This is a poem that Mom had in her scrapbook. I think she loved it!
I vunce had a leedle dog
Heems name was Teeddlee Veenks
I shut heem's tail in de door vun day
And it came off qvick as a veenks
My vife came home and on de floor
Poor Teeddlee's tail she find
"Yimminey Gracious, he's gone", she say
And left heem's tail behind.
Vun day I show heems to heem's tail,
To vag it had no vim
My vife she feels so bad she cries
and Vaggles heem's tail for heem.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Birth and life in Juniper, Idaho
I was born in Juniper, Idaho, in Juniper in Preston, June 20, 1913. My Mother was Mary Ellen Halverson, my father was John Walters Owen. His middle name was Walters because that was his Mother's maiden name and they named all of the children with the middle name of Walters.
My Mother's name was Mary Ellen, but she was called "Nell" all of her life. Many of her nieces and nephews didn't know she had any other name. She got the name Nell because when she was little, they couldn't decide what to name her so after a certain point they decided to just wait until she was old enough to pick her own name. So they did. When she picked it, it was Mary Ellen, but when she finally got the name Mary Ellen, everybody had called her Nell for so long that she went by Nell. She never did get to be called Mary Ellen. (giggle) Which made kind of an interesting little side-light.
Um……..this is going to be very difficult. I was born in Preston, but my mother was only there for the period of her confinement. My family was living in Juniper, Idaho at the time, working on a dry farm. It was very hard living because it was hard work. They had had to clear the fields - I think we had two sections and they were covered with sage brush and they had to get all of the sage brush out of there in order to make them clean enough to be able to plant grain and so on and we had to haul our water for about - between 5 to 10 miles. They'd take all the big barrels they could get and put them in a wagon and hitch up the horses and go over and fill up the barrels and come back. That would last us for a few days and then they'd have to repeat the process.
I'm not sure how long they were in Juniper (before I was born) but we left there when I was about in the 2nd grade, I think. My Dad had found it so hard to be able to make enough to make a living to support his family living out there, working as a dry land farmer.
My Dad had graduated from Brigham Young Academy at Logan, Utah, (which of course there isn't one anymore and hasn't been one for many, many years) but he was an accountant and was a well educated man and he would get a job with various construction companies and he and my brother Sam would go out and work on construction jobs working in the offices and whenever he got a job, he would just take off and leave Mother and I, and usually Wallace or Evan and Helen at home and he'd go work wherever he could get work. then they would come home whenever a job ended and try and catch up on the loose ends. So when I was really little I didn't see much of my Dad; he was gone the biggest share of the time.
It was Evan's and my job to poison the squirrels. thee were millions of them! So there was always wheat to go out and we had to walk through the big sections of land - about 260 acres or so, and watch for squirrel holes. If you found a squirrel hole, you were to drop so much poison wheat by the squirrel hole to help eradicate them, cause they could really clean out a wheat field.
A couple of things happened before we left Juniper that are worth recounting, I think. When I was probably in the first grade, about in there, I got very ill and was ill for several weeks; they didn't ever think I would really survive. In those days we were so far away, you didn't ever see a doctor- so no doctor saw me, so they didn’t know what I had. But I ran a high fever and I my Mother and Dad decided I should have a laxative. I can remember them giving me Castor Oil in coffee. Still, if I ever see a cup of coffee I can see that Caster Oil floating around in the top. It probably kept me from ever, ever drinking any coffee. But I was very ill and if I was moved at all they had to carry or move me. (Much later, in about 1980, I went to Dr. Boswell in Santa Clara and he was asking about childhood diseases. I told him about being really ill. He said what I had, had been the mumps and they had gone down on me and had settled in the pancreas and that they had been the cause of the headaches and rheumatism and everything else.)
One morning I remember the lady that became my sister's mother in law, Sister Rentmeister came to our house and they asked her to come in and she saw me sitting up in a little chair. She threw up her hands and said, "Why didn't you tell me she was dead!" which wasn't too encouraging, of course.
But slowly I got better. Finally a while later my sister Helen was giving me a bath one day, and this is when we used to have round tubs, and because I was so little and scrawny, the tub was sitting up on a little table and Helen had been washing my hair. At that time they used to take a patch of hair up on the top of your head, with a little girl's hair, that is, and braid it in one single braid and it just hung down the side of your face or someplace, wherever it plopped.. and Helen went to take a hold of my braid and the whole thing just fell out in her hands. She felt so bad about it and my three dear brothers teased me unmercifully because I was bald headed.
I had three brothers. Wallace was the oldest, Sam was next to him and Evan was the youngest. Evan was four and a half years older than I am. My sister, Helen is 11 years older than I am, and Wallace and Sam were - Sam was something like two years older than Helen and Wallace was about two years older than Sam. So, and the boys used to tease me a lot. Anything that they could figure out that they could catch me on, that was just great. Of course I was always called Elizabeth, I was named for my father's mother Elizabeth Walters Owen. So that was one thing that happened in Juniper.
Then, I remember they used to threaten children that if you weren't good, they would give you to the gypsies and periodically the gypsies would come through Juniper. I remember once as a girlfriend and I were walking home from school, we had a little over a mile to walk and we saw this wagon train coming, decided they were gypsies, so we got off the road and went down, kind of in the side of the road where it was much lower than the road and hid behind some shrubs so the gypsies couldn't get us.
And then occasionally, there would be Indians come through and they would and they would want to trade hand goods for whatever you'd want to trade with them. I know my mother traded for some gorgeous, tanned dear skin gloves that had beautiful beading on the wide cuffs and fringe on one side. They were so pretty and were handed down through various members of the family until they eventually I got them. I loved those gloves; I would wear them on state occasions, you know, just once in a while. I think I had those gloves clear up until my oldest son, Lynn, was born and I think eventually I gave them to Lynn. Who knows whatever happened to them after that. But they were so pretty. They had this rose beaded into the cuff. And I think I had some moccasins at one time with beading on 'em too.
Just before we left Juniper, we were pretty well packed up, and the last Sunday we were there, everybody in the family except me went down to the Rentmeisters' for dinner. By then my sister Helen and my to-be-brother-in-law, John, were quite seriously dating, I think. (Being as young as I was, I wasn't paying too much attention - but when we left Juniper, John went, too and we all went up to Soda Springs, Idaho where there was a dam being built.) Anyway, they all went down to Rentmeisters' for dinner and I was allowed to go up to the Wattup's family home for dinner. They had three youngsters that were within my age group; there were two girls and a boy. I don't think the parents were home, it was just us kids. I went up there and had dinner.
I had been allowed to ride my horse up there, and my horse - to delay the story of the dinner at the Wattups' - my horse was a neat little pony. She had originally belonged to my brother Evan and he had ridden her and loved her and petted her for what seemed like to me like a long time, but being that young, it couldn't have been that long, but I'm sure he's had her a year or so. But one day he came home from riding her and said, "Would you like to have Pet?" That was her name. I said, "Oh, yes!" And he said, "Ok, you can have her." He never would admit why he gave me Pet.
Anyway, I got Pet, and at this time when I was going up to the Wattups' for dinner, I rode Pet up there. It was several miles, probably three, and we'd had a good time and I was supposed to leave before dark, so it was probably 4 or 4:30 in the afternoon when I said, "Well, I gotta go." So I went out, one of the boys was going to bring my horse for me and he got her saddled again and I went out and got on. Just as I got in the saddle, a whole string of horses came down out of the mountains; they lived right to the foothills. There must have been 15 or 20 horses come right into the yard where I was on this horse of mine. Suddenly all these horses were gathered round this pony. Horses and ponies, little baby horses are very strange. They want to - I don't understand it even yet - whether they want to damage them or they just take them away from the mother, but anyway, they started after the little colt, and Pet of course, was trying to protect her colt. She just completely took over; I couldn't control her and we ran down the long lane that there was between their house and the next road down, and we got about - almost down to the end of that lane, and finally I tried to turn her around. They had gone down to the end of the lane and turned around and had started back. She saw them coming and she tried to turn around. Always she had been trained that if I was getting off or falling off, she would stop. So my idea was if I could just get off, she would quit. But she wasn't caring about me, she was worrying about that colt. (said laughing) So I started to get off, and of course, I just fell off. I fell off and I must have blacked out for an instant when suddenly I opened my eyes and came to, and here were about three big horses coming for me; I was laying flat on the ground on my back. I sat up suddenly and they just swerved around me. The next day I had black marks where the horses had stepped on my arms, on both arms, but that's really all it did. I just had some black and blue marks and was kind of sore from being…. but the kids from up at the house came racing down and as soon as the horses went back up their way again, they got them in their sheds, and shut them off between them and the colt and everything was alright. But it scared me to death! Uhhh, that was so frightening!
