Web hosting Custom Email SiteBuilder

I was born at 1:30 a.m. 27 November 1905 in a small town named Cannoville, Garfield County, Utah. John Mildard Allen and Isadora Losee are my parents. My father was a polygamist. My mother was his second wife. The children born to my mother are Ellen, Joseph Millard, Isadora, Johnathan Ernest, Lovisa, Andrew Herold, and Zelpha May, myself. My Aunt Almira's children are Lydia, John Chauncy, Sarah Maria, Eliza Olive, Emma Jane, Ellis Huff, Odessa Christena, and Elba Vernessa. I was the youngest of all the children.

I was born in a two-roomed house, one of the rooms (the kitchen) being a leanto at the back. I even remember how the room was arranged. The house faced east. There was a window on each side of the door and one on the south side of the room. There was a bed in the northwest corner and one in the southeast corner of the room, a small stand or table by the south window, and a heating stove on the south side of the room. The sewing machine, one that had belonged to my grandmother, was kept by the north wall when it wasn't being used, but when she sewed, Mother put the machine near the center of the room for better light. In the leanto on the west side of the house was one bed for the boys. This leanto was the kitchen.

Our house, which was on the west side of town, was located on the south side of the street. Our corral was right against the sand rock hill. We used to roam on that rock, but I would crawl on my hands and feet because I was afraid to stand up.

When I was a baby, all the family but Mother had the measles. Ellen lived at home then with her baby, Verona. Father was living in Tropic five miles away with his other family. He didn't come to help her with the children because he was afraid he might take it to the other family. So, Mother was alone with us. Ellen was very sick. She was delirious, and she turned black. Some way, Mother got word to her brother, Isaac Losee, who lived in Tropic just across the street from Father. Uncle Isaac and Aunt Melissa, who was blind, came and stayed with us, helping out as long as they were needed.

There are a few things which took place while we lived in Cannonville which I remember quite vividly. While I was quite small, I remember sitting on Mother's lap while she was sewing on the machine. I put my finger in the way and the needle passed through it. Mother said I was about nineteen months old, but I remember it very well. After she had cared for my finger, Mother put me down on a large brown shawl, which was lying on the floor. The shawl had a fringe around it.

I also recall quite well when my brother Ernest Rode a mare called Gypsy over some bars that had been dropped at one end and her feet became so entangled in the bars that she fell, breaking his arm. Ernest, age 14, who had been working away from home, was coming by the house for his clothes so he could go on an outing to Pine Lake for the Fourth of July. I was standing by the kitchen window when he rode up the street. He smiled and waved to me and I ran out of the house to meet him. By that time, the horse had fallen and Ernest's arm was broken.

Before I was born, my sister Ellen was married to Eugene Potter, whom she later divorced, and she had a daughter named Ellen Verona who was about seven months younger than I was. When she divorced her husband, Ellen went out to work and she left the little girl with us. As a result, we were raised like sisters. The neighbors there in Cannonville called us twins. We had two cousins, Elva Ross and Edna Chalk, who were about three or four years older than ourselves. We loved them a lot and they often played with us. Usually, we played that I was Elva's little girl and Verona was Ednas' little girl. The cousins were about seven years old and of course one of them wanted to be the teacher. But I insisted on being the teacher myself and even went so far as to say I would go home if they didn't let me, so they consented. I remember how miserable and unhappy I was because I didn't have the slightest idea what to do, never having been to school. Thus, I learned at a very early age to stick to something I knew a little bit about.

The town ditch, which was used for the town's irrigation water, ran between our house and the corral. Across it was a plank we used as a footbridge. One day, Verona and I were going to cross the plank and go to the corral. Ellen, who was washing with a washboard and tub out in the back yard under the trees, said, "Now, don't fall in. "We won't," I said. "I'll take Mona by the hand and we'll go just as careful as careful," and on the second "careful" we fell in. Verona went off to one side and grabbed the bridge. I went in the ditch, going down with the stream so my sister went after me first. Verona screamed and screamed because her mother went after me first. After she caught me and I'd gotten my breath back, I said, "I want my bread." She said she couldn't get that but that I could have more bread and butter.

One time our neighbors just east of us had thinned their carrots, which were lying along the row in little piles. Verona and I crawled through the fence and gathered an apronful of carrots and took them home. Our mothers wanted to know where we got them and, when we told them, they said we would have to take them back. But they gave us a dime and sent Lovisa with us to see if the neighbor would sell us a few carrots. We took them down to Laura Davis and told her what we'd done. She wouldn't take the money but she gave us a few carrots pulled fresh from the garden. Thus, I received my first lesson in honesty.

I could write a book about the things I remember before I was five.

One time my brother fell in a barrel head first. A neighbor woman grabbed him up by the feet and gave him a shake. He gasped and said, "There goes my hat."

Mother's oldest brother and wife, Alma and Priscilla Losee, and her son by a previous marriage, Wilbur Clayson, came to visit us when I was very small. The boy called me "Dutch" because I couldn't talk plain.

I went to a Fourth of July celebration and won a race. I got a tiny China doll for a prize. I also remember attending a school Christmas program. All I recall of the program was that the angels were little girls in nightgowns, circling the tree, which had real lighted candles on it. I have the two little dishes I got for that Christmas, a little white plate and pitcher.

The church house was used for church, school, and all public gatherings.

A couple of blocks from where we lived was a little store owned by a man who blessed me as a baby. Everybody called him Uncle Seth Johnson. I remember him because he used to give me a little bag of candy when I went in there.

Pat Willis had a general merchandise store down farther on the main street.

My Aunt Mary Coffell's husband, Ephraim Coffell, was postmaster. They were the grandparents of both Elva Ross and Edna Chalk. Elva's mother died when she was small and her grandparents raised her. Aunt Mary was a midwife, and she was with Mother when I was born.

I remember the church house and where a few people live. I remember most of the people there as just names that sound familiar, but there are a few I remember as individuals.

One year a rainstorm came on top of the snow and the snow raised up, floating on top of the water. There was slush all over town. My real father, John Allen, came down there and was putting a pipe on the stove. He had gunny sacks wrapped on his feet to keep them warm. It was that same winter that the feed was short for the cattle and they cut down shade trees and the animals ate the twigs.

My father didn't live with us to speak of. He lived mostly in Tropic with his other family--Aunt Almira, and the children: Lydia, the oldest, Chancy, Sarah, Eliza, Jane, Ellis, Odessa, and Elba. Father would come down, stay a night or so. My mother had seven children and raised six: Ellen, Joseph, Isadora (who died at age two), Ernest, Lovisa, Herold, and myself--Zelpha.

My mother mentioned to Father one day when he was there that she wanted to name me Zelpha. He said, "That's all right." Ras (Erastus, his brother) has a girl by that name. She said I was her namesake, but Mother didn't know this was her name when she chose it for me.

I recall another visit from Father. He was sitting at the table eating breakfast with us. I sat there so intently, watching his jaws as he chewed his food.

On the Fourth of July they always had a program, with the children running, racing, and winning prizes. I think each child got a bag of candy and the ones that won the races got prizes. One year I got a tiny China doll that was about two and one-half inches tall. I kept that doll for years. I can still see it now. This is the doll I mentioned before.

In the spring of 1910, Ellen went to Coyote (now Antimony) to work as a cook and housekeeper for John (or Johnny) Gleave and his brother, Herbert. They owed a cattle ranch, quite a big place, and they spent most of the summer putting up hay, much of which was meadow (or wild) hay. Also, they raised alfalfa and grain (both oats and wheat).

In October 1910, a month before I was five, we moved to Tropic, where we lived in a two-room house four block from Father and his first wife. Our house was on the northwest corner of the block, one block west of Main Street. The front room faced north and the kitchen faced south.

On November 9, 1910, Ellen and Johnny Gleave were married in our home. Family members were present and a counsellor in the Bishopric performed the ceremony. His name was William Shakespeare. His wife, Matilda--or Tilly--came with him. She was a large, angular woman. I remember her quite well.

My mother's brother, Isaac Losee, lived in Tropic, too. He had a blind wife, and I used to lead her sometimes. I started school in Tropic, attending Primer. Mrs. Mable Johnson was my first teacher; and I really disliked that teacher. I was dumb and she would pinch me for being dumb. She used to grab me by the ear and shake me. Miss Mildred Nelson, however, finished teaching the rest of that first year, so I didn't have Mrs. Mable Johnson during the whole year.

Classes were held in a long building with three rooms. Primer, first, and second grades met in the east room, third to fifth in the middle room, sixth to eighth in the west room. Church meetings were also held in the school house. On the east side of the street from the school house was the post office. I can see that town just as plain as if I were there. It wouldn't be the same now. The school building may even be gone now.

In the first grade, Miss Martha Johnson was my teacher until Thanksgiving, when we moved away again, this time to Coyote.

One summer while we were living in Tropic, we went to my cousin Isaac Coffell's place and picked a lot of pie cherries. His trees were so thick it was about like the Pottawatomi plum trees are. It seemed like Mother, Lovisa, and Herold picked cherries all day.

One fall when I was six or seven years old, we picked apples for a man named Alstrom, and I was really proud of myself, because, as I remember it, we got one-fourth of what we picked for our own share, and I earned two and one-half one-hundred pound sacks of apples. I felt quite important that I was able to earn that much. That is the first I recall ever earning anything. That was the first time I'd ever tasted snow apples. Oh, they were good.

One summer (I think it was 1913), Verona was staying with us. One Saturday it rained. Mother gave us our baths and got us all cleaned up. Then we went to the post office to get the mail. Verona and I were playing along and skating in the mud puddles and Verona sat down in one. Well, we went home and she got cleaned up again. Then we went out to play and I went across the street, where I was wading in a ditch that had resulted from the rain. Well, down I went in the muddy water. It was all fun for us, but poor Mother--I don't think she was very happy about the whole thing.

One day when I was about six, we heard a terrible roaring noise, and my brother Ernest told me it was an automobile. He said to watch where the noise was coming from and I'd see it when it came into town. The road out of town was just a block from our place. It seems to me we watched a long time before that automobile appeared. It was the first one I'd ever seen and I think it was the first one any of our family had seen. As I remember it, the noise it made compared to the big cats we have nowadays.

Another time, there was a long string of ox teams that came through town pulling some kind of machinery--what, I don't know, but it seemed like the string of ox teams was almost endless.

I remember going to the Fourth of July celebration in Tropic where I won a foot race, receiving as a prize a yard of pink ribbon. I'll have to brag about this as it is my last chance. I never won another foot race and now I don't expect to.

Like the Cannonville people, I remember the Tropic people mostly as just names that sound familiar, although I recall a few individuals.

One time while we lived there, Joseph (Joe) had rheumatism until he couldn't turn over in bed without help. One summer Ernest got goat fever. That was when I was six years old. He was sick for a long time. When he improved to where he could sit up, he walked into the kitchen one day to eat dinner. When the meal was over, he couldn't use his legs. He had to be dragged in the rocking chair back to his bed and there he spent several weeks more in bed. It's just my idea, but I feel it must have been rheumatic fever.

