1801

An early memory I have is mother taking me on a dark night walk somewhere up around the Norge Cleaner’s neighborhood and 17th South.  We stopped in a shop somewhere and brought home some coloring books.  I remember walking past some neon lights - on 17th South, I suppose.  Perhaps some can feel some of what I do about her as I think on this.  My best guess is I was about 4.  Sue and me got to color when we got home.  I am not certain whether Sue made the trip though, kinda seems she wasn’t there…. I always went to Relief Society on Wednesday mornings.  One morning, on the way home, mom bought me some Starburst candy.  Wow, it had a unique flavor.  And colorful wrappers.  It wasn’t long after that, Starburst disappeared from retail shelves and I forgot the name of the candy but not the flavor.  Many years later, they started selling it again and I remembered and identified it.  One morning, we came home from Relief Society and mom got to doing the dishes which was what she typically did then.  I sometimes tried to get her to play with me but she generally had to do dishes or some such thing.  I was content to play around her.  I would involve her or at least report to her.  So anyway, I had mail to deