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.
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