Herold used to herd cows for us and for other people too. He was just a little boy, but each morning he took his lunch and the cows and went east of town to what was called the East Valley and herded them all day. At night, he brought them back. One day he was playing with pussy willows and put one of them in his ear so far he couldn't get it out. It stayed there until a doctor took it out three or four years later.

One special event, to me, happened when I was six. My brother Joseph, who had gone to Orderville to work, ordered a doll sent to me by Sears and Roebuck. It was a very special doll to me. It could go to sleep. It had real curls. And it was about eighteen inches tall. I had that doll for about ten years.

While we were living in Tropic, my father deserted my mother and her family. We stayed on another year. And then, in 1913, we moved, going to Antimony, Garfield County, where my sister Ellen lived. We rented a small house from James Lariby. After spending the first winter there, we moved into a house just east of the school house. I don't remember who owned it. It had three rooms and was the biggest house we had before I was married.

My brothers worked at my brother-in-law's all summer, so they weren't home much. The farm was out of town to the north, the north fence being on the County line between Garfield and Piute Counties.

During that first winter in Antimony, my eyes became so bad I couldn't read more than half a page without tears streaming down my face. The students made fun of me and said I cried because I had to read. My teacher was Lydia White, a widow, and she and Mother decided I should be taken out of school. In April, Mother took me to Manti, Sanpete County, Utah, and had my eyes taken care of. The doctor from whom we got my glasses said I would never be able to read or do any close work without glasses. I was baptized in the Temple while I was in Manti and, as they did sometimes in those days, they baptized me for my eyes. I wore my glasses two winters and never had to wear glasses again until I was twenty years old.

The winter of 1913-1914, I got more for Christmas than any other Christmas in my childhood. I got a little water set, pitcher and six glasses. One tiny tea set with four cups and saucers was given me by Ellen's sister-in-law, Lora Gleave (Herbert's wife). Ellen gave me a tea set. The dishes were larger, but it had two cups and saucers along with teapot sugar bowl and cream pitcher. Most of these dishes I still have though somewhat the worse for time and wear. Mother gave me a little pitcher for cream that Christmas and two storybooks, "Beauty and the Beast" and "Cinderella."

Joseph, Ernest, and Johnny Gleave (Ellen's husband) partitioned off Johnny's granary so we could live in it. We spent the winter of 1914-1915 there. That Christmas Herold went after a Christmas tree. All the presents were put on the tree, which was customary there, and Santa came and gave each one his gifts. Ernest performed the duty of Santa. I don't remember what I got that year, but I recall how pretty the tree looked with all the presents on it and how excited Ellen's three-year-old Hazel was. Everyone, I remember, had a good time.

Since we had no home, Mother and the boys were trying to get settled. We didn't have any money, only the $150.00 received from the house in Tropic, so they decided they'd have to homestead somewhere. They talked about going to Giles in Wayne County. Mother, Ernest, Herold, and I went there in Johnny's white-top buggy to look things over. They liked what they saw and decided to move there. Then, in the early spring of 1915, Mother, Joe, and Ernest loaded the wagons and started for Giles. Lovisa, Herold, and I were still in school, so we stayed with Ellen and family. They were planning to come back for us after we got out of school. But it didn't work out the way they'd planned. They had so much trouble getting the loaded wagons over the mountain and the mud was so bad that they came back and started looking somewhere else for a place to homestead.

Mother wrote to a girlhood friend in Short Creek, Arizona (now Colorado City), asking how things were there. The answer Mother received led her to believe things were pretty good, so the family decided to go there. In April of 1915, we started out to make the trip. We had two covered wagons. One was a double bed on which Ernest put his mule team (Jack and Joe) and Mother's team (Fan and Ted). Joseph's team (Bally and Midge) was put on the other wagon. Ernest and Herold each had a riding pony (Gypsy and Maud). Joe's pony was called Molly. In addition, we had cows (Beaut, Tiney, and Daisy) and some small cattle, two or three head, and a yearling colt (Bess). Most of the time Herold and I rode the ponies, driving the other stock.

At the top of the Tropic hill, we met Mother's sister, Olive Stock, with her two sons Isaac and Ellis and daughter Retta. My father met us there, too, and tried to get me to stay with him and Aunt Almira, but I didn't want to and I'm sure my mother and brothers would have objected very strongly if I'd been inclined to do so.

We went on there. Aunt Olive had two wagons, too, but I don't remember about the livestock. We stopped at noon each day to feed the horses, and our food was cooked over the campfire in dutch ovens and frying pans. We would have sour dough biscuits, salt side, and potatoes. The potatoes were sliced in the grease after the meat had fried and had been taken out, then a little water was added and they were covered with the lid of the dutch oven and cooked over the coals. This tasted so good to me. Of course, we had other things to eat but I don't remember what they were except buffalo berry preserves. That stands out in my memory as a real treat.

I remember when we were at Antimony, Ellen, Mother and us young ones would go gathering buffalo berries. They would spread some large canvass or wagon cover or whatever they had available and then break off the limbs of the bushes, piling them on the cover and beating them with a large stick to shake the berries off. After this was done, they would take off the branches and pile them to one side and then lift the edges of the cover until the berries were all in a pile in the center of the cover. Occasions like this were picnics for us, as we weren't big enough to do much work, although we did have to help beat the branches.

On our journey, we camped at night out under the stars, or clouds, whichever happened to be the case. We made our beds on the ground. Our supper, of course, was cooked over the campfire. The horses were all tied up and fed grain in nosebags--and hay which we had to buy as we went along, not having room to haul it. The teams were tied to the wagon wheels. We always had to camp where we could get water from streams or a spring or a farm house. The animals had to be taken to water at night and fed grain, and then in the morning they were again given their grain and watered, after which they were harnessed ready for the day's travels. I usually helped lead the horses to water and helped hang the nosebags of grain on them. Breakfast had to be cooked. Bedding had to be rolled up and put back on the wagon after the meal, all the food and cooking utensils loaded again and the campfire put out. We had a box fastened to the back of one of the wagon boxes with a few chickens in it. It had net wire on one side so the chickens could get air and light. These also had to be watered and fed twice a day. A ten gallon keg was tied on the side of the wagon to haul drinking water in. We drank it whether it was warm or not, as refrigerators hadn't been invented and we weren't accustomed to ice water, except in the winter, so it didn't make any difference to us. This was our daily routine. We didn't travel far each day.

We went through Red Canyon between Hatch Town and Tropic, which to me was very beautiful. The hills and all the soil were a lovely orange red until we came to the end of the canyon going west. The last few rods of the hill on the right side of the canyon changed abruptly to black lave or volcanic rock. The canyon was full of fir trees. I would look at the beautiful trees and keep saying, that would be a pretty Christmas tree, or this one would make a pretty Christmas tree, or that one would hold lots of presents. There had been a sawmill in that canyon. It had been moved, probably because the supply of lumber material had been used up.

Then we went on to Hillsdale or Wilson and on to Hatch Town, then on to the Long Valley Divide, where we saw the Virgin River on the south. A few miles south of Hatch, we crossed the Mammoth Creek but it ran quite swift and came up about to our horses' knees. I was riding Gypsy when we crossed this stream (forded it). I couldn't say how wide it was, but it seemed a long way across to me. I got so dizzy watching the water that Joseph, who could see it was bothering me, shouted, "Hold on tight. Don't fall off." Well, I made it all right. We finally reached the other side and I was still on the horse.

When we crossed the Divide, we were in Long Valley Canyon, which is a beautiful sight in April, wild flowers and new spring green among the long-leaf pine trees. At the time we were there, the lorb was in bloom. The low green shrubs covered with pink blossoms on the hillsides all along were a lovely sight to see. One day in the canyon we stayed over a half day to rest the teams and possibly to give them a chance to get some green feed. Everyone in the camp but Mother, Aunt Olive, and her son, Isaac (a bachelor) went roaming the hills, gathering pine gum and having a good hike. I was six years younger than any of the others and so I had a hard time keeping up--to the displeasure of my cousin Retta. She was about twenty-one and didn't like very much being bothered by a little girl in the party. But my brothers and sister were tolerant and good to me, and though I became tired I had a very good time.

When we got to Orderville, we stopped a day at Uncle Erastus and Aunt Mane Allen's place. It was the first time I had seen them. They had a family, several corresponding to ages to our family. There were Hazel, Charles, Zelpha (about Lovisa's age), Earl, Rex, Cora (my age), and Dean. I enjoyed my visit there, playing with Cora. Several of my father's sisters also lived there: Aunt Jane Hardy, Aunt Christina Heaton, Aunt Ellen (Ellie) Croft, Aunt Mary Cox (I remember her most; she was bedfast, a tiny little old woman. She didn't live long after that), Aunt Diadama Reese, and Lenora Esplin. While we were there, the mare I had been riding most of the way had a little blue colt.

We finally started on our journey again. We went through Mount Carmel and on toward Kanab, turned right at the top of the hill and went through the sand dunes. The water holes were rather scarce along the way. At a place called Yellow Jacket was a small spring--just a campground. The sand was so deep the road was just a place cleared from brush with wagon tracks. It was very little traveled. Another water hole was called Sandholes. We camped there about three days.

It snowed on the first day of May. And it was that day Old Fen had her colt. I named it May because it was born on May Day. We arrived in Cane Beds, Arizona, on May 3, 1915, but we had temporarily left one of our wagons about six miles back at Pine Springs. The sand at Pine Springs was so deep and the load was so heavy they had to double up the teams. Because of this, one of the wagons had to be left behind. At Cane Beds, there was one family (Newell and Lydia Palmer) living in a walled-up tent, which consisted of boards rising several feet from the ground with a tent on top. Newell Palmer was the brother-in-law of Aunt Amanda Bodily, who was Grandpa Bodily's second wife. We camped at Cane Beds the next day. Joseph and Ernest went back to get the wagon they'd left behind. It snowed, so they were late getting back. They were both wet and cold. Ernest had a chill. The next morning, he was unconscious. Sister Palmer made room in her tent and had Mother and Joseph bring him in. A messenger was sent on seven miles to Short Creek, Arizona, where there was a phone, and Dr. Harold H. Wilkinson, from Hurricane, was called. After examining Ernest, Dr. Wilkinson said he would have to be taken to Hurricane where he could be taken care of. Brother Palmer had a light spring wagon in which they made a bed. He drove while Mother administered to Ernest's needs. Ernest was in a bed in the back of the wagon.

It was six weeks before he could come back to our tent-and-wagon-box home. As I said earlier, we had started for Short Creek. The morning my brother was so sick, my Cousin Isaac Stock hitched up his teams and started on. He said he couldn't stop, that he had to be moving on. So he left us, not knowing where he was going or when he would stop, while we of course had to stay there, with Ernest so sick. (It so happened that Isaac went two miles west and staked himself a claim and pitched tent. And there they lived for quite some time.)

Mother sent word to Lovisa to come help her to care for Ernest. Someone had to sit up nights, as he had to have his poultices and medicine regularly night and day. Mother rented a room from Andrew Isom whose parents were both dead. He, being the oldest, had taken charge of his brothers and sisters. Mother and Lovisa lived in this room while they took care of Ernest. I stayed with some people across the street. These people were really good to us. Ernest got better but then he had a relapse and had to stay in Hurricane three or four more weeks. Finally, he got well and we all went back to Cane Beds.

Joseph had staked out a claim for Mother, Ernest, and himself. He and Herold did some plowing and planting, but there wasn't much farming and harvesting that summer. Later in the summer, I went back to Hurricane with Mother and she put up fruit without sugar. She said maybe we could afford to get sugar to eat with it when we used it. But we were never able to get it, so we ate the fruit the way it was. She dried some peaches that summer, too. I helped her gather them in, cut them, and spread them to dry. While we were there, Old Ted back in Cane Beds got on his back in a wash and died, so we had to have another horse. Ernest got one from Frank Lee in Hurricane. I don't remember how he paid for him, but he was a faithful old horse.

When he was small, Ernest's mule, Jack, had his right front leg broken. It was crooked and he walked on the side of his foot, but didn't limp and he was a very good mule. But, true to nature, he was very stubborn. No one had ever been known to ride him. He'd buck off everyone that had ever tried. While we were still in Hurricane with Ernest, Joseph and Herold were camping at Cane Beds one day and Herold went to bring the horses to camp. Old Jack wouldn't be driven or led. Herold became so angry, he got on Old Jack and rode him to camp, driving the rest of the horses. Old Jack didn't even try to buck. After that, he never bucked again. Herold was fifteen years old and only five feet tall. I have ridden Jack myself and he was gently as a lamb. I guess all that hard trip pulling as a wheeler along with Old Joe took the buck all out of him.

As I mentioned, Joseph and Herold staked claims for Joseph and Ernest and Mother while we were still in Hurricane. They were living on Mother's claim. That summer, Ernest and Brother Newell Palmer went to the Mount Trumbel Saw Mill about forty miles away in the Buckskin Mountains for lumber to build with. By winter, we had a room fourteen feet by twenty feet with inch-boards for walls, plain rough lumber for a floor and door, flour sack windows, and a galvanized tin roof. It didn't have any ceilings and Mother bought some unbleached muslin and tacked it up on the rafters to serve as a ceiling. And that's where we spent all the time we lived there. No improvements were made on it except a partial partition built about two years before we moved away. The room was heated with a wood-burning range which sat in the south end of the room. We sure had to hug close to the stove, to keep warm that first winter. Lovisa worked for Mrs. Gladys Young in Mt. Carmel that winter. The boys would catch wild animals and make a little bit of money that way from the furs, but there wasn't any work around there, except once in awhile there would be a job herding sheep. No need trying to farm on dry land when there was no storm. Cane Beds proved a better location than Short Creek, the place we'd started for. It was just nicer ground and things like that. I spent the next nine years there, leaving finally when I was eighteen years old. The day Melvin was born. The going was hard at Cane Beds and there was lots of work for all.

The first winter we lived there, we had no school. At that time there were only about eight students and that wasn't enough to hold school. Mother taught me from a third grade reader we had which had probably been in the family for years, and she'd make up arithmetic problems and give me spelling words from the stories we read.

What with sickness and all, we didn't raise any food the first year we were in Cane Beds. So we ate lots of salted pork side. The salt was to preserve it. There were just lots of times we had to boil it in water and pour off the water to get part of the salt out before we could eat it. That was the diet for the winter. We had a cow or two but they gave such a little bit of milk. There was nothing for them to eat but the dry grass which wouldn't make much milk. We did have milk, though, enough for bread and enough to have milk for supper. There were a lot of winters when we didn't even have potatoes. Mother would take just a little square of this meat, one and one-half inches square, for each member of the family and she'd fry it; then she'd take that grease and a little bit of flour and make water gravy. We'd eat bread and water gravy for breakfast and we'd have beans for dinner and for supper we'd have bread and milk with the fruit I've mentioned that didn't have any sugar in it.

But we made it through that first winter. People saved their own seeds and the neighbors were kind enough to give us seeds to plant melons and things like that. Of course, we had to buy our grain seeds, but they gave us a lot of melon seeds. There were all kinds, musk melons and cantaloupes and different types of watermelons. I think that was the year we really had a bumper crop of melons. Oh, it was just fabulous; and they were so delicious. It was the sweetest melon you could ever want--raised on dry land like that. We had a pretty good crop of everything we planted that year, which was 1916.

We carried water from a well, which all of us used not only for our stock but for culinary purposes as well. We'd put a cup of it into each hill of melon or squash, placing the soaked seeds in the water and then covering them. That's all the water they got until the rains came. If it didn't rain we didn't get a crop. That year, my sister Ellen and her husband and family, with his brother and family, all came out to see us and look the country over for themselves. I don't think Johnnie, my brother-in-law, was interested in moving from where he was, but evidently his brother was interested. Also, my favorite uncle (Isaac Losee) and his wife (Aunt Malissa) came out in a little black-top buggy. The others came in wagons and brought their kids. These were kid's I'd known before I came out to Cane Beds. And, boy, did we have a ball. They'd go to school with me and then we'd come home and play. It was in the fall and we had the corn shocked in the stack yard. We had melons under the corn shocks to keep them from freezing; there were plenty left in the garden, too, that hadn't frozen yet. Well, we started playing with those melons. One group of kids would steal from the other group. I remember I caught one of the girls that had a melon and I was going to take it away from her. She had a bite of melon in her mouth at the time, and laughed so hard she almost choked to death on that piece of melon. We really hard a lot of fun. I didn't know how Mother ever fed all that big crew. There must have been about thirteen people, in addition to ourselves, who were there several days. But we lived through it and us kids really had a good time.

This year we had school. The man who was going to teach us, Joseph Wilkinson, was homesteading right next to our place. He'd been there some during our first summer in Cane Beds and He'd built a house, but he'd never brought his family.

School was held in one of the Wilkinson's two rooms, but when Lelwin was born, we held school in Palmers' home--the one he built of the lumber he'd hauled when Ernest hauled ours. We had lots of fun, though there was a big difference in some of our ages. We always had a program for Christmas and one for the last day of school. I remember one year we had a program on Washington's birthday. I can still remember most of the poem I learned for that program. I've forgotten the name of the poem, but it went like this.

In Seventeen-hundred and thirty-two

This very month and day,

Winking and blinking at the light,

A little baby lay.

No doubt they thought the little man

A goodly child enough,

But time has proved that he was made

Of most uncommon stuff.

The little babe became a man

That everybody knew,

Would finish well what he'd begun

And prove both fine and true.

So when the Revolution came

That made our nation free,

They couldn't find a better man

For general, you see.

I don't remember the next stanza but it spoke of Washington being made President of the United States.

And then he did his part so well

As President, 'twas plain.

They couldn't do a better thing

Than choose him yet again.

When in regular school was established, the grammar grades went from 9:00 a.m. to noon and the Primary grades went in the afternoon. The school house was built in time for school during our second year, 1917-18.

In 1916, they organized a Branch with Joseph Wilkinson as our Presiding Elder. During the first year and one-half, only three Sunday School meetings were held. There weren't enough residents in Cane Beds to have all Church organizations, but we had Sunday School, Relief Society, Primary (ages four to fourteen), and Sacrament meeting. When I was thirteen, I was put in as Assistant Secretary of Primary, the first position I ever held in the Church. When I was sixteen, I was asked to be a Sunday School teacher. We never did have Mutual. I remember that when I was in First Intermediate class, the group in those days for children between twelve and fourteen, the teacher was Dee Cox, a relative of mine. We really liked him. He gave us some good messages. It seemed so good to be able to go to church. I couldn't understand why my friends sometimes expressed a desire to stay away from meetings. I remember when I first became aware of this. One day I stopped at a friends' place on the way to church and their parents had told them they didn't have to go to Sacrament meeting. That's the first time it ever dawned on me that they might not want to go. I was anxious to go myself. I think I know now why this was the case. While I was living out there with no Sunday School at all or anything else to go to, not even school, my friends were living in town where they could go anytime they wanted to. Maybe being deprived of the privilege of going to church at that time made me not want to ever miss it when I finally did get a chance to go. I think sometimes a thing like that makes one appreciate it more.

One Sunday, between Sunday School and Sacrament meeting, which was held just a few minutes later because everyone lived so far apart, the Presiding Elder came to the young folks--those from about ten to seventeen--and told us he was going to call on about six of us to talk in Sacrament meeting. When he called on me, I told the story of Wilford Woodruff as a missionary in the early days of the Church.

There were a number of years there wasn't enough food raised to live on. Ernest and Joseph would herd sheep in the winter and farm in the summer. Sometimes, when it was too dry to farm, they herded sheep in the summer, too. When Herold got older, he sometimes herded sheep, too.

People from Long Valley, which included Orderville, Glendale, and Mt. Carmel, ran cattle on the range, or desert, south of us. The cattle didn't need much care, only in the fall and spring roundups. The cattle tailed from their grazing ground to the Z Cattle Corrals where water had been piped down from a spring in one of the canyons. The water was run into a trough and the overflow was stored in a pond. There were two of these corrals about two miles apart. That is where the camps were made when the cowboys, who took care of their own cattle, came for the roundups. So, sheep herding was the only job available.

Joseph married Ethel Cox on December 24, 1917. Ernest married Della Harris on July 21, 1919. Herold married Mary Barnhurst on August 21, 1920. Lovisa is three years older than Herold, but he married first, at age twenty.

In Cane Beds, we usually did something for Arbor's Day and we'd have an entertainment. That was all. The dances were a lot of fun. We usually danced to harmonica music--sometimes to violin music--accompanied by chords on the organ. Wilkinsons, who owned the organ, would haul it to the school house, which was used for all entertainments, as well as church and school. At the dances, everybody danced with everybody else, the old and the young. The older people would ask the little children to dance, and we all learned to dance that way. I remember there was one young man in his late teens who, if he didn't have a date, would always start dancing with the littlest girl in the house, and from there he went right up the line. Married men all danced with the little kids, too. It was just sort of one good big family. I don't believe there ever were more than twelve families. The first baby born in Cane Beds was the school teacher's little boy. Ernest and Della's oldest child, Eldon, was next.

On about our second Fourth of July in Cane Beds, when there weren't enough people to have a celebration of any kind, my brother took me for a horseback ride up the canyon. Mother, I think, felt I should have some kind of recreation that day. In the canyon, my brother showed me the hieroglyphics, the Indian writing on the ledges. The only road consisted of wagon tracks through the sand. There was no grading or anything at that time. On either side of the road, right up against the wagon tracks, were great big stink weeds. I've never seen them grow so big, clear above our heads even when we were sitting on our horses. They were covered with big purple balls, very beautiful, but they stank like mad. Stink weeds also have yellow blossoms, but they aren't as large as the purple ones. That was the first time I'd seen such a big patch of those kind of flowers all in blossom. There were actually stink weeds all over Cane Beds, the yellow ones. We'd taken a few chickens out there and we didn't have any feed for them. As a result we had no eggs because they were too poor to lay. When those stink weeds went to seed, the hens started to lay like mad. They ate those seeds and it gave them the energy they needed to lay eggs. Before that they'd had to spar for everything they got. We were quite astonished because we hadn't thought of feeding them that sort of thing.