One other thing happened with horses out in Juniper. My sister, Helen, had a horse that she rode that loved to race. Oh! She ran like the wind! She was bigger than my little Pet. I was sent down to the Rentmeister's once for eggs, I think it was. And Helen's horse took off and started to run with me, and she just really breezed on home. My mother was so mad at me because I could have broken the eggs.
Then one other time I rode Helen's horse to school. As I got on the horse after we got out of school, somebody threw a rock at her as I headed out into the road and she ran all the way home just as fast as she could go. I was just literally flying! (laughing) And she swung in the gate at our house. She usually ran into the shed that was there but they had it closed off because they had some poison wheat to poison the squirrels with or something sitting in big barrels there. So when her usual shed was shut off, she got almost up to the fence and then just stiffened up her legs and stopped, and I just sailed on over her head. It knocked the wind out of me, but I wasn't hurt. So I had some kind of exciting times in Juniper.
While we were still there, we got our very first car. I was so excited about it, I remember memorizing there were three pedals on the floor. One was the clutch, one was reverse, and one was the brake. I used to go around saying, "clutch, reverse, and brake; clutch, reverse, and brake." And your gas control was on the steering column and you used your hand to control how much gas you gave it. And on the other side of the steering column was the spark. I remember we were expecting company and Mother was somewhat worried because there were enough of us that we filled the car without having anybody extra. I remember saying, "Well, somebody could ride on the running board," because it had big wide running boards. But they laughed at me. They didn't think that was nice at all.
Then one other thing that happened in Juniper was that we had a - I think there were three bedrooms in the house, I don't remember for sure. But anyway, my Dad and Mother had been hearing for several nights something gnawing in the closet in their bedroom. Every day she'd check to see if she could find anything and she never could. They figured it was a rat coming through the wall. Finally one night they heard the thing break through, and they got up and of course at that period of time you had to light, light-lamps; you didn't just flip a light switch. So we had both kerosene lanterns and the kind of lamps that had wicks in them. And they lit the lamps and woke everybody up in the house to help come and chase this rat out of the house or kill it. They finally got a glimpse of it, and it didn't look like a rat; they didn't know what it was. I remember Mother gave me two broom sticks, and we had a pump organ that you controlled the air by pumping foot pedals to get it to work. I was to keep these foot pedals going and they got in behind the organ and kept banging at it, hoping he'd go out in the front. We didn't ever see how he got out of there, but he got out of there and ran into the kitchen. We ended up with him running back and forth among all the cabinets in the kitchen and I think somebody finally killed him in the kitchen.
But in the kitchen we had a big kitchen table cabinet combination that had a work surface of some kind of metal on top and there were big bins underneath for flour and sugar and eggs and other kinds of storage. She had just put in a whole big sack of flour into this one drawer and we had to throw the flour away - everything in the cabinet away because it all smelled so bad that you couldn't use it. There was just no way…… you tried to make bread out of it and it got stronger as it baked, I think. Everything in that whole house smelled; everything had to be washed. If you remember we had to carry water from so far away that it was a tremendous job. Evan and I tried to go to school the next day, but our clothes smelled so bad that we were ostracized and finally decided it was better to walk home. We had to walk a mile to school. Well, I'll finish up the story about the cat first. Some kind of a man from the farm bureau or something came by a few days after this had happened and it was still laying out in the yard, so they took him out to show it to him and he said, "Oh that's a civet cat". I don't know what the difference is between that and a skunk, but anyway it was a civet cat, but it certainly smelled strong. It was an awful experience. It really smelled terrible!
(From Wikipedia: The Ringtail (Bassariscus astutus) is a mammal of the raccoon family (thus not actually a cat), native to arid regions of North America. It is also known as the Ringtail cat, Ring-tailed cat or Miner's cat, and is also sometimes mistakenly called a "civet cat".)
As I was saying, Evan and I walked a mile to school. Once in a while in the winter time somebody further up like the Wattups' where I went horseback riding just before me moved away, their kids would ride in the sleigh and they would pick up Evan and I and we'd get to ride the rest of the way with them. Otherwise we'd walk a mile and a half. Occasionally they'd let us take a horse to ride, but it was an exception rather than the rule. I remember one winter time, the snow was deep; it would come up over the tops of the fences and I kept falling down; it was so slippery. And Evan said, "That's because I'm hypnotizing you." I didn't know what hypnotizing meant. He says, "I can do that and make you fall down all the time." I was so impressed, but I was so mad at him that he'd make me fall down in the snow. You can see I had lovely brothers. They just really kept life interesting.
We had some good times, too. We had some good friends up in there and all of the people who ever lived in Juniper remained friends for as long, I guess, as any of them are still living, because even at my brother Wallace's funeral, one of the friends from out there who is a Bishop came in and conducted the funeral ceremony. At Evan's funeral, his friends from out in Juniper were there for the funeral. Anybody's funeral or any get-together, that ever happened with anybody from Juniper everybody should show up. It was always kind of neat to think they held their friendships that tight and for so long.
Life in Alexander, Idaho
Dad was an accountant for a Utah-Idaho construction company, and they were building a dam up in Soda Springs, Idaho, so finally, as I said, when I got to be in the about the 2nd grade after several pretty hard years in Juniper, my Dad got a job at Alexander, Idaho and we moved.
In Alexander, the dam was several miles further east from where we lived in this little bitty town. There was a pool hall there, a school, a railroad depot, a post office, a general store and two or three homes. There were some railroad workers who lived there in their little yellow houses, and there was this one, well it would be considered an apartment house now - the post office was in one side and the lady that ran the post office and her family lived in the building and then our family lived in the other side. We had some upstairs rooms and some downstairs rooms. I don’t remember how many we had. The gas that was the post mistress was kind of a dummy. She lost packages regularly. I remember one year, a man that my father knew quite well had sent him a beautiful fruitcake for Christmas and after Dad didn't mention it for quite some time,he asked hi if he had ever gotten it. Dad said, no, and so we asked at the post office and the lady said, well I do have a box here for somebody named Jack Owen, but Dad's name is John, so it didn't ever occur to her to check if it was the same person. She didn't know that Jack was a nickname for John. When he finally got that fruitcake, it was a gorgeous thing. It had sugar icing and the icing was so hard that you almost had to take an axe to break it. We sure laughed about that.
But it was kind of a strange little town. I went to a two room school that had two teachers and a lot of students. We had some strange people! They came from all over and some kids had lived a pretty rough life. Once at school - because it was such motley people who came and worked on the dam, you never knew what kind of people you were going to get, there were some kids who were acting strange one day in class. One of them finally got sick and he admitted that he and another boy had been up in the foothills that were close there and had found a still and proceeded to get some liquor out of it and got drunk and were drunk in school and the one in front of me threw up all over his desk in the schoolroom. I got sick from just looking at him, watching all he was going through. So the teacher looked at me and she got my brother, Evan from the older class and told him to take me home, that I was sicker than the other kid was. So that's when I learned about not-too-nice of people. But, oh! That kid smelled awful!
We were active in the Church in Juniper but I can't remember ever going to Church when we were in Alexander or Soda Springs. The Church would have been in Soda Springs, but eventually we moved out of this little apartment thing and got a house out - oh probably about half way between Alex (Alexander) and Soda Springs in a town called Grace. It was a nice home. we lived right across the street from a big set of railroad tracks. This was 1925, I think.
In those days, it seemed like every place you ever moved into, you had to fumigate it first - do something to get rid of bed bugs because they were just there. They were terrible little beasts. They ate you and made you itch like crazy. And I can remember that we had to fumigate this house. We put something to burn in the rooms and closed it up and left it for about 48 hours before we could go back in. And then I remember my Mother had me painting all the bed springs with some kind of something to be sure we killed all the bed bugs before we took a chance moving in this house. You did that to every place you ever moved into. (said laughing) It was kind of a pain in the neck, but then you didn't get bed bugs that way. Now you never hear about bed bugs anymore. Thank goodness!
We had a neat old dog that we brought with us from Juniper to Alexander. He was, I don't know, several years old before we left Juniper and was a particular pet of Evan's and mine. He would chase a ball for you and he loved to be played with. Well, after we moved into Alex, everybody was gone all day; Evan and I'd be in school and my Dad and brothers were gone, and there would just be Helen and my Mother at home and life got dull for him, so he got so he'd wander around town and eventually made his way into the not-too-far-away pool hall and the men found out he would play with them. They just literally fell in love with him. They would get him to chase his tail and all the stuff and so eventually the pool hall took over and he got so he just didn't ever come home anymore. When we moved out to this little house partway in-between Alex and Soda Springs, he wouldn't move with us.
In fact when we moved from Juniper, he wouldn't ride in the car. You couldn't get him into a car. So when we moved, my brother, Wallace, who was the oldest, had driven a team with our furniture loaded in a wagon, and he had driven from Juniper to Alex. I don't know how far that is, but it took him several days. (Note from Arlene - looking on the Internet, depending where Juniper is/was and depending on what roads they had to take to go through Lava Hot Springs on the way it looks like Preston is about 60-100 miles from Soda Springs.) Finally when he got to Alexander and drove into the yard, we said, "Well, where's Shep?" He says, "I don't know. The last time I saw him he was back at Lava Hot Springs. He was just laying in the road." (chuckle) I guess by then Wallace was so tired, he wasn't paying any attention. So they got in the car and drove back to Lava Hot Springs and there was old Shep just laying in the middle of the road; he was so foot sore and weary. Wallace said, "I don't know what happened." He said, "He was chasing rabbits all the way." He had run, I guess he had made that trip three or four times just chasing rabbits while Wallace would drive along the road with the team, the dog would take off and chase all the rabbits he could find and then come back; he wouldn't even ride in the wagon with Wallace.
But when he got hooked on the pool hall and all his friends there, one day my Dad came home and he says, "You'll never guess who I saw riding in a car today." And we said, "Who?" "Well, Shep! Somebody had him in his car and Shep had his nose out in the wind and was just loving it." So we lost our dog to the "bright lights". (giggle) If you can call that pool hall the bright lights.
Another thing that we had out there that scared me to death was the coyotes that would howl at night. I was always just sure they were going to come and get me. The sound frightened me so bad; I hated it!
And another interesting dog we had there part of the time was, a friend of my brother, Sam, had a beautiful hunting dog. It was a gorgeous animal. He had been trained to protect anything that his man laid down. He'd say, "Major, you guard it." And Major would stay right there and nobody could touch it. So when we went out to the country, this man asked if we'd keep Major with us and we had him. Where Shep would play with us and was so graceful and lovely, Major was an awkward dog; he couldn’t catch things without just looking silly. But if you laughed at him, it hurt his feelings and if you laughed at him and he got his feelings hurt, he'd go hide in the corner and wouldn't come out for hours.
We lived in Alexander for, I guess, a couple of years and then we moved out to a little house that was between Alexander and a larger town named Grace. that was the most interesting country up there. There was such good fishing and we used to do a lot of picnicking after work; seemed like they got home at a nice time of day, and the men all loved to fish, and they'd gather up all the fishing poles and we'd get in the car and take a picnic with us - always raw potatoes. We'd peel them and slice them up fine and Mother would make camp style potatoes which was really just fried in a really big frying pan with onions and cooked over a sagebrush fire and they always tasted so good! I guess they picked up part of the flavor of the sage, and oh, they were so good. And they always caught fish, so we always had fish for dinner and a vegetable of some kind and it was always just a delight. Around Soda Springs there were quite a few places where you could picnic and they were, like the name implies, soda springs, they were springs that came up out of the ground that were made with soda water. But the flavor, just to drink it as water was quite strong and wasn't very palatable. So everybody would take either lemons and make lemonade, or root beer extract and you could make really good root beer. So we'd take a picnic and go to one of the soda springs and have a delightful time.
The area around Soda Springs had bottomless lakes. there were caves where you could put fruit and they would petrify over a period of time. One of the other things up there was quicksand. I remember my brother Sam walking across by one of these lakes and he could feel the ground springing under him, so he started jumping up and down. Drove Mother crazy! "Sam, stop it! You'll go through the crust!" He'd stand and laugh at her.
While we were in Alexander the doctors decided that Sam and I should have our tonsils out. He had his out first and when I came to have mine out, they decided that I had some very bad teeth. I was just at that age where part of them were baby teeth and part were adult teeth and so they pulled seven teeth and took my tonsils out at the same time. When I came out of the ether I felt pretty good and through the afternoon I felt pretty good. Finally the doctor came in and there was a big, what they called a Chautauqua*,
it's a traveling tent show, playing just across the street from the hospital and the doctor came in and was starting to kid Sam and I about going out to see the Chautauqua that night and when he looked at me, he said, "You look kind of pale." He said, "Are you bleeding?" and I said, "I don't know." He finally checked my throat and decided I was. The thing of it is, this man was a marvelous doctor, but he was terrible on tonsils. He did surgery that you'd swear he couldn't pull people through and he always did, but when it came to having tonsils out, he just did a really bad job. So from that I finally ended up having my tonsils out three times. He said I'd have to come back into him, and he tried doing a better job and didn't make it, and finally when we were, several years later in Logan, they said they'd grown back again, so I went in to a doctor and he just numbed it and did it with me conscious. That was terrible, too.
Anyway, this night, the doctor decided I was having a hemorrhage so he had me open my mouth and he took some stitches to control the hemorrhage. From then on, for what seemed a long time, I didn't have any energy. I got so tired at everything I did. I remember we went down to my aunt in Logan and she had a flight of stairs between the first floor and the second floor, and I went partway up and had to sit down and rest, I just couldn't make it. And I guess that weakened my body enough that I became subject to lots of ails and stuff after that because it wasn't too long after that I started to have arthritis that bugged me for many years to come.
In Alexander, the dam was several miles further east from where we lived in this little bitty town. There was a pool hall there, a school, a railroad depot, a post office, a general store and two or three homes. There were some railroad workers who lived there in their little yellow houses, and there was this one, well it would be considered an apartment house now - the post office was in one side and the lady that ran the post office and her family lived in the building and then our family lived in the other side. We had some upstairs rooms and some downstairs rooms. I don’t remember how many we had. The gas that was the post mistress was kind of a dummy. She lost packages regularly. I remember one year, a man that my father knew quite well had sent him a beautiful fruitcake for Christmas and after Dad didn't mention it for quite some time,he asked hi if he had ever gotten it. Dad said, no, and so we asked at the post office and the lady said, well I do have a box here for somebody named Jack Owen, but Dad's name is John, so it didn't ever occur to her to check if it was the same person. She didn't know that Jack was a nickname for John. When he finally got that fruitcake, it was a gorgeous thing. It had sugar icing and the icing was so hard that you almost had to take an axe to break it. We sure laughed about that.
But it was kind of a strange little town. I went to a two room school that had two teachers and a lot of students. We had some strange people! They came from all over and some kids had lived a pretty rough life. Once at school - because it was such motley people who came and worked on the dam, you never knew what kind of people you were going to get, there were some kids who were acting strange one day in class. One of them finally got sick and he admitted that he and another boy had been up in the foothills that were close there and had found a still and proceeded to get some liquor out of it and got drunk and were drunk in school and the one in front of me threw up all over his desk in the schoolroom. I got sick from just looking at him, watching all he was going through. So the teacher looked at me and she got my brother, Evan from the older class and told him to take me home, that I was sicker than the other kid was. So that's when I learned about not-too-nice of people. But, oh! That kid smelled awful!
We were active in the Church in Juniper but I can't remember ever going to Church when we were in Alexander or Soda Springs. The Church would have been in Soda Springs, but eventually we moved out of this little apartment thing and got a house out - oh probably about half way between Alex (Alexander) and Soda Springs in a town called Grace. It was a nice home. we lived right across the street from a big set of railroad tracks. This was 1925, I think.
In those days, it seemed like every place you ever moved into, you had to fumigate it first - do something to get rid of bed bugs because they were just there. They were terrible little beasts. They ate you and made you itch like crazy. And I can remember that we had to fumigate this house. We put something to burn in the rooms and closed it up and left it for about 48 hours before we could go back in. And then I remember my Mother had me painting all the bed springs with some kind of something to be sure we killed all the bed bugs before we took a chance moving in this house. You did that to every place you ever moved into. (said laughing) It was kind of a pain in the neck, but then you didn't get bed bugs that way. Now you never hear about bed bugs anymore. Thank goodness!
We had a neat old dog that we brought with us from Juniper to Alexander. He was, I don't know, several years old before we left Juniper and was a particular pet of Evan's and mine. He would chase a ball for you and he loved to be played with. Well, after we moved into Alex, everybody was gone all day; Evan and I'd be in school and my Dad and brothers were gone, and there would just be Helen and my Mother at home and life got dull for him, so he got so he'd wander around town and eventually made his way into the not-too-far-away pool hall and the men found out he would play with them. They just literally fell in love with him. They would get him to chase his tail and all the stuff and so eventually the pool hall took over and he got so he just didn't ever come home anymore. When we moved out to this little house partway in-between Alex and Soda Springs, he wouldn't move with us.
