryside. My grandmother found these letters very interesting. The minute that the paper came into the house, the first thing that Mother had to read was the letter from Charlie Wahlquist. So for about two years, without knowing Charlie Wahlquist, she had been reading his letters and of course had gained many impressions of him from the letters.
When he returned home, she was still not, of course, acquainted with him, but Grandma was very anxious to meet him, and as soon as she learned where he was going to be speaking, she insisted that they must go and hear him. After his talk, not being shy like my mother, she insisted that they must go up and meet him, and so they did. My father immediately fell in love with my mother, but he was so different to her, or seemed so different from his letters that it was some time before my mother found a great deal of interest in him. But he was a very determined person, and as I said before, very outgoing. Before they were even engaged, he began building the house that was to be their home: a small, cabin-like house right next to his mother’s house on their land in Daniels.
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| Charles and Elizabeth Wahlquist, wedding portrait, 1895 |
I guess they must have had a great time with those two mothers-in-law. They just did not get along at all. My Grandma Wahlquist was equally strong-willed and just as determined as my Grandma Campbell, but in a different way. Quite differently from my father, she had refused to accept the ways of America. I’m sure she had had her feelings hurt deeply many times when she was working in other people’s households when she first came to America, and she had become quite bitter. She refused to learn the language and continued to keep her Swedish ways, including her manner of dress. So of course my mother and her mother could not communicate with Grandma Wahlquist, and Grandma Wahlquist didn’t bother to come to see them or to make any effort to be friendly with them. As my mother has often said, when Grandma Wahlquist would talk to my father it would usually be out in the yard, and Grandma Campbell would say, “Well, now you’re catching it.” Fortunately, my mother and father were both blessed with a good sense of humor, so they managed to work it all out.
It might be interesting to say here that Grandma Campbell learned to do so many things in her blindness. In making their carpeting for their floor, Mother said she would cut the rag strips and put them in separate piles of different colors and then she would take Grandma’s hand and put it on each pile and say, “Now this is red, and this is blue, and this is yellow” and so on. Grandma would feel the material and feel the position of the different colors on the table and then she would go ahead and with Mother threading the needles, she would sew the rags. Mother said that it was really amazing the beautiful patterns that she came up with and that she would never make a mistake in her colors, that she would always get them exactly the way she wanted them.
I suppose they had many hardships and I’m sure it must have been very difficult for my mother and probably for my grandmother during those years, because my father had very little except what he could earn in his off hours when he was free from the farm. Also, he was studying very hard at this time—a correspondence course in law—and had little time for much in the way of pleasure or really to do anything other than work.
I would imagine that Grandma Wahlquist was quite jealous of my mother. I suppose it is quite natural that she would be. My father was her only boy and she considered him as almost a gift to her from the Lord. She had waited on him hand and foot and I suppose had spoiled him pretty badly in many ways.
My mother, sweet, gentle person that she was, was also a rather determined young lady, and so she decided quite early in their marriage to take him in hand. There is a funny incident that she used to tell that happened quite soon after they were married. It seems that he had only two good shirts, and one morning, one Sunday morning he got up to go to Priesthood meeting, and when he went to put on his shirt, the button was off, and so he took the shirt, went over to the stove, and put the shirt in the stove. So my dear little mother (I can scarcely believe this, but she insisted it’s true) quietly went to the closet, got his other shirt, walked to the stove, took the lid off the stove, and put the shirt in the stove and let it burn. My father, after standing absolutely aghast for a few minutes, his sense of humor got the best of him and nearly died laughing. He then put on his old work shirt and went off to Priesthood meeting. This is one of their early experiences in their married life, but I think she continued to do these things and in her gentle, sweet way, she changed him to the point where I never did see my father lose his temper except twice in all of the years that I knew him.
My folks lived at Daniels, it must have been several years. My brothers Keith and Fred and John were born there, and Keith had some memories of his grandmother. My dad was the bishop of the Buysville ward. It’s always been a puzzle to me about Daniels and Buysville. As far as I’m concerned, they were the same locality, but perhaps it was called Buysville Ward from a Church standpoint rather than a geographical standpoint. I really don’t know. My father was, as I said, bishop there, and it’s my impression that both of the grandmothers died during the time that they lived there.[8]
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| The cabin in Daniels that Charlie Wahlquist built |
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Notes:
- “The handcart company” refers to the ill-fated Willie and Martin Handcart companies that traveled so late in the season in 1856 that they suffered the deaths of hundreds when early winter struck them while still on the Great Plains. There were handcart companies both before and after those two. The Campbell family came across the Plains to Utah in 1855.
- 11 September 1857. Juanita Brooks wrote an excellent book about this infamous episode in Utah history.
- The Wahlquists came by railroad in 1877; the Golden Spike was driven 10 May 1869.
- The sisters were Eva Sophia (1858–1921) and Esther Margaretha (1860–1889).
- Rhymes with “know why.”
- Anna was born in 1823; her son Charles in 1866 when she was 43.
- The elder daughter, Sophi, was married and came to the U.S. later; the younger daughter, Esther, came with her brother and mother.
- Anna Wahlquist died in 1899; Elizabeth D. Campbell in 1901.
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Go to Part 2.
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