We had weekly mail there, just once a week on Friday, and the mail carrier did all our shopping for us. We'd send him a note with some money and he'd do all our shopping and bring it back the next week. I don't remember of every paying him for it. We didn't have enough money left for that. But he was real kind and patient with us. He did the shopping for the whole community. Thank goodness it wasn't any bigger. Of course, there wasn't an awful lot of shopping to be done because there wasn't much money to shop with, but we had to have kerosene for our lamps, and of course our flour and whatever we had to eat. He'd bring our salt and sugar, and there were never any big hundred-pound sacks, I'll tell you; just a few pounds at a time.

I recall making a few trips back to visit Ellen and a few trips down to Hurricane, but I don't remember that we returned to Hurricane after I was about ten years old; and I lived at Cane Beds until I was eighteen.

In 1922, the summer I was sixteen, we had a bad flood. It was really dry that year, and it seemed like we had a nice good patch of sugar cane and there was a place maybe as big as a house right to the side of it that was dried up. The stalks in the good patch were four or five feet tall, but the other stalks were only about two and a half feet tall, and they were just yellow with drought. One Sunday afternoon, the crowd got together and had a watermelon bust. About sundown, we all came home, and it started to get pretty cloudy. It started to thunder and lightning, and then at sundown it started to rain. It just poured. It hailed, too. It never let up enough so we could milk the cow until 10:00 o'clock that night, and it was still sprinkling then. After milking the cow, we went to bed.

We were surrounded there in Cane Beds with hills, from which four little canyons led into the valley. Well, the rain fell on these hills, running down into the canyons and on down into the settlement.

Sometime during the night, Mother said, "I am going to light the lamp and see what things look like," and she swung her foot out of bed into the water. She lit the lamp, and in the light we could see an aluminum kettle floating around. It had been sitting on the floor behind the stove where we put it because we didn't have a lot of cupboard space. My Panama-weave hat, which was water proof, was floating around, too. It sounds real funny, but it wasn't. The water in the house was still rising and it got to be nine inches deep before it finally stopped. We could hear the little lamb blatting outside, so I opened the door and got it inside.

We thought maybe we'd better get out of the house because the water was still rising, so we lit the lantern and, carrying the lamb, waded up to our thighs in water to get out of the house. It was ice cold because of the hail. Our house was in a low spot, so we went up for a little ways, just above the corral, to the place we'd camped when we first moved there. My brother had lived there in a small tent with his wife, but he'd moved out. The tent was still there, with a bunk in it but no bedding. We decided to go back to the house for a little bedding and then finish the night in the tent. While we were getting some things together, back there in the house, we heard a terrible splashing outside. We had just gone to open the door when Ernest hollered, "Don't open the door. The water will come in." We said, "Well, it's already in and starting to go down, now," and we opened the door. Ernest had seen all the lights all around the valley there from where he'd been up on higher ground. He'd got on a horse and come down there, but he'd had to come through a little swale on the way, and he had to hold his feet right up on the horse's sides to keep them out of the water. That didn't do him any good, though. He soon got them wet after he got down where we were.

We had just about decided maybe we could stay in the house over night when we noticed that the adobes in the fireplace were melting or dissolving in the water. The chimney, which was made of rock, was up above the ceiling, so we knew it wouldn't be safe to stay in the house. So, my brother got the stuff on the horse and took it up to the tent and that made it a little easier for us.

Then the neighbors started to come out. There were two neighbors who helped out a bit but there wasn't much they could do. It was in the night and the only light we had was a lantern. But they got us out of there and enough stuff with us to make us as comfortable as possible. We slept right on that wet bunk with the bedding we brought from the house. With the water dripping off the trees onto it, that tent leaked all night long.

But the sad part of this flood, to me, were the chicks. We had two little pens of baby chicks, which were between the corral and the house. The water was about ankle deep there, the pens being on higher ground than the house. I think there were about twenty-seven chicks with one old hen; and they were small. And there stood the old hen with her wings all spread out, trying to hover those little dead chickens. Well, we got her out of the water and put her in a kind of chicken crib we had had for little chickens, and then we got out what was left of the bigger chickens that were in a pen without a hen and we put them in the chicken crib, too. And, you know, she clucked and carried on with those chickens until she got those bigger chickens that had been weaned to let her hover them.

About 10:00 o'clock the next morning, the fireplace fell in. It went through the floor, breaking it up. It was months before they got our house moved and fixed and another well dug so that we could have water and move back home. We lived in a tent up at Ernest's while they were doing all this. That was quite the ordeal. I still have a book (Wilford Woodruff's history) and some little dishes and different things that were in the bottom of a trunk when the water came in. The water had leaked in onto the contents of the trunk.

I used to ride horses around the settlement there and up towards the canyons. Our homestead was 320 acres and some of our neighbors lived a half-mile away, some two miles, and some farther than that. Wherever I went, it was on a horse. I rode my brother's riding horses. Herold had a mare named Maude, the one that fell and broke Ernest's arm. I mostly rode these two horses. When I was about ten or eleven, they bought a little mustang horse for me. He was a real pretty palomino color with a white streaming tail, and he was built like a Shetland pony but larger, about 500 lbs. His tail almost reached the ground and his mane came way down below his neck. He had a white face and he was blind in one eye. He was my little horse, and his name was Prince. I thought there was nothing like Prince. I think I had him about three years. He died when I was about thirteen.

I'd bring the cows in at night with a horse. That was one of my jobs. And I helped do the milking. Part of the time we raised bum lambs. We had a little bunch of sheep to watch. And that was our meat. We used the wool to make our quilts and things like that, and Mother would make yarn on her spinning wheel. I didn't have very much housework to do. Mother and Lovisa took care of that and I took care of the chores quite a bit when the boys were off working and there were other things for them to do on the farm. My work was nearly all outside. I was a little shepherdess.

There was another horse, too. The mare Father gave Mother had a yearling colt named Bess. Mother, who couldn't ride it, gave it to me for Christmas. The horse died after I moved to Manti.

Horse riding was my recreation as well as a necessity. My girl friends and I would get together for horseback riding. Sometimes the boys were there, but not very often. I remember one night, Lodica Perkins and I ran races in the dark, which is a very dangerous thing to do, of course; and I wouldn't approve of my children doing that. One time I rode with a friend to Short Creek on horses and one time my cousin and I rode about forty-five miles to Glendale. I knew I'd been riding a horse by the time I got there.

I don't recall what year it was--about 1917 or 1918, I think; we were out of flour and didn't have money to buy anymore. For several months we had to grind our wheat and corn in a hand mill. I didn't like the whole wheat. It was quite coarse. All we had to mix it with was water, baking powder, and salt--no shortening or milk or eggs. They made cornbread for me until the corn was all gone, then I about starved until I got so I could eat the whole wheat bread.

We lived there nine years, and during that time people moved out and then sometimes back again. But we stayed there all that time, except for occasional trips. There weren't very many people living in Cane Beds at any given time. We used to have a lot of good times, old and young.

During the second school year, the following families were there: the Wilkinsons, whose children were Annie, Luzene, Emily, Karl, Merle, Lelwin, Arvil, Wells, and Ralvin. Lelwin was born two or three months after they moved there in 1916. Lalwin, Arvel, Ralvin, and Wells were born after they moved there. Smith Thurston--whose wife was Aunt Olive Stock's daughter--with their three children, Lavern, Frank, and Erwin. William Scott and his four children, Estella, Belle, Clara Marie, and Joseph. The Palmer's children: Lula--who was going to school in St. George, Utah, most of the time, Asael, Alex, Nellie, and Lee. Except for the Palmers, the above people moved there after we did. Many of them moved away before we did.

Somewhere along the line, others moved there and some left. Aunt Olive Stock sold her improvements and moved away. Andrew and Almaretta Jenkins moved onto that place with their family. They had three grown sons and a grown daughter who never made her permanent home there but worked away most of the time. There was Clarence, Ray, Lyman, Julia, Effa, and Ella (twins), Dick, Berta, and Carl or Spencer. Palmers moved away and his sister, Eve Cox, lived in their place. Delano Cox, her son, moved in not far from her with his wife, Cora. They had one son, Alma, when they came there. Eve's children were Julius and Ira and Caroline Cox. Eve later married Brigham Dalton and his children were Eugene, Jacob, and Nora. He had other children that were married and didn't move there. Daniel and Violet Palmer moved there. They had a large family: Vera, Vilate, James, Zamira, Edward, Asael, Ray, Almeda, Leo, Kenneth, and Walter. The last two were born after they moved there. So, the community grew, and the school grew, but never large enough for more than one teacher. There was a Canova family there for a few months; another Scott family for a short time; Fred Beebe, a man and two sons and a daughter--none were home much but Oscar and Jennie. The Covingtons lived in Short Creek when we moved there but they moved to Cane Beds later and started the first little store there. It didn't last long. There was a Mr. Joel S. Eager came there with his family of five children. They were motherless. There was Lee, Walter, Frank, Jetta, and Ella.

I remember what a grand occasion it was when my cousin came to visit his mother during the Christmas holiday. He had a new Ford. His brother, Ellis, with whom I was keeping company, borrowed it. I was sixteen or seventeen at the time. With his nephew Frank and Erwin Thurston and with Annie and Luzene Wilkinson, Ellis and I rode around most of the afternoon.

By 1924, Mother and I were alone and we couldn't run the farm by ourselves. It was a terribly dry, hot summer all over the state. Mother and I were just about at the end of our rope. We didn't know what to do. My brother Joe came from Rockville, Utah, where he lived, and he said he was going to Antimony to hunt work. He had a team with him, and he said to Mother, "You better come and go with me." That's all we needed. He laid over a day or two until we could wind things up there, load everything we could bring. What we couldn't bring, we fastened up in our trunks and left in the house. It was plundered after we left. It was the 24th of June 1924 when we started off.

We had to go across the Pipe Valley over to Pipe Springs, which is now a national monument. It was parching hot and I forgot my dog needed water. He just about choked to death. He kept crawling under every culvert for awhile. The culverts were just over washes. There weren't any streams at all. Finally, I realized he was terribly thirsty, so I poured a little water out of the water bag we were carrying on the horn of the saddle and gave it to him to drink. We camped at Pipe Springs that night. We went around by Kanab and had to camp out two or three times before we got to Glendale. I drove the cattle on the horse as far a Glendale, where my brother Herold and Mary were living. When we got there, we stopped at their place. Mother got sick and so Joe went on ahead. Johnny came and got us in the car. Johnny was my brother-in-law, and what a part he played. He was just as good as one of my brothers in doing as much as he could to help us out. He was just wonderful. Well, Johnny took us to their place.