In fact when we moved from Juniper, he wouldn't ride in the car. You couldn't get him into a car. So when we moved, my brother, Wallace, who was the oldest, had driven a team with our furniture loaded in a wagon, and he had driven from Juniper to Alex. I don't know how far that is, but it took him several days. (Note from Arlene - looking on the Internet, depending where Juniper is/was and depending on what roads they had to take to go through Lava Hot Springs on the way it looks like Preston is about 60-100 miles from Soda Springs.) Finally when he got to Alexander and drove into the yard, we said, "Well, where's Shep?" He says, "I don't know. The last time I saw him he was back at Lava Hot Springs. He was just laying in the road." (chuckle) I guess by then Wallace was so tired, he wasn't paying any attention. So they got in the car and drove back to Lava Hot Springs and there was old Shep just laying in the middle of the road; he was so foot sore and weary. Wallace said, "I don't know what happened." He said, "He was chasing rabbits all the way." He had run, I guess he had made that trip three or four times just chasing rabbits while Wallace would drive along the road with the team, the dog would take off and chase all the rabbits he could find and then come back; he wouldn't even ride in the wagon with Wallace.
But when he got hooked on the pool hall and all his friends there, one day my Dad came home and he says, "You'll never guess who I saw riding in a car today." And we said, "Who?" "Well, Shep! Somebody had him in his car and Shep had his nose out in the wind and was just loving it." So we lost our dog to the "bright lights". (giggle) If you can call that pool hall the bright lights.
Another thing that we had out there that scared me to death was the coyotes that would howl at night. I was always just sure they were going to come and get me. The sound frightened me so bad; I hated it!
And another interesting dog we had there part of the time was, a friend of my brother, Sam, had a beautiful hunting dog. It was a gorgeous animal. He had been trained to protect anything that his man laid down. He'd say, "Major, you guard it." And Major would stay right there and nobody could touch it. So when we went out to the country, this man asked if we'd keep Major with us and we had him. Where Shep would play with us and was so graceful and lovely, Major was an awkward dog; he couldn’t catch things without just looking silly. But if you laughed at him, it hurt his feelings and if you laughed at him and he got his feelings hurt, he'd go hide in the corner and wouldn't come out for hours.
We lived in Alexander for, I guess, a couple of years and then we moved out to a little house that was between Alexander and a larger town named Grace. that was the most interesting country up there. There was such good fishing and we used to do a lot of picnicking after work; seemed like they got home at a nice time of day, and the men all loved to fish, and they'd gather up all the fishing poles and we'd get in the car and take a picnic with us - always raw potatoes. We'd peel them and slice them up fine and Mother would make camp style potatoes which was really just fried in a really big frying pan with onions and cooked over a sagebrush fire and they always tasted so good! I guess they picked up part of the flavor of the sage, and oh, they were so good. And they always caught fish, so we always had fish for dinner and a vegetable of some kind and it was always just a delight. Around Soda Springs there were quite a few places where you could picnic and they were, like the name implies, soda springs, they were springs that came up out of the ground that were made with soda water. But the flavor, just to drink it as water was quite strong and wasn't very palatable. So everybody would take either lemons and make lemonade, or root beer extract and you could make really good root beer. So we'd take a picnic and go to one of the soda springs and have a delightful time.
The area around Soda Springs had bottomless lakes. there were caves where you could put fruit and they would petrify over a period of time. One of the other things up there was quicksand. I remember my brother Sam walking across by one of these lakes and he could feel the ground springing under him, so he started jumping up and down. Drove Mother crazy! "Sam, stop it! You'll go through the crust!" He'd stand and laugh at her.
While we were in Alexander the doctors decided that Sam and I should have our tonsils out. He had his out first and when I came to have mine out, they decided that I had some very bad teeth. I was just at that age where part of them were baby teeth and part were adult teeth and so they pulled seven teeth and took my tonsils out at the same time. When I came out of the ether I felt pretty good and through the afternoon I felt pretty good. Finally the doctor came in and there was a big, what they called a Chautauqua*,
* Chautauqua (pronounced shə-TAW-kwə) is an adult education movement in the United States, highly popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Chautauqua assemblies expanded and spread throughout rural America until the mid-1920s. The Chautauqua brought entertainment and culture for the whole community, with speakers, teachers, musicians, entertainers, preachers and specialists of the day.[1] Former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt was quoted as saying that Chautauqua is "the most American thing in America."[2]
it's a traveling tent show, playing just across the street from the hospital and the doctor came in and was starting to kid Sam and I about going out to see the Chautauqua that night and when he looked at me, he said, "You look kind of pale." He said, "Are you bleeding?" and I said, "I don't know." He finally checked my throat and decided I was. The thing of it is, this man was a marvelous doctor, but he was terrible on tonsils. He did surgery that you'd swear he couldn't pull people through and he always did, but when it came to having tonsils out, he just did a really bad job. So from that I finally ended up having my tonsils out three times. He said I'd have to come back into him, and he tried doing a better job and didn't make it, and finally when we were, several years later in Logan, they said they'd grown back again, so I went in to a doctor and he just numbed it and did it with me conscious. That was terrible, too.
Anyway, this night, the doctor decided I was having a hemorrhage so he had me open my mouth and he took some stitches to control the hemorrhage. From then on, for what seemed a long time, I didn't have any energy. I got so tired at everything I did. I remember we went down to my aunt in Logan and she had a flight of stairs between the first floor and the second floor, and I went partway up and had to sit down and rest, I just couldn't make it. And I guess that weakened my body enough that I became subject to lots of ails and stuff after that because it wasn't too long after that I started to have arthritis that bugged me for many years to come.
Living in Wellsville, Utah
But the job in Alexander ended Dad and Mother decided to move back down and we moved to Wellsville where we lived in the same house with my grandmother who was a widow: Elizabeth Owen. She was a neat lady. She was in her 70's, I think at that time or late 60's I guess when we started living with her. We lived with her for a while and then eventually she moved to Logan and lived with us for a while and then she moved into her own apartment for a while before she died, so we were very close to her for several years.
This house in Wellsville was the one that my grandparents had built I guess after they were married and it was 2 floors. We had a kitchen and living room downstairs and some bedrooms upstairs. It was a big eight room house and it had one bathroom. The rooms were huge. In the original house when they first built it, my grandfather had been quite well to do at one time and so he had gold-leaf paintings done in the ceiling and on part of the walls, and it was just beautiful. But of course by 1919, this was around 1919 or 1920, that was considered very out of style and very dated so grandmother eventually had it painted over so we couldn't see it anymore. And oh, it seemed such a shame, especially now when I think back on it.
Then when we were in Wellsville I got sick and got rheumatism and arthritis really bad and was out of school at least half the year. But because Idaho schools had been further ahead than Utah schools and I'd been repeating a lot of material I'd had in Idaho, I passed on anyway to the next year. I think I went to the Wellsville school through the fourth grade and the fifth grade we moved to Logan and I was in the sixth grade. So it didn't slow me down in school that badly. Then I remember getting some kind of itchy stuff on the bottoms of my feet and they would itch so terribly. I remember getting up at night and rubbing salt on my feet so I could scratch them harder. It’s a wonder I didn't wreck them, but I didn't. Oh, they itched.
Then my sister, Helen and John Rentmeister got married while we were in Wellsville. He was working for a company named McKeek Construction (sp?) in Texas. We had all gone in the car to take her to the train in Ogden, I guess, and somebody saw me leave and I was out of school the next few days sick and when I went back to school and to Primary the day after I got better, my name had been removed from both rolls. They figured because they had seen me in the care when my parents left and nobody had seen me come back and hadn't seen me for several days, that I had gone to California with my sister! (giggles) So they took a lot for granted in Wellsville! That was a shock!
In all the in-between times of being in and out of Logan and Wellsville, I had kept track of a girlhood friend named Opal White. In all my trips from Juniper to Wellsville to Logan I had always gone back to visit her and almost every summer I would go out to Juniper for two or three weeks. Opal and I would ride horses, and one year I went out and her brother Harvey offered me to use his brand new saddle that had never been used. So Opal and I said, "Sure!" We rode from her place to Black Vine which was probably 15 miles. I hadn't been on a horse in a couple of years and by the time I got off that horse I was so stiff and sore, I couldn't hardly walk for days. A brand new saddle will do that to you because it's so stiff. Harvey and his brother, Blaine, and my brother, Evan offered to take us to a dance up in Holbrook that night, but needless to say we didn't go.