When I could get work I did it, but there wasn't a lot to be had, so I helped on the farm. For six days, I helped them put their hay up, driving a team on a bull rake. Then I tromped hay on the wagon for a day or two, and I was so stiff and sore I never wanted to see another spear of hay.

We lived there in Antimony part of the summer with Ernest and with Ellen, whose places were right close together. And then I went to Marysville to stay with Lovisa for awhile. I got more work there tan anywhere else I'd been. Just house work, cleaning work, and things like that. But it helped. Each little bit helped. My brothers didn't have to help us any with money.

My Uncle Isaac and Aunt Malissa, at that time, lived in Manti. We went there to stay with them for awhile and Mother worked in the Temple. I got a job in the cannery and I made better money there than I had anywhere else. I think I made twenty cents an hour, some difference compared to now. I was able to get quite a little bit of housework. Late that summer, Lovisa moved there from Marysville and lived with us for a little while. When I got where I could, we rented a small apartment.

Some of the girl friends I had while I was there were Bernice Tugerson, Rachel Peterson, Geniel Miller, Zelma Miller, Della Miller, and Ruth Johnson.

I worked in the cannery until December 23rd, when it closed. That late in the year they were putting up salads and celery and carrots and stuff like that. Verona got a job in the cannery, too, and stayed with Mother and me. On September 23, 1925, I went through the Temple and had my Endowments. When I couldn't get work to earn money, I'd go and do Temple work. Then I got a steady job with a lady named Mable Simmons for whom I worked eight months, during which time her baby was born. Six months later, Mother got married and we went to Vernal the next day.

Lovisa happened to go to the Manti Temple one day when my father's half-brother was there with some relatives from Vernal on a Temple excursion. They all got to talking about how they were related, and Lovisa told my father's half-brother that Mother was living alone now. When Mother, who was then in Antimony, got home, he wrote and asked her to marry him. Of course, they'd known each other years before. It might look funny to say that my mother married her husband's half-brother after she'd divorced him. It might look like there was a little bad play there. But there wasn't because it was fourteen years before he even knew that they had separated at all.

On the 12th of November 1926, my mother married my Uncle Isaac M. Allen in the Temple. We left that afternoon to come to Vernal in Uintah County, Utah. It had rained all day and was really miserable. Wellis Hackford and his wife, Ordell, my step-sister, owned the car we were in. It was dark when we got to Indian Canyon. When we were coming up the hill on the other side of the canyon, the road was so slick because of a little snow on top of the ice that we had to push the car to get it up the hill. On the way down through Indian Canyon, a truck was stopped right in a horseshoe bend. The driver was putting chains on his truck. His lights blinded our driver, so he put the brakes on. The car spun around and started rolling backwards off the dugway. The man with the truck saw what was happening. The car was just barely moving, but we were helpless. There was no way we could help ourselves or get out. The man with the truck grabbed on the back of the car and it was enough to stop it. He saved us from going off the dugway. His name was Emery Johnson.

We spent the night in a little cabin near a sawmill. There was only one pair of springs in the cabin and Mother, Ordell, and I slept on that. Father and Willis slept on the floor. Nearly all of them but me froze, or were very cold, but I was sleeping between Mother and Ordell and was quite comfortable. It snowed three or four inches that night, and the next morning was beautiful, with the sun bright on the snow. We came to Vernal without anymore trouble.

The first girl friend I met in Maeser was Edna Dudley. She was very nice and we became the best of friends. Maysie Hall was the next one and she also became one of my very best friends. There were other very nice girls, including Nettie Oaks, Jessie and Helda Oaks. (Dallen Oaks, President of B.Y.U., is a nephew of these girls.) Then, when summer came, Nellie Oaks, who had been going to the B.Y.U., came home. Then Grace Hall returned from her Mission, and she was a lovely girl, too. Pearl Dudley and Thora Ashby were younger, but they went around with the others mentioned above. Rachel and Olive Jones were in that age group, too.

In April 1927, Ernest came to Vernal on a visit and I went back to Antimony with him. Through a friend, Verona got a job for me at Mammoth, Utah, working for Mr. and Mrs. Deahl. Mrs. Deahl was a invalid who required a lot of care. Her sister, and elderly widow who lived with them, was a retired school teacher but still taught school a couple of hours a day. The Deahls were not members of the L.D.S. Church, but they were not opposed to my attending meetings, which I did. I stayed there a month, then I returned to Vernal. In August of that year, I went to Roosevelt, Utah to work. I worked six months for Mrs. Martha Edwards. Dr. Miles lived with her. Jesse Allen, my second cousin, also boarded there part of the time. I returned to Vernal in February. In July 1928, I went to work for Claire C. Hacking. I worked there for two years except for about two and one-half weeks of that time. I had my tonsils out in 1929 and had ten days off. I also had a week off another time.

In about 1927, I had an experience I've never forgotten. I had my bed out under the big tree in front of the house at that time. One afternoon it started to rain. I tried to cover the bed with a tarpaulin to keep it from getting wet, but the wind was blowing so hard that when I'd tuck it under one side it would blow out the other side before I could get it tucked under. I tried and tried to cover up the bed. All at once this terrible fear struck me to get in the house. I felt like it was maybe because of the lightning that was coming so close, because I've always had such a fear of lightning. I was about ten feet from the house, and I started to run. When I stepped onto the doorstep, half of that big tree fell right on the bed where I'd been trying to cover it up. The part of the tree that hit the bed was as big around as my body. It mashed the top of the bed and one side of the cot went down. I felt like that was really a warning to me to get out of the way. This happened at my mother and father's house in Vernal.

In May 1930, I went to Salt Lake City for the first time and attended the Centennial Pageant which was held in the Tabernacle. It was indeed a privilege.

In May 1929, a new chapel was started in Maeser Ward. Carl R. Richens, Walton E. Bodily, and Leroy Carroll were the Bishopric. The building was completed and dedicated in December 1929. I was happy to have the privilege of making a contribution of the chapel. The building was full and people even sat on the stage in the Recreation Hall, which was in the far end of the building. Apostle Melvin J. Ballard dedicated the chapel on December 29, 1929. It was an inspirational meeting.

In about 1928, I was asked to teach the Book of Mormon class in Sunday School. The students' ages were twelve to fourteen. Some of the members were Neldon Richens, Lawrence Richens, Florence Hacking, Edna Collett, Edith Collett, Neva and Edith Blackburn, Eula Massey, Marvin Singleton, Ward Ashby, Jay Hall, Lee Jenkins, Merrill Anderson, David Hall, Florence Allen, Mary and Lola Bowden, Bernice Colton. And perhaps more I do not now remember. I taught this class until the spring of 1931.

During the winter of 1930-31, I went to work for Walton Edwin Bodily as housekeeper, as he had lost his wife on November 12, 1930. She died, leaving six small children: Lucile, nine; Lorenzo, eight; Melvin, six; Anna, five; Gordon, three; Harold, twenty-one months old.

I was pretty badly in need of work by the time I went to work at the Bodily household. Of course, my folks fed me, and when I worked I got a dollar a day. I bought all the things I could for Mother. The folks didn't have much cash, just a little bit of milk check, and it took about all that to pay their utility bills. Father was in his seventies, and he didn't have much of a way to make money, but he was just as good as gold to both of us. He treated me wonderful. He had a cow and some fruit trees, apples, pears, apricots, and some raspberries. He always raised a good garden. I raised a few chickens which I gave to Mother when I got married. Father was a wonderful man, and I was always welcome to come back there when I didn't have work. Of course, on those occasions, I helped in the garden and on the place and with the house. When I was working, I'd always come home on weekends. I'd get home Saturday afternoon and stay unt il Sunday night, when I'd go home from church with the people I worked for. After I quit working at the Hackings, I didn't have very many jobs, just a day or two here and there. For instance, when Evelyn Hacking (Owen's wife) had a baby, and there was a lady who used to take the mother and baby into her home to take care of them until they were ready to go back home and she hired me for ten days. That was the only work I had from September until I came to work for Daddy in November.

I remember that Aunt Esther Carroll went down there and stayed over night the day of the funeral, helping with the kids, and Uncle Levi stayed over for two or three days with Daddy. The funeral was Sunday. It snowed that night, just started when we came out of the funeral. By the next morning there were seventeen inches of snow. It was a big funeral. They had to open the doors between the cultural hall and the chapel.

The next morning, Mrs. Carroll came in the house and told me that Brother Bodily wanted me to come and stay for a few days to help out until his brother could get a widow woman from Gusher to come take care of the kids. And I said, "Well, I can't take care of a family like that, with no mother around." I'd never even been in the house until just before the funeral.

I knew Olive, but not very well. I'd seen her two or three times and she'd given me a ride to town once when I was walking, and then I recall seeing her in church a few times. And there were other times I'd seen or heard about her.

Not long after I came to Vernal, Aunt Jane Colton had an operation. Mar and Wallace Caldwell were living in one of Uncle Ed's rooms with their baby, Betty, who was about four months old. Coltons asked me to help out a few days, so Uncle Ed came after me in a pickup. On the way back, he stopped to borrow something from Daddy. I don't remember what it was. Olive came out to the car and asked how Jane was, and we talked a few minutes. Then, while I was over at Coltons, she came over to see her sister. I don't remember seeing her, but Lucile, then five, who was with her, came in the kitchen and talked to Mar. Also, I'd heard things about her; that she was nice, for instance. But the most I ever remember hearing about her was when she started having this trouble and sickness, and people would mention that she had all this little family and was having trouble. I recall that I saw her once over in front of the old chapel. I was late for church one morning and so was she. We didn't carry on any conversation, but she was standing there holding Gordon, and when the doors opened, we all went in. Actually, through, she was to me at that time more or less just another person you meet when you go into a new place.

I've wished so many times that I knew more about her so I could keep her more alive in her children's memories.

One time I was teaching at Sunday School and Florence Allen, Aunt Eleanor's daughter, was in the class. Evidently, Aunt Eleanor took care of Harold while his mother went out for the mastoid operation or on one of the trips to the doctor in Provo. Anyway, she was helping take care of Harold part of the time his mother and father were away from home. Florence was talking about Harold, the cute little things he did. And I wanted to know who Harold was. She said he was her Aunt Olive's baby, who was staying with them for awhile. Then one time Eleanor spoke of how her big boys played with Harold when she had him there in her home, and how they enjoyed him.

When Mrs. Carroll came in and asked me, and I said I couldn't, she said, "You can too. Just for three days you can go and help them out. They need help over there." So I said, "All right, then." Daddy took Mrs. Carroll over to her home and then he came back after me. We walked out of the house, and he took the little bundle I had for the three days I'd be there and put it in the car. Then I got in. Levi was there, and the little kids. Gordon and Anna and Harold were in the back seat. Harold was asleep. The other kids were in school, I guess.

There was nobody to show me around. I didn't know where things were, and I was never any hand to snoop when I went anywhere to work. I took care of my own things and did the work that needed to be done, but I didn't dig into things to find out what they had. Well, these kids had clothes there somewhere that had to be dug into and I had to find out where they were. I didn't do it for several days. For one thing, I didn't know where to look. When I ran out of stockings to put on their legs, I said something about it. Jane Colton just happened to be there, and she said, "Olive bought the children a lot of those stockings when they were on sale. They must be in that trunk." There was nobody else to do it. That was one of the hardest things I ever had to do. So Jane went with me and we found the stockings and all the different clothes and things in the trunk. There weren't any closets. We got the clothes out and got that started, and I thought, "Well, it's up to me to do this now. I've never done it anywhere else. There's always been a mother there to tell me what she wanted done, but I've just got to go ahead myself and find what has to be done." I never went through anything so hard in my life.

About three days after the funeral, Chris and Dorothy came over to take Levi back home. Chris was supposed to have brought this woman when he came, but when Daddy asked him about the woman, he said, "I haven't been to see her yet." He didn't even know I was there and

he came over without the woman, and Daddy said, "Well you don't need to bother. Zelpha's doing all right with the children." A he never said a word to me--would I stay or anything else. I would have said No if he'd asked me because I still felt the job was bigger than I was--a whole lot. And that's the way it went. Well, I kept wondering and wondering whatever happened to the woman. I didn't dare ask. It wasn't any of my business, only that I was there taking her place until she got ready to come. So, finally, awhile after he asked me to marry him, I asked him whatever happened to the other woman. So he told me about it, the facts I've mentioned above. So, I've joked about it all the time and said he tricked me into it. That's the only way I can see it; he tricked me into it. Anyway, it turned into quite a long three days.

For about the first day, Harold wouldn't have a thing to do with me, and Lucile helped when he needed anything, and put him to bed that night. But after that, it was all me. A short time after that, Daddy tried to take Harold home from Sunday school while I went to officers' meeting and Harold wouldn't go with him. So I took him to the meeting. When I got home, Daddy said, "Young man, if you turn me down again like that, I don't know what I'll do with you.

One time Mother was down there and she was going to eat dinner with us. Daddy was going to wash the kids, Harold and Gordon, before they ate dinner. He got down on his knees, straddling Gordon and Harold, washing their faces with a wash cloth. That tickled Mother nearly to death. It was quite funny. He was always teasing the kids and doing things to play with them. They had a great big rocking chair. It was a big wooden thing, and Harold used to get in it and rock. There was something wrong with it and it would give a loud crack each time it went back and forth. Harold would get in it and go just as hard as he could go and sing. He didn't say any words, just made this noise. He'd sing and sing and rock just as hard as he could rock.

Harold and Gordon used to play together a lot. Anna, who was five, wasn't going to school yet, and she just bossed those kids around something awful. She'd want Gordon to do something and if he didn't do it, she'd say,"Gore-dan!" One time, Daddy took Harold somewhere in this big double-bed wagon. I don't know where he went, but he came home and unhitched the team and took care of them, and I could hear Harold crying and yelling, "Mama." I went out there and he'd left Harold in the wagon and gone away. That was just a short time after I went there because Harold was still saying "mama."

On May 18, 1931, I was married to Walton Edwin Bodily in the Salt Lake Temple.

Our children are: Loren Bodily, stillborn October 4, 1932; Floyd Walton Bodily, born January 9, 1934; Thoral Allen Bodily, born August 24, 1935; Luella Bodily, born August 29, 1937; Delila Bodily, born May 15, 1944; and Deloris Bodily born April 24, 1946.

Until we got married, the kids called me Zelpha. Once we were married, I told Daddy I thought he should be the one to say what they would call me, that it wasn't for me to say. He said, "Well, I don't want them to call you the same thing they called their own mother--and that was 'Mama.' But I want them to call you something that your own children can call you. So I think maybe they'd better say 'Mother.'"

Harold called me Do-do and called Lucile Do-do, and Gordon couldn't talk yet, but the others all called me Mother right from the time he told them to. It took Lucile about a week to be able to do it every time. She was nine years old. You could tell it was really hard for her to call me Mother. It was quite a struggle for her. And every time she called me Zelpha, Anna tattled on her. That probably helped her get started. Since Olive was their mother, I felt it was she the children should call Mother. Daddy said Olive had always wished she'd had them call her that. But he felt it was better the other way. I think doing this made the relationship better.

The kids never got very much for Christmas. The first Christmas after Olive died, the Relief Society brought an article of clothing for each of the children, something for Sundays. There was a little suit for Harold and one for Gordon, a little wool dress and a cotton dress for Anna, a nice little dress for Lucile, and--I believe--shirts for the bigger boys. The Relief Society made these things. I don't think they were made from all new material but it was all good material, and the kids got a lot of good out of them.

Daddy never bought the kids a thing but candy and nuts. And he never would have done. That's just what I mean: he never would have done. I always had to do that. Right from the start, after we were married, I had to do all the buying. I complained to him about it. I said, "I think you ought to go with me and help, you know, take care of your money." He said, "If a man wants to save his money he'll have to let his wife spend it." And I believed him after that, too, because I firmly believed you ought to buy the best quality of things you could afford. But he couldn't afford it. And it wouldn't go around. You've got to make the money go around. You can't buy for one child and let another child go naked. It must go around even if you have to buy the cheapest things. And that's the way we had to do it.

When he was younger, he'd always had anything he wanted, so different than I was. If he wanted something, he'd go buy it. He didn't have to worry about it. They had all those sheep and everything. But after he and Olive got married, they lost everything. They mortgaged the place and then most of the sheep that belonged to Grandpa Bodily and his sons were lost as well. And he never had a roof over his head. That was because of the hard winter. So many of the sheep died that the mortgage was foreclosed. And they had a family started, too. So the cream check was all he got, and he had several head of cattle. We had to live on it. We had eggs to eat, a few to take to the store once in awhile. You could get quite a few groceries with a bucket of eggs, a darn sight more than you can today with almost a twenty dollar bill.

The next Christmas, I think each child got a ten or fifteen cent present to call his or her own. Then we got a little wagon for all the children, together. We always got enough candy and nuts to satisfy them. I felt bad because there wasn't more for the kids. But everybody acted satisfied. Nobody complained. And they were tickled to death over the wagon.

Then, about the third Christmas, just before Floyd was born in January, we got a little bit more. I can't remember what we got Lucile, but we got Anna one of those little rubber baby dolls about nine inches tall, and I recall making clothes for it and how cute it was. By the second Christmas, we got a little paint book and a box of crayons for Harold, and he knelt by the side of a chair with that on it all day long and painted. I don't think we could have ever gotten anything that would have pleased him more. A child's interest span at that age doesn't usually last that long. Everybody acted that happy with whatever little bit they got.

Later, when the kids were old enough to be in school, Daddy and I went to town one day, leaving Melvin and Lorenzo at home alone. They hadn't gone to school that day for some reason. We had the Christmas things under the bed in the middle bedroom. There was a little blue purse that Anna had found in the catalogue and wanted so badly for Christmas, and two banks that looked like little barrels for Gordon and Harold, plus some things for the older ones. Well, we came back from town, and the minute we stepped in the house, Lorenzo said, "Do you think Santa Claus will bring Anna that little blue purse?" And I thought right now: They've been peaking; and I walked into the bedroom and there the stuff was, half out from under the bed. We never said a word about it. One time Melvin was here in Vernal, a few years ago, we were talking about Santa Claus and kids snooping, and things like that. And I said, "Well, I don't think too many of our kids snooped. Melvin did one time--Melvin and Lorenzo." He said, "Well, when did you find that out?" I said, "The minute we stepped in the house. Lorenzo hollered, 'You think Anna will get that little blue purse?'" And I said, "When I walked in the bedroom, the stuff was half out from under the bed, sticking right out in sight." Melvin said, "Well, we thought we'd put it back all right." All those years he hadn't known that we'd known that he'd snooped.

That was during the depression. Sometimes, I could buy overalls at 39 cents a pair, more often it was 49 cents or 59 cents a pair, and sometimes 69 cents. These were bib-overalls. That's what little boys wore then. I made the girls underclothes and their slips and their dresses, and the boys shirts, too, Sunday shirts and all. I even made some shirts for Daddy. I also made overalls for the tiny boys, Gordon and Harold at first then later Floyd and Thoral. The kids did the housework and I did the sewing. I'd sit up until twelve o'clock sewing. They had a good electric machine. I remember we finished paying for it after we were married. Sewing was a necessity, and I was glad I was able to do it. If we'd have had to go and buy the stuff ready-made, even at those cheap prices, the boys would have had about one pair of overalls and one shirt each. I would make three school shirts each and a Sunday shirt for each, then I'd get three pair of overalls for each one. We'd get the children new clothes to start school with in the fall. By the time school was out, we were starting to mend them and cut the shirt sleeves off at the elbow and hem them up. And then we'd get a new supply to start school with the next time. If I hadn't been able to sew, I don't know what in the world we would have done.

We always raised a large garden in which all the family participated, each as he or she was old enough. We always raised a winter's supply of potatoes and carrots, lots of sweet corn and tomatoes. For a few years we raised popcorn, which we enjoyed a lot, either buttered, sugar-coated, or made into popcorn balls. We raised a big patch of p eas, which the family enjoyed very much, eating most of them right off the vine, though we used them at the table, too. We raised a large variety of vegetables and some fruit, such as apples, apricots, sometimes raspberries and gooseberries. We canned lots of fruit and tomatoes and corn and green beans, then in 1951 we got a freezer and thereafter froze our corn and peas instead of canning them. We had to buy most of our fruit, but we raised what we could. In the fall we would take a load of wheat to the grist mill and have flour, whole wheat and Germade cereal, made to last until the next harvest. There was a mill in Vernal for years, but later we had to take the wheat to Roosevelt to be ground.

We had several milk cows and sold cream to Calders Creamery. We separated milk, and on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, a man named Robert Aycock, who worked for Calders Creamery, came in a truck and collected the cream from the farmers. The children usually watched for him and let me know when he was coming so I could take the cream out to him. They called him the Cream Man. One day when Harold was quite small, he came running and said, "Here comes the Cream Can." We sold cream until about 1936 or 1937, when Calders stopped buying it and started buying milk. Then we sold milk. That is how we got our money. They would weigh the cream and put it in ten-gallon milk cans, but when we started selling milk they would leave us a milk can each time and cart off the one with milk in it.

We received our mail rural delivery, and for years, when the family was small, a man by the name of Richard Jensen carried the mail. He was friendly with the people on his route and knew them all personally. Most everyone called him "Dicky." Occasionally, someone else would deliver the mail for him. One day a lady brought the mail and Harold came in the house and said, "Dicky was a woman today."