One other thing that Opal and I did, one hot summer I was out there - we could see snow in the tops of the mountains. Her dad was going up after logs, and we said, ok, we'll ride up with you to the mountains and hike up and get some snow. So we did. We took a gunny sack with us, hiked up to the top of the mountains - strange how heavy that bag of snow got before we got back down again. But we did bring back down enough snow to make two freezers full of ice cream. It was wonderful; something that I'm sure neither one of us ever forgot.
This house in Wellsville was the one that my grandparents had built I guess after they were married and it was 2 floors. We had a kitchen and living room downstairs and some bedrooms upstairs. It was a big eight room house and it had one bathroom. The rooms were huge. In the original house when they first built it, my grandfather had been quite well to do at one time and so he had gold-leaf paintings done in the ceiling and on part of the walls, and it was just beautiful. But of course by 1919, this was around 1919 or 1920, that was considered very out of style and very dated so grandmother eventually had it painted over so we couldn't see it anymore. And oh, it seemed such a shame, especially now when I think back on it.
Then when we were in Wellsville I got sick and got rheumatism and arthritis really bad and was out of school at least half the year. But because Idaho schools had been further ahead than Utah schools and I'd been repeating a lot of material I'd had in Idaho, I passed on anyway to the next year. I think I went to the Wellsville school through the fourth grade and the fifth grade we moved to Logan and I was in the sixth grade. So it didn't slow me down in school that badly. Then I remember getting some kind of itchy stuff on the bottoms of my feet and they would itch so terribly. I remember getting up at night and rubbing salt on my feet so I could scratch them harder. It’s a wonder I didn't wreck them, but I didn't. Oh, they itched.
Then my sister, Helen and John Rentmeister got married while we were in Wellsville. He was working for a company named McKeek Construction (sp?) in Texas. We had all gone in the car to take her to the train in Ogden, I guess, and somebody saw me leave and I was out of school the next few days sick and when I went back to school and to Primary the day after I got better, my name had been removed from both rolls. They figured because they had seen me in the care when my parents left and nobody had seen me come back and hadn't seen me for several days, that I had gone to California with my sister! (giggles) So they took a lot for granted in Wellsville! That was a shock!
In all the in-between times of being in and out of Logan and Wellsville, I had kept track of a girlhood friend named Opal White. In all my trips from Juniper to Wellsville to Logan I had always gone back to visit her and almost every summer I would go out to Juniper for two or three weeks. Opal and I would ride horses, and one year I went out and her brother Harvey offered me to use his brand new saddle that had never been used. So Opal and I said, "Sure!" We rode from her place to Black Vine which was probably 15 miles. I hadn't been on a horse in a couple of years and by the time I got off that horse I was so stiff and sore, I couldn't hardly walk for days. A brand new saddle will do that to you because it's so stiff. Harvey and his brother, Blaine, and my brother, Evan offered to take us to a dance up in Holbrook that night, but needless to say we didn't go.
One other thing that Opal and I did, one hot summer I was out there - we could see snow in the tops of the mountains. Her dad was going up after logs, and we said, ok, we'll ride up with you to the mountains and hike up and get some snow. So we did. We took a gunny sack with us, hiked up to the top of the mountains - strange how heavy that bag of snow got before we got back down again. But we did bring back down enough snow to make two freezers full of ice cream. It was wonderful; something that I'm sure neither one of us ever forgot.
Living in Logan, Utah
In 19 - I can't remember when. I'll have to put it down later on something, we moved to Logan and we lived in Logan five years; that was the longest I'd lived any place. I was in sixth grade when we moved there I finished the 6th grade and started junior high and the first year of high school in Logan. I loved school in Logan. I had good teachers each year. And in the 7th grade, the teacher I had for ancient history, was Teresa Pugh. She, several years later, married my brother, Sam.
While in junior high school, I was the editor of the school paper one year, I guess in the 9th grade. And when I went down to high school, I kinda wanted to get back on the paper, but I was too shy to even go in and ask about it. I just didn't dare.
While we were in Logan, they were shuffling schools around. When I went to the 7th grade, they sent us down to Butthead to the old Brigham Young Academy, which was the school my Dad had gone to college in. But then the next year they decided that the BY Academy would much better handle high school students than the junior high students so then we went up to what had been the high school and the high school students went down to the BY Academy, which became Logan High. And Logan High was an absolutely beautiful campus, something that 7th and i8th graders didn't appreciate. The schools were great; we had a good time. It had a small creek running through behind the school and there was a big football field and baseball field; lovely old trees and lots of lawn. It was just really a beautiful campus and I just loved it there. The school had student body presidents and school council of selected kids and it was so neat because the students were given lots of responsibilities to plan the assembly programs and plan for various things and I remember getting very involved with a lot of the school elections. In walking home from a rehearsal one night I lived a mile from the school and it was cold: one of those crisp and cold nights. It was so crisp that everything just sparkled. It was a gorgeous night! I don't think I've seen one so pretty! Course I thought I'd freeze to death, but it was really pretty!
When we were in Wellsville my parents started giving me lessons on the piano which my grandmother had and I think someplace along the line we had sold the organ - I don't remember where - so I took piano lessons for, oh I don't know, maybe six months and then they couldn't afford it anymore because my Dad was out of work and everybody was out of work. There was just no work available. So anyway it got me into music a little bit, and when we moved to Logan, my mother arranged for me to have violin lessons. They bought an inexpensive violin and I took violin lessons and the junior high school taught classes so that didn't cost anything. So I eventually joined a school orchestra. I remember playing for graduation in junior high school and at that time there were quite a few chapels being dedicated around Logan because Logan was growing fast and they were building a lot of new churches. Somehow or other they kept having the junior high school orchestra - and I'm sure we must have been terrible, but they would have us come and play for an hour before the dedication ceremonies began. I heard President Grant several times speak at various dedications and he would always stop and shake hands with all the students. It was always impressive, very interesting.
Finally in Logan my Dad got a job with a construction company and they were building a road through Zion's Canyon from one highway to another. And they were tunneling out - it was going to be the longest tunnel in the world at that time. I can't remember now, it was a mile and something - a mile and a half or a mile and 7/8ths.
He lived down there for several years and my Mother would go down and live with him in the summer time and would leave Evan and I at home and I would cook and Evan would work and then we'd make maybe one or two trips down and see him and visit and then we'd come home again. They trusted us enough to leave us. (giggle) And on one trip we were down there, Evan had taken a girlfriend with him and he and I and this girl were in Zion's Canyon driving around and it started to rain. It just poured! We happened to look up at the tops of the mountains and Zion has so much color in it and as we looked, we could count seven or eight different colors of waterfalls falling off of the tops of the mountains. It was so neat and so impressive to look at! And we visited the Indian - they weren't villages, but they were like little caves they built - they didn't really look big enough for more than one person to sleep in. They are about half way up the mountain so that was neat.
My family was not very active in Church so on Sunday afternoons frequently, we'd all get in the car and take guns and go out by the Logan river and practice target shooting. I got so I was pretty good. They'd take the spent 22 shells as they'd shove them out of the magazines of the guns and stack them up on the rail or bridge about six or seven high and shoot at them; they're not a very big target! I got so I could shoot them down pretty good. And then they'd take the shotgun shells that had been used and pinch the tops together and they'd throw them in the river and they'd use the for target practice to see if they could sink them. I was a pretty good shot!
My Dad got the last laugh on my brothers one day, though. We were coming back and they saw a mud hen in one of the ponds on the side of the road so they all had to try to shoot the mud hens.
And you can't shoot mud hens; they just dive too fast. Dad finally got out and he was fast enough that he shot the mud hen and he just crowed over my brothers for weeks afterwards. Such a fun time; we did a lot of things together.
We never went to Church together that I can remember of. It seems like to me that I was the only one that ever went to Church. Once in a while my brother, Sam would go, but nobody else ever went.
My brother-in-law, John Rentmeister was working on a bridge I think, down in El Paso, Texas and a big 12X12 timber fell down on him and slid down his back and broke his back. He was in the hospital down there for months and months. Finally he and Helen moved back home and they rented one room from Mother and Dad and they lived with us for probably a couple of years while John recuperated. He was in a very heavy body cast that he had to wear except when he was sleeping and he walked with two canes and during this time he had a hard time trying to keep busy so he eventually bought some yo-yos and that was the first time they came out. He got so good with that yo-yo - he could do all the tricks that anybody ever did.