For our food supply, we used mostly what we raised. Of course, we had to buy our sugar, salt and spice and flavoring, rice and honey. Honey was produced in Vernal, but we didn't have it. Uncle Joe Bodily kept bees, so did Uncle Chris.

It was a good way of life. We always had plenty to eat, though it was plain and simple. We raised our own meat, had plenty of milk and eggs. And that, with grain, fruit, and vegetables, kept food on the table.

For a few years, while living in our present home, we raised quite a few chickens and sold eggs by the twenty-four dozen crate. We had about 200 one-year-old hens and 300 pullets in the run, which had walls on three sides and chicken wire on the front.

During the thirties, Ward movies were held each week on Thursday and Friday nights. They were started in 1932, and Daddy, who became custodian in 1934, would go on Thursday, taking the older children except one. I would go on Friday with the other older one, who would help with the locking up and all that had to be done, and Daddy would stay home that night with the little ones. One Thursday night, sometime between 1936 and 1939, we had already gone to bed when Daddy and the other children came home. Daddy came in the bedroom and said, "I guess we are out of the chicken business." I asked why, and he said the top had blown off the chicken run. One side of the pig pen served as one end of the run, and part of the corral served as the other. When the top of the run blew off, it damaged both the pig pen and the corral. As a result, the cows and horses and pigs were all out. Daddy said that if there were any chickens left, which he doubted they would all be loose. In the dark, we couldn't see the extent of the damage. The next morning, we were pleasantly surprised. All but two or three chickens were still alive. They were scattered but they were alive. All the other animals were okay, but nothing, of course, was shut up. It looked like a strong whirlwind had come along and lifted the roof from the south side, just turning it over upside down on the corral fence on the north side of the chicken run. It had broken the ends of the run and the roof in half, letting the cows, horses, and pigs out. One end of the chicken roosts had fallen down, but evidently the chickens had stayed on the roosts, spending the rest of the night there. The ends of the roosts had fallen on two or three chickens and killed them, but that was all. We felt pretty fortunate. Of course, the chicken run, pig pen, and corral had to be mended.

While Roy Carroll was in California, working in a factory during World War II, my husband rented his farm. After the war, Roy came back to the farm, so we farmed only our own eight acres. Then, in about 1946, the job of custodian of Maeser School was offered to Ed. He worked there until 1956. When he was 68 years of age, he retired. He was, at the same time, custodian for the Maeser Ward Chapel until about 1960 or 1961.

By 1946, most of the children were home only part of the time. Those still home helped with the work at school and the chapel. All our children went to school at the old Maeser school and the Uintah High School. Delila and Deloris went to junior high school in Vernal, but the rest all went to the seventh and eighth grades in the old Maeser school. The new Uintah High School was completed in 1955, the school year that Luella graduated, so she never got to go to the new one. Delila and Deloris, however, graduated from the new school.

Because Harold's birthday was on Valentine's, I usually tried to make his birthday cakes in a heart shape. I remember the year he turned eight. I'd made one of the heart-shaped birthday cakes and I put it on the front porch beside the door. I knocked on the door with a stick and then ran out of sight around the house. Harold went to the door, picked up the cake, which was covered, then walked into the house, where he put it on the table and went back into the other room and started playing with the kids. He didn't even look to see what it was. I came into the house and there the cake was. It hadn't even been looked at. I asked Harold what was in the package. He looked in and found his birthday cake.

I vividly recall an incident that occurred during the summer of 1937, the year Luella was born. Daddy was over at Lapoint, running a farm for Mr. Huber. One day the children and I were walking up to Mother's when a horse broke loose from a hay frame at John McConkie's, where they were putting up hay. It ran out of his place and turned south on the sidewalk, just a little way behind us. We were over by Don McConkie's place, and here was this big work horse coming on the run, the single tree hanging on one tug, swinging all the way from one side of the walk to the other. Thoral, who was two, was right behind Anna, and he was crouching down as frightened as could be. The rest of us were so far ahead, it would have been impossible for us to get to him to save him. Anna, who was carrying a pan of eggs, ran and grabbed hold of Thoral's hand and was trying to get him out of the way. She didn't even break an egg. Just before the horse got to us, Ray McConkie was able to catch him.

We had a fire in about 1935. In those years I heated the wash water outside in a steel barrel. I'd been washing that day and I'd told the children if we could get our work done by four o'clock we'd go to Grandma's for a little while. It would be a walk of a mile and a half round trip and we just wouldn't have time to go any later than that. The children were all helping me with the work and we tried to get ready in time to go. But it came four o'clock and we weren't ready. We decided not to go that day. Just a few minutes later, as I was standing by the kitchen window looking out, I saw that the fire I thought I'd put out under the barrel had been fanned up by the wind and was following the weeds. It was almost to the corner of the coal bin. If we had been gone, it would have taken the whole place. As it was, it didn't have enough start to do much damage and we were able to put it out. It would have taken the whole place. First, there was the coal shed, then the granary, then the shed with the car and wagon and harnesses, the chicken coop on the other side of the path from the house, and the cow barn and corrals and stacks of hay. No doubt it would have taken the house, too, if the wind had changed a little in that direction. So, I felt like that was a warning to me, the fact we weren't able to go. We were all working hard, too. The kids were helping just as hard as they could because we all liked to go to Grandma's.

In 1936, we moved to the property where we now live. The house we moved from belonged to George D. Merkley, and he wanted his son, John Henry Merkley, to take the house and the place where we lived. So, he wanted us to move out. Our house in the new location was already in the process of being built but it was far from finished. So, my husband hurried up the building, and in August, when he'd got the walls up, the roof on, screen on the windows, a screen door in the front room and an old door in the back, he moved us in on the sub-floor. That was August 11. Thoral was a year old on the 24th of that month. We put an old seven foot by nine foot rug in the center of the dining room and set the table on that. When we walked around over the floor, we could see down into the basement through the big wide cracks. It was enough to make anybody dizzy. There was no glass on the windows, just the screen. In October we ordered a furnace and had it installed. We were able to keep warm by that when the wind wasn't blowing, but when it was blowing it got terribly cold. We had to hang quilts at the kitchen doors that led into the hall and dining room, and we had to shut the back door, after which we'd make a fire in the kitchen to keep warm. We had some old linoleum on the kitchen floor. In November, Daddy rode to Salt Lake with Joe Merkley and ordered material to put the floor in, and we got windows and an outside door. In November, he installed the windows, but it was December before we got the floor in. After that, we weren't able to do anymore on the house for quite awhile, but that was enough to keep us comfortable. He gradually built onto the house for about nineteen years before we got it really finished. We've been adding a little now and then ever once in awhile. About the last addition we made was an extra bedroom downstairs; however, the boys slept downstairs before the room was divided off, when the only floor consisted of the rocks put there as a base for cement that would be put down later. Daddy would put in a square of cement and then, when he could afford it, he'd make another square. Eventually, he got all the cement floor done.

Daddy did all of the carpentry work on the house himself. He hired Carl Bodily a half day to show him how to do the wiring and then he finished it himself. Also, Uncle Joe Bodily came one-half day and showed him how to put in the door and window frames. He and the kids did every bit of it. Melvin and Lorenzo were able to help quite a bit by moving lumber and bringing things to him and things like that, but he did the building himself. Thoral, when he was nineteen years old, put the plastic tile on the walls in the bathroom and in the kitchen, or at least he showed us how to do it and helped us. He had helped Grant Hacking put it on their walls and that's how he learned the process. He did a better job than they were doing at the new high school.

When we first moved into the house, we had a plank at floor level over an open staircase, and there happened to be a lot of old sacks of rug rags underneath. I was outside working one time, having Harold to watch Thoral, who was just a baby. Harold let Thoral crawl out on that plank and fall down into the basement. Fortunately, he lit on those old rug rags. It probably knocked a little of his breath out but it didn't injure him. Anna brought him out to me and told me what had happened.

In 1937, Daddy was running a farm for Huber over at Lapoint, and part of the time he'd take the boys to stay with him. He raised a lot of watermelons, sugar cane, a lot of hay. He'd sell the hay over at Lapoint and buy hay for home use so he wouldn't have to haul it all over by team and wagon. One time he brought a load of melons over here and we sold them out for one-half cent a pound. We had people so thick here we had to send them away without any melon. Those melons were gone in no time.

I remember in 1931 when Harold walked in his sleep one time. He slept in a little bed in the room with Daddy and me. In the night I heard Harold get up and run across the floor. When the screen door slammed in the kitchen, I got up to follow him. He was down between the coal shed and the house, at the middle way between two paths, one of which went straight east to the corral and the other around the coal shed on the north side. He was standing there, crying. I guess he'd awakened.

It was that same summer that Harold wanted me to come and wake him up. I was up working around the house, and I heard Harold holler, "Do-do, come wake me up." I thought to myself that it was funny, him wanting me to wake him up, because he must be already awake to talk like that. He called me again before I got in there. I found one of his eyes swollen shut, from a mosquito bite or something like that. I guess he wanted me to come and open it for him.

I don't know why Harold called both me and Lucile "Do-do," unless he was trying to say "sister." He called Anna by her own name and he called Gordon and Daddy "Daddy." One time I was trying to bring it to his mind that he wasn't calling them the right names. He said, "Where's Daddy?" And I said, "Oh, he went down in the field." Harold said, "I mean little Daddy."

One time Melvin dropped a butcher knife on Gordon's head. The boys were interested in making flippers, and Melvin had climbed up in the old box elder tree that stood just north of the corrals with a big butcher knife in his hand so he could cut a flipper crotch out of the tree. When he got through cutting, he said, "Look out," and dropped the knife straight down. It hit Gordon right on top of the head, cutting a lock of hair just as slick as a whistle, then the knife dropped off onto the ground. The gash went clear to the bone. I sometimes wonder how those kids ever grew up. I remember another time Melvin had a piece of wire with sticks fastened at either end. He was holding onto one end and swinging the other around his head. The loose end hit Gordon right by one of his eyes. It was so near the eyes it wasn't funny.

One time Gordon threw a big bucket over a fence and hit Harold in his head. I don't know which one was the most scared, Harold or Gordon. I can't remember whether that happened just before the first baby was born or whether it was the summer before Floyd was born. I do know I wasn't feeling very well. I was lying down at the time, and I think the rest of the family had gone to Sunday School. Harold came in with the blood just streaming down his head and running off his nose. And there stood Gordon just as white as a sheet. Harold said Gordon had hit him in the head with the bucket and that's what had cut it. I could see the kid was scared nearly to death, so I took care of Harold and didn't question Gordon. But it came out anyway. They were straining sand through a screen and Gordon had gone over the fence to get a bucket to strain it into. Gordon had thrown it back over the fence and the ear of it hit Harold on his head.

Another time Anna split her toe with an axe. I was in bed and they brought her in the house. There was a tree stump in front of the house and she'd been trying to chop it with an axe but split her toe instead. It didn't go clear through but she put a great big gash down the top of one of her toes. It was a pretty sore toe.