While we were in Logan my brother Sam had a hemorrhage and ended up in the hospital. Dad and Wallace and Sam had been working out at the Bear River Dam and Sam had been high up on the dam when he had the hemorrhage. He finally made it down to ground level and they brought hi to the hospital in Logan. we were told that they wouldn't know for 78 hours whether he would live or not. anyway, Sam finally pulled through, much to our relief.
Of course while I was in Logan, I was still having arthritis periodically. My fingers would swell up, one finger or the other, and get so sore and ache and ache and ache, and my knees would. My mother would take me to different doctors and they would try various things or diets. I remember Evan was having some problems too, and they took us to some doctor who gave us some shots. And those things made you so - oooooooo - you could taste the shot immediately. He'd put it in a vein in your arm and you could taste it almost the minute the needle went in. And then it made you woozy for a while afterwards so somebody always had to be there with us. And your eyesight would go haywire. Somebody either had to be with us to guide us home or they had to be there with a car to take us home. That was not pleasant!
While in junior high school, I was the editor of the school paper one year, I guess in the 9th grade. And when I went down to high school, I kinda wanted to get back on the paper, but I was too shy to even go in and ask about it. I just didn't dare.
While we were in Logan, they were shuffling schools around. When I went to the 7th grade, they sent us down to Butthead to the old Brigham Young Academy, which was the school my Dad had gone to college in. But then the next year they decided that the BY Academy would much better handle high school students than the junior high students so then we went up to what had been the high school and the high school students went down to the BY Academy, which became Logan High. And Logan High was an absolutely beautiful campus, something that 7th and i8th graders didn't appreciate. The schools were great; we had a good time. It had a small creek running through behind the school and there was a big football field and baseball field; lovely old trees and lots of lawn. It was just really a beautiful campus and I just loved it there. The school had student body presidents and school council of selected kids and it was so neat because the students were given lots of responsibilities to plan the assembly programs and plan for various things and I remember getting very involved with a lot of the school elections. In walking home from a rehearsal one night I lived a mile from the school and it was cold: one of those crisp and cold nights. It was so crisp that everything just sparkled. It was a gorgeous night! I don't think I've seen one so pretty! Course I thought I'd freeze to death, but it was really pretty!
When we were in Wellsville my parents started giving me lessons on the piano which my grandmother had and I think someplace along the line we had sold the organ - I don't remember where - so I took piano lessons for, oh I don't know, maybe six months and then they couldn't afford it anymore because my Dad was out of work and everybody was out of work. There was just no work available. So anyway it got me into music a little bit, and when we moved to Logan, my mother arranged for me to have violin lessons. They bought an inexpensive violin and I took violin lessons and the junior high school taught classes so that didn't cost anything. So I eventually joined a school orchestra. I remember playing for graduation in junior high school and at that time there were quite a few chapels being dedicated around Logan because Logan was growing fast and they were building a lot of new churches. Somehow or other they kept having the junior high school orchestra - and I'm sure we must have been terrible, but they would have us come and play for an hour before the dedication ceremonies began. I heard President Grant several times speak at various dedications and he would always stop and shake hands with all the students. It was always impressive, very interesting.
Finally in Logan my Dad got a job with a construction company and they were building a road through Zion's Canyon from one highway to another. And they were tunneling out - it was going to be the longest tunnel in the world at that time. I can't remember now, it was a mile and something - a mile and a half or a mile and 7/8ths.
The history of the Zion-Mt. Carmel Tunnel is interesting. It was in 1919 when a Congressional bill designating Zion was signed into law. In 1923 a search began to find a way to open Zion Canyon to the the magnificent land of the other side of the mountain. This was a giant challenge for the times. Imagine boring through the solid rock with the equipment available in those days. July 4th, 1930, the tunnel and highway were dedicated, linking Zion Canyon to the land east of the park and making it easier to visit the other parks located on the east side of the park.
He lived down there for several years and my Mother would go down and live with him in the summer time and would leave Evan and I at home and I would cook and Evan would work and then we'd make maybe one or two trips down and see him and visit and then we'd come home again. They trusted us enough to leave us. (giggle) And on one trip we were down there, Evan had taken a girlfriend with him and he and I and this girl were in Zion's Canyon driving around and it started to rain. It just poured! We happened to look up at the tops of the mountains and Zion has so much color in it and as we looked, we could count seven or eight different colors of waterfalls falling off of the tops of the mountains. It was so neat and so impressive to look at! And we visited the Indian - they weren't villages, but they were like little caves they built - they didn't really look big enough for more than one person to sleep in. They are about half way up the mountain so that was neat.
My family was not very active in Church so on Sunday afternoons frequently, we'd all get in the car and take guns and go out by the Logan river and practice target shooting. I got so I was pretty good. They'd take the spent 22 shells as they'd shove them out of the magazines of the guns and stack them up on the rail or bridge about six or seven high and shoot at them; they're not a very big target! I got so I could shoot them down pretty good. And then they'd take the shotgun shells that had been used and pinch the tops together and they'd throw them in the river and they'd use the for target practice to see if they could sink them. I was a pretty good shot!
My Dad got the last laugh on my brothers one day, though. We were coming back and they saw a mud hen in one of the ponds on the side of the road so they all had to try to shoot the mud hens.
And you can't shoot mud hens; they just dive too fast. Dad finally got out and he was fast enough that he shot the mud hen and he just crowed over my brothers for weeks afterwards. Such a fun time; we did a lot of things together.
We never went to Church together that I can remember of. It seems like to me that I was the only one that ever went to Church. Once in a while my brother, Sam would go, but nobody else ever went.
My brother-in-law, John Rentmeister was working on a bridge I think, down in El Paso, Texas and a big 12X12 timber fell down on him and slid down his back and broke his back. He was in the hospital down there for months and months. Finally he and Helen moved back home and they rented one room from Mother and Dad and they lived with us for probably a couple of years while John recuperated. He was in a very heavy body cast that he had to wear except when he was sleeping and he walked with two canes and during this time he had a hard time trying to keep busy so he eventually bought some yo-yos and that was the first time they came out. He got so good with that yo-yo - he could do all the tricks that anybody ever did.
While we were in Logan my brother Sam had a hemorrhage and ended up in the hospital. Dad and Wallace and Sam had been working out at the Bear River Dam and Sam had been high up on the dam when he had the hemorrhage. He finally made it down to ground level and they brought hi to the hospital in Logan. we were told that they wouldn't know for 78 hours whether he would live or not. anyway, Sam finally pulled through, much to our relief.
Of course while I was in Logan, I was still having arthritis periodically. My fingers would swell up, one finger or the other, and get so sore and ache and ache and ache, and my knees would. My mother would take me to different doctors and they would try various things or diets. I remember Evan was having some problems too, and they took us to some doctor who gave us some shots. And those things made you so - oooooooo - you could taste the shot immediately. He'd put it in a vein in your arm and you could taste it almost the minute the needle went in. And then it made you woozy for a while afterwards so somebody always had to be there with us. And your eyesight would go haywire. Somebody either had to be with us to guide us home or they had to be there with a car to take us home. That was not pleasant!
Moving to Seattle, WA
From Logan my Dad got a job with another construction company in Seattle Washington; I think it was called Phoenix Construction Company that was going to replace a hill. So Dad, Mother and I moved to Seattle, and my brother, Wallace went with us to help drive the car up there. We had never driven in anything larger than Wellsville and Logan, so going to Seattle was a big adventure. I don't know how we transferred all our furnishings there. When we came back I remember it, but I don't know how we got up there - whether somebody drove a truck, I don't think so, maybe they sent it on a train because we had our own things when we got there. Maybe we didn't have our own things; maybe we rented furnished. I really don't remember. But we lived in an apartment house. My Dad always said that summer in Seattle was the nicest winter he ever spent, cause Seattle is chilly!
But we had a tiny little apartment that was managed by a little old maid who was very fussy. We were allowed one bath a week for each of us and to save on water we saved our bath water and washed the clothes in our bath water which was a hassle!
But we rented an upstairs apartment, about three or four rooms, and my Dad was working on what was called the Denny re-grade which was a process of moving a big hill out of downtown Seattle. It had been so high that they - any buildings that were on top of it, they used an elevator to go up the side of the hill to get to the building. They just decided this big old hill in the middle of town was just a terrible waste, so they had this company come in and take away the hill.
From Wikipedia:
All the time they were doing that, my Dad said it was such a waste to take all that dirt and just dump in the bay because that is what they were doing. They had big - they had built a conveyor belt from the regrade up over the town and out and put it on barges at the dock and took it out a ways into the bay, take soundings and then dump it. So they dumped the whole hill; in the last, probably 10 years, they've been digging up the bay, bringing dirt back in and filling low spots in Seattle, which is what they should have done in the first place! But that was interesting to watch. There was one they resettled the people who had lived around the edges of the hill, and I remember that there was one house that was still there - the man wouldn't sell his house for what they were willing to pay for it, and he wouldn't move, so finally the steam shovels just dug all around his house and left him sitting up on about a 5 food high perch of left hill under him. And he'd have to rock it in, because with the Seattle rains, it would have to wash away. So that was the way it was when we finally left Seattle in about 1933 or 34.
Wallace and I used to like to drive around Seattle. Seattle is a lovely place and we'd start out from our place and somehow we'd always end up home and we never knew how we got there; Many times we'd leave our house at the base of Queen Anne Hill and end up circling the thing, coming back and being parked right in front of our house again! We'd just go around in circles. But we explored frequently.
Wallace decided that he should get some more education. He had gone to Utah State University when we lived in Logan and graduated. But after he'd been out of school for a while he decided he wanted to be a geologist, to know more about it. So after working with Dad the summer in Seattle, he left Dad and Mother and I there and put the car in storage because Dad wouldn't drive in Seattle and Mother and couldn't, so the car was put in a garage and left there for a couple of years. He left and went back into the Midwest someplace to go to college and get a master's degree in geology.
So in the fall I started school and went to Queen Anne High School which was up on a hill; we lived at the base of the hill and it was at the top of the hill and I don't know how many steps, there must have been 200 or 300 you had to climb to get up that dang hill. You either did that or you took a cable car part way but then you had to hike the steps the rest of the way.
From Wikipedia:
Most of the time, because I was having arthritis again, with some iritis thrown in, which is a disease of the eye - you can't stand daylight, I'd wear a patch over the eye that was bothering me the most and try to get by, going to school at Queen Anne. It was a huge school about three or four levels. I remember I used to have one class in the top corner of one building (it was an L-shaped building) and my next class was at the bottom floor in the opposite end of the L shape. Well, it took ya 10 minutes to make that, even in good conditions, and I was having trouble walking up and down stairs! It was a little rough! I went through a period of time up there where my feet swelled so bad I couldn't buy shoes to fit and I had to wear house slippers, and then would attach a ribbon or bias tape or something at the back of the heel and tie straps around my ankles to hold the heels on because otherwise I couldn't keep them on. It was altogether miserable.
School was so different from Logan High School that I hated school. One good thing happened: in my transfer of credits from Logan High School to Queen Anne High School I had much more credits than I'd had at Logan. The classes I'd taken at Logan like orchestra only gave half credit and in Seattle they gave whole credit. And some other classes I'd had at Logan only gave a half credit and up there they were a whole credit. So when they got them all equalized out, I ended up that I could graduate in just the first semester of school. So I graduated from Queen Anne High School at mid-term 1932 after only 3 1/2 years of high school. School is Seattle was very difficult. I had taken some history classes where the teacher believe that we should outline all of the stuff that we read. I swear she must have weighed those outlines to see how much they weighed before she gave us a grade.
Our graduation exercises were ridiculous. They had all the graduating students sitting on the stand. And they had a new P.A. system (which P.A. was just being invented) and we could hear the speaker speaking at the pulpit and then the sound would go out and pick up on the little speakers they had on each side of the stage so we sat up there on the stand and couldn't understand anything anybody said. It was really boring. Somebody had brought a comic book with them and finally tore off pages and passed them up and down the aisles of the graduating class. That was how we spent our graduation night. It was really boring. the graduation exercises I had attended at Logan High School had been beautiful. Everybody cried because they were leaving school, loved everybody else, etc.
All the dances at Queen Anne High School were matinee dances from 3:00-5:00 in the afternoon. There was never anything in the evening. I don’t' think they even had a senior prom or junior prom or anything. Where at Logan all the dances had been mostly in the evening. I don't remember matinee dances at all. In the orchestra we played some really good music and that's what got me started liking symphony music. We played for several musicals, which were fun, and I enjoyed that, as we had done at Logan High School - we had put on a couple of musicals that I'd been in the orchestra for. But in Queen Anne High School my music by then was good enough that I made the first orchestra, or the A orchestra, which was nice; I enjoyed that. But I was second violin, which was all I was really qualified to play. While we were there I was eventually in an all-girls orchestra that we were going to play for dances. I don't know what convinced me that I was good enough to play for a dance, but we tried it a few times. It eventually dissolved; somebody moved away and that kind of killed it. I think probably the one who was most interested in keeping it going left, and the rest of us weren't all that dedicated.
I had my first plane ride while I was living in Seattle. I was dating a young man who was managing a grocery store, so he decided one day we should go for a plane ride. We went up in a Sea Plane.
Mother and Dad had been out shopping one day. They made so much noise coming up the stairs as they were coming home. when I opened the door for them, my Dad's hands were just shaking; he had had a stroke while they were out. We had kind of a hard time taking care of him. I don't remember that we even had a doctor.
Then the depression hit; Dad's job ended and the rest of the family decided that they should come up and move Mother, Dad, and I back to Brigham City where my brother Evan was running a service station. they said Dad could help run the books for him and it would give Evan more time. So that was done. They came and got us and we rented or got a little trailer to pull behind the car. We loaded everything we had on the trailer and the car. Cars in those days had wide running boards, and you could really load a car. I remember we had a barrel that Mother had put a whole bunch of stuff, or I had. I was a better packer than her and I filled up every nook and cranny. (Note from Arlene: I believe this is the story Mom used to tell about how the barrel fell off and things in it broke and all mixed together - jam or honey and buttons, etc. They took the time to sort through it all to save as much as they could because commodities were so hard to come by, and some things were rationed, so they couldn't spare anything - even a button.)
Anyway, we finally moved back to Brigham and rented a house there. It was a nice home and had a big yard with fruit trees in the back. It was while we were in Brigham City that my brother and I started to have some fun together. I really hadn't been around him much since we were in grade school together. I remember one trip he was invited to a wedding out in Juniper for a wedding reception or shivaree or something and he said, I know very well when I get out there, they're going to try to get me drunk. So he said I'm going to fool them. He'd been told that if you drink just a little bit over a long time, you can't get drunk. So he started drinking just a little bit as we were driving out there. When we got to that wedding dance, Evan was so sober he was mad. He was just plain bored with the whole thing and thought it was so stupid.
After we'd been back in Brigham City for several months, my mother's stepmother died and my uncle Walt (Walter Halverson) and his wife, Geneva came up from Long Beach California; I'd been having terrible headaches in Brigham. They had a daughter named Ruth who was about three years younger than I am. Then, in living with Uncle Walt and Aunt Geneva, and Ruth, I learned to really laugh. I couldn't remember things ever being funny at my house.
Oh yes, after grandmother Halverson died, and because I'd been having such terrible headaches, Uncle Walt, who was a chiropractor, talked mother into letting me go back to Long Beach with them. I stayed with them from - I went down just before Christmas 1934.
One night Ruth and I were to a MIA dance that they had after MIA at that time, and we met a couple of sailors. My darling Lynn. Ruth's mother said nice girls don't go with sailors.
But I started to date Lynn, but he was never allowed to come out to the house in his uniform. Our first date was to the Gold and Green Ball that year.
But we had a tiny little apartment that was managed by a little old maid who was very fussy. We were allowed one bath a week for each of us and to save on water we saved our bath water and washed the clothes in our bath water which was a hassle!
But we rented an upstairs apartment, about three or four rooms, and my Dad was working on what was called the Denny re-grade which was a process of moving a big hill out of downtown Seattle. It had been so high that they - any buildings that were on top of it, they used an elevator to go up the side of the hill to get to the building. They just decided this big old hill in the middle of town was just a terrible waste, so they had this company come in and take away the hill.
From Wikipedia:
The more dramatic Denny Regrade No. 1 (1908–1911) sluiced away the entire half of the hill closest to the waterfront, about 27 city blocks extending from Pine Street to Cedar Street and from Second to Fifth Avenues. 20,000,000 US gallons (75,708 kl) of water a day were pumped from Lake Union, to be aimed at the hill as jets of water, then run through tunnels to Elliott Bay.[6]
Much of the motivation for the regrade had been to increase land values, but the area opened up was left as a strip cut off from much of the rest of the city by the remaining eastern half of the hill, whose western face offered no route of approach.