On another occasion, Gordon was wading in a ditch do wn in the field. He was holding a hoe in the water and somehow he cut his toe quite badly. He came up to the house screaming, "I hurt me. I hurt me." I said, "What did you do?" He said, "Oh, I hurt me."

One time during the summer we were married, Daddy came across the corral one day and leaned his elbow on the fence. He was talking to me and I said, "What's the matter?" He said, "Why?" And I said, "Well, you're shaking all over. What's the matter with you?"

He'd had our horse, Old Doll, hitched up on the harrow as a third horse, and he got tangled up in the lines and was thrown down. She'd just whirled around there, stomping on him. I believe she broke his watch, which was in his bib pocket. Old Doll apparently got frightened. Lorenzo, who was with him, was taking care of the horses while Daddy started toward the house. I just happened to be going down there when he started for the house. I'm sure it broke some of his ribs because he had lumps on them after that.

Then, one day, while we lived at the other place, Daddy was on this same horse, driving the cattle up through the field, when he had trouble with the Jersey bull. That bull had always been so gentle that the kids could even go around him. While Daddy was driving those cattle, that bull took off after the horse he was riding on and stuck his head under her flanks, lifting her up on her front feet and wheelbarrowing her for quite a distance, scooting her right down through the field with Daddy on her back. Her hind feet weren't even touching the ground. If he'd ever tipped the horse over, he'd probably have stomped Daddy to death. I was standing on the kitchen doorstep and saw the whole thing happen. From then on that bull was just as mean as any I ever saw. Daddy traded him for another one and that one got mean. We finally quit keeping a bull. The one we first had was a Jersey bull. Daddy traded him to Walter McCoy for another Jersey bull, then, when that one got mean, he sold him and we just didn't keep anymore bulls.

Daddy had a place over by Doc's Beach, which he lost later on. It was there that Floyd's leg got broken. Daddy was over there the day after Thanksgiving, cleaning out brush and trees. All the boys but Thoral had gone with him. Floyd was just under three, and Harold was playing with him under a tree Lorenzo was cutting down. When it started to fall, Lorenzo hollered, "Run," and Harold tried to pull Floyd out of the way. Harold managed to get out of the way but if Floyd had been just a foot closer, the tree would have crushed him. Daddy had to carry him in his arms part of the way home because his leg was hurting so badly. Lorenzo was driving the wagon. Harold couldn't have been more than eight. Lorenzo was about fourteen. He didn't have a car, so one of the McConkies took us to town to the doctor. I don't remember which McConkie it was. I remember Anna came home ahead of the rest, and she said, "Floyd broke his leg." She always broke news so abruptly. I just nearly fell over. I was getting ready at the time to go to the Daughters of the Pioneers. It was my birthday. After the initial pain, Floyd cried worse with a headache than he did with the broken leg. He had a great big bump on the side of his head. I remember he painted his cast all over with crayons and one side of it was all worn out from where he'd crawled with it all over the floor. Daddy was putting the floor down during this time.

We went to Stake priesthood meeting on Sunday afternoon, leaving Delila and Luella. Delila was about two and one-half or three years old. While we were gone, she was swinging in a swing made of an old tire which hung from the apple tree. She fell out and broke her collar bone.

We first heard in December 1944 that Lorenzo was missing in action when two ladies delivered the telegram. We couldn't believe it. We were in a state of shock. We didn't even cry. We could hardly talk. We just couldn't do anything. These two ladies stood there, looking as bewildered as we felt. After they left, somebody brought Gordon and Harold home from school. It was probably Mr. Lundell. Luella came home from school and told her about it and she went in her room and cried and cried. She was seven years old. All the kids were crying. It was a terrible thing, worse than if we had heard right at first that he'd been killed. Uncertainty is terrible. And we'd heard such terrible things of what they were doing to the ones they captured. We felt almost that death would be sweet compared to the way some of those boys were treated and mutilated. We wrote Melvin about it. When he got the letter, he was in Leyte where Lorenzo had been killed. He got right on the job with the Red Cross. He told us, long before the Government did, that Lorenzo was dead. He wrote to us, telling us what had happened, and he sent Lorenzo's things home to us. Later on, Frances Swett, who was with Lorenzo when he died, told us more about it. He said they were on an LST which was loaded with cars and trucks, all crowded in together as much as possible. The Swett boy said Lorenzo was coming towards him over the trucks, walking or stepping over in some way, when the bomb hit. "I'm sure I saw Lorenzo," he said, but since Lorenzo wasn't wearing his dog tags, they had to report him missing instead of killed because the officials couldn't legally accept any other kind of identification. He said the bodies were all blackened with smoke and powder and that a good many of the men had fallen into the water and were never recovered. The explosion took half the company. I know there were a lot of them. from the pictures in the paper right after that, where it said they were missing in action and they were killed and one thing and another. I'm sure we could never imagine quite how it would be without having been there.

I wrote a letter to Lorenzo one time, telling him we sure appreciated the fact that he wrote us so often. I said, "The only way we have of knowing how you are is when you sign your letter. We never know from that time until we get another letter how things are with you." After that he sent me a Mothers Day card. (Shown on page 36)

I think he took, from what I'd said in that letter about never knowing from one letter to the next how things were with him, that we really understood how it was with him, because they were never safe, you know. They might be killed the very minute a letter left their hands.

He was killed October 25, 1944, but the final announcement said October 26, 1944.

We asked the Swett boy if Lorenzo had ever indicated a belief that something like this might happen to him. He said No. The Swett boy did say they were on deck one time when the bombs were dropping and that he, the Swett boy, had started below deck when Lorenzo caught hold of him. They stood there on deck and watched the action. In the summer of 1974, Melvin told us that when he saw

Lorenzo in Australia during the war that Lorenzo had said he would never make it back if he was sent to Leyte. So, he apparently felt that way but never told anyone but Melvin. There will always be things we will wonder about but will never know.

One of Lorenzo's friends, Grant McMullen, wrote us a letter, telling us about Lorenzo having done something for him and what a good man he was. Daddy had a copy of that letter printed in his history. It meant a lot to us to know he had proved faithful.

That was the year Delila was born, and we'd sent him a family picture taken by Mr. Thorn and a picture of Delila. He never got them. They were sent back to us.

I've thought of it a lot. Those kids never had a chance in life. You look at pictures of the different families and there's Lorenzo all alone. I think he'll have a family, though, because the latter day prophets have said that the families of the unworthy men will be given to the worthy men. If Lorenzo was worthy of a companion, he'll have a family, I'm sure. Think of all the thousands and thousands of those young men that were taken without ever even having a chance in life. It's been happening since the world began. That's the sad part of it. There's so much wickedness in the world it just makes you sick all over.

One Sunday night I asked Anna, who was then about eleven, if she would stay with Floyd and Thoral while I went to Sacrament meeting. She said she would but then she started to cry, just sort of quiet-like, and I noticed she was walking through the house, going out the back door at the fruit room on the northeast corner of the house and in at the kitchen door, then out the other door, crying all the time. I thought she was crying because I had asked her to stay with the little boys, so I told her she didn't have to do it. She still kept crying. We realized, then, that something was wrong, but we didn't have any idea what it was until Gordon said that maybe she'd hurt herself when she fell off the hay frame. We weren't aware she'd had a fall, so we questioned him about it. He said she fell and bumped her head while swinging on the cable of the hay frame, that she bumped her feet on the hay frame and then fell. We couldn't tell whether her head had hit the ground or the hay frame. Earlier, Anna had milked one of the cows. Daddy asked her about it but she couldn't remember that she had done any milking at all. We then asked her about other things that had taken place that evening and she couldn't remember any of them. She just kept going in and out of the house, crying. It was 11:00 o'clock before she quieted down and went to sleep.

The thing Harold was most interested in as a child was beauty, beauty of anything. Everything he saw had beauty in it. We went up the canyon in the wagon one time, and there are those big rocks lying out to the side of the road. He said, "Oh, look at those pretty rocks." They were just big gray rocks, just ordinary rocks. He'd watch me hang the clothes on the line and if there was anything with the least bit of embroidery work, like some of the pillows I had, he'd say, "Oh, pretty." He just noticed things so much and everything he saw was beautiful. He saw beauty in everything around him. I remember he really loved flowers. We should have known then that he'd be a musician or artist or something like that because everything he saw was pretty. He loved beautiful things. He liked pretty pictures. When he was small he liked to play house with Anna and Lucile more than he liked to play with the boys. Lorenzo and Melvin used to tease him about it. One day when he was playing with the girls, I heard him say, "When I get big like Lorenzo and Melvin, I won't play house with you anymore." When he got in his teens, he wanted to find the magazines with those pictures of the girls with big billowy dresses. And it's followed him through life. He's liked the arts in life, and the other kids have been more for other things. Mrs. Perry, a teacher, told me one time that she used to watch the boys in the eighth grade when they went up the stairway, that some of the boys would lumber up there and slouch along like old clodhoppers, but when Harold went up the stairs he just floated up. There was something really cute that happened. All the kids the age of Shirley Temple just loved her shows. Of course, they weren't the only ones. I liked to watch them, too. In one of these shows (I think it was The Little Colonel), this old Negro servant and Shirley Temple were tap-dancing up and down the stairs, holding hands as they did it. There was a program at school one day after that. The mothers were invited. We met in the rooms with the children first and when they had a program. The kids were coming out in the hall and Mrs. Collett touched me and said "Look at Harold." He was going up and down the stairs tap-dancing, trying to imitate Shirley Temple. He was completely oblivious to everything that was going on around him. I've never forgotten that. It was one of the cutest things. I've ever seen. He must have been in the first or second grade then. They were going to have a Shirley Temple show while Harold was up to Grandma Allen's with scarlet fever. He wanted me to go to the show so I could tell it to him. Harold was always interested in something different from the other kids. Some of them even kind of pooh-poohed the things he liked. Gordon used to make fun of him for playing the piano. But it wasn't very long after he got in the military service as a grown man that he wrote some homesick letters, saying in one of them, "If I was home I'd make Harold sit down and play the piano for me." That was a long way for him to come after the way he'd made fun of Harold, calling him sissy and everything. But I sure enjoyed the playing, anyway. One thing I enjoyed about it was that I didn't have to make him practice like most parents did. Lucile said something the other day about Margaret Caldwell saying he didn't practice enough. I think maybe the specifically assigned lessons he didn't practice enough, but goodness knows he played the piano enough. The only time it ever annoyed me was when I couldn't get him away to do his work. The unusual thing about it was that you have to coax most kids to play but it didn't matter if we had company or not and he didn't care if they asked him to play or not; he'd just go ahead and do it. That was the thing he wanted to do most of the time. Lucile was good on the piano, too, but she had to be forced to practice. And it just seemed like heaven when Harold came along and didn't have to be asked to practice. It was wonderful. Well, it takes quite a strain of one to know a child's practicing because you don't like to pay for something they aren't getting. I believe Lucile had more lessons than Harold. I recall that she took them from Mr. Winn, who later became a professor. He said she was doing well. She was going twice as fast as any of his other students.