The result was Denny Regrade No. 2, begun in February 1929 and lasting 22 months. This time, the technology was power shovels rather than sluicing, with earth carried to the waterfront by conveyor belts, then placed on specially designed scows and dumped in deep water.[6] The scows were intentionally designed to capsize in a controlled manner. They were symmetrical top-to-bottom and side to side; a seacock could be opened to fill one side with water. In three minutes it would capsize, dump its load, bob up, empty the tank, and right itself.[10]
One of the buildings demolished in Denny Regrade No. 2 was the Denny School on Battery Street between 5th and 6th Avenues. Opened in 1884, it had been described as "an architectural jewel… the finest schoolhouse on the West Coast."[7]
All the time they were doing that, my Dad said it was such a waste to take all that dirt and just dump in the bay because that is what they were doing. They had big - they had built a conveyor belt from the regrade up over the town and out and put it on barges at the dock and took it out a ways into the bay, take soundings and then dump it. So they dumped the whole hill; in the last, probably 10 years, they've been digging up the bay, bringing dirt back in and filling low spots in Seattle, which is what they should have done in the first place! But that was interesting to watch. There was one they resettled the people who had lived around the edges of the hill, and I remember that there was one house that was still there - the man wouldn't sell his house for what they were willing to pay for it, and he wouldn't move, so finally the steam shovels just dug all around his house and left him sitting up on about a 5 food high perch of left hill under him. And he'd have to rock it in, because with the Seattle rains, it would have to wash away. So that was the way it was when we finally left Seattle in about 1933 or 34.
Wallace and I used to like to drive around Seattle. Seattle is a lovely place and we'd start out from our place and somehow we'd always end up home and we never knew how we got there; Many times we'd leave our house at the base of Queen Anne Hill and end up circling the thing, coming back and being parked right in front of our house again! We'd just go around in circles. But we explored frequently.
Wallace decided that he should get some more education. He had gone to Utah State University when we lived in Logan and graduated. But after he'd been out of school for a while he decided he wanted to be a geologist, to know more about it. So after working with Dad the summer in Seattle, he left Dad and Mother and I there and put the car in storage because Dad wouldn't drive in Seattle and Mother and couldn't, so the car was put in a garage and left there for a couple of years. He left and went back into the Midwest someplace to go to college and get a master's degree in geology.
So in the fall I started school and went to Queen Anne High School which was up on a hill; we lived at the base of the hill and it was at the top of the hill and I don't know how many steps, there must have been 200 or 300 you had to climb to get up that dang hill. You either did that or you took a cable car part way but then you had to hike the steps the rest of the way.
From Wikipedia:
Queen Anne High School (1909–1981) was on Galer Street atop Queen Anne Hill and is on the National Register of Historic Places. The building was converted to condominium apartments in 2007.
The school was built in 1908 with additions in 1929 and 1955, (ID #85002916). It is also an official City of Seattle landmark.[1]
Most of the time, because I was having arthritis again, with some iritis thrown in, which is a disease of the eye - you can't stand daylight, I'd wear a patch over the eye that was bothering me the most and try to get by, going to school at Queen Anne. It was a huge school about three or four levels. I remember I used to have one class in the top corner of one building (it was an L-shaped building) and my next class was at the bottom floor in the opposite end of the L shape. Well, it took ya 10 minutes to make that, even in good conditions, and I was having trouble walking up and down stairs! It was a little rough! I went through a period of time up there where my feet swelled so bad I couldn't buy shoes to fit and I had to wear house slippers, and then would attach a ribbon or bias tape or something at the back of the heel and tie straps around my ankles to hold the heels on because otherwise I couldn't keep them on. It was altogether miserable.
School was so different from Logan High School that I hated school. One good thing happened: in my transfer of credits from Logan High School to Queen Anne High School I had much more credits than I'd had at Logan. The classes I'd taken at Logan like orchestra only gave half credit and in Seattle they gave whole credit. And some other classes I'd had at Logan only gave a half credit and up there they were a whole credit. So when they got them all equalized out, I ended up that I could graduate in just the first semester of school. So I graduated from Queen Anne High School at mid-term 1932 after only 3 1/2 years of high school. School is Seattle was very difficult. I had taken some history classes where the teacher believe that we should outline all of the stuff that we read. I swear she must have weighed those outlines to see how much they weighed before she gave us a grade.
Our graduation exercises were ridiculous. They had all the graduating students sitting on the stand. And they had a new P.A. system (which P.A. was just being invented) and we could hear the speaker speaking at the pulpit and then the sound would go out and pick up on the little speakers they had on each side of the stage so we sat up there on the stand and couldn't understand anything anybody said. It was really boring. Somebody had brought a comic book with them and finally tore off pages and passed them up and down the aisles of the graduating class. That was how we spent our graduation night. It was really boring. the graduation exercises I had attended at Logan High School had been beautiful. Everybody cried because they were leaving school, loved everybody else, etc.
All the dances at Queen Anne High School were matinee dances from 3:00-5:00 in the afternoon. There was never anything in the evening. I don’t' think they even had a senior prom or junior prom or anything. Where at Logan all the dances had been mostly in the evening. I don't remember matinee dances at all. In the orchestra we played some really good music and that's what got me started liking symphony music. We played for several musicals, which were fun, and I enjoyed that, as we had done at Logan High School - we had put on a couple of musicals that I'd been in the orchestra for. But in Queen Anne High School my music by then was good enough that I made the first orchestra, or the A orchestra, which was nice; I enjoyed that. But I was second violin, which was all I was really qualified to play. While we were there I was eventually in an all-girls orchestra that we were going to play for dances. I don't know what convinced me that I was good enough to play for a dance, but we tried it a few times. It eventually dissolved; somebody moved away and that kind of killed it. I think probably the one who was most interested in keeping it going left, and the rest of us weren't all that dedicated.
I had my first plane ride while I was living in Seattle. I was dating a young man who was managing a grocery store, so he decided one day we should go for a plane ride. We went up in a Sea Plane.
Mother and Dad had been out shopping one day. They made so much noise coming up the stairs as they were coming home. when I opened the door for them, my Dad's hands were just shaking; he had had a stroke while they were out. We had kind of a hard time taking care of him. I don't remember that we even had a doctor.
Then the depression hit; Dad's job ended and the rest of the family decided that they should come up and move Mother, Dad, and I back to Brigham City where my brother Evan was running a service station. they said Dad could help run the books for him and it would give Evan more time. So that was done. They came and got us and we rented or got a little trailer to pull behind the car. We loaded everything we had on the trailer and the car. Cars in those days had wide running boards, and you could really load a car. I remember we had a barrel that Mother had put a whole bunch of stuff, or I had. I was a better packer than her and I filled up every nook and cranny. (Note from Arlene: I believe this is the story Mom used to tell about how the barrel fell off and things in it broke and all mixed together - jam or honey and buttons, etc. They took the time to sort through it all to save as much as they could because commodities were so hard to come by, and some things were rationed, so they couldn't spare anything - even a button.)
Anyway, we finally moved back to Brigham and rented a house there. It was a nice home and had a big yard with fruit trees in the back. It was while we were in Brigham City that my brother and I started to have some fun together. I really hadn't been around him much since we were in grade school together. I remember one trip he was invited to a wedding out in Juniper for a wedding reception or shivaree or something and he said, I know very well when I get out there, they're going to try to get me drunk. So he said I'm going to fool them. He'd been told that if you drink just a little bit over a long time, you can't get drunk. So he started drinking just a little bit as we were driving out there. When we got to that wedding dance, Evan was so sober he was mad. He was just plain bored with the whole thing and thought it was so stupid.
After we'd been back in Brigham City for several months, my mother's stepmother died and my uncle Walt (Walter Halverson) and his wife, Geneva came up from Long Beach California; I'd been having terrible headaches in Brigham. They had a daughter named Ruth who was about three years younger than I am. Then, in living with Uncle Walt and Aunt Geneva, and Ruth, I learned to really laugh. I couldn't remember things ever being funny at my house.
Oh yes, after grandmother Halverson died, and because I'd been having such terrible headaches, Uncle Walt, who was a chiropractor, talked mother into letting me go back to Long Beach with them. I stayed with them from - I went down just before Christmas 1934.
One night Ruth and I were to a MIA dance that they had after MIA at that time, and we met a couple of sailors. My darling Lynn. Ruth's mother said nice girls don't go with sailors.
But I started to date Lynn, but he was never allowed to come out to the house in his uniform. Our first date was to the Gold and Green Ball that year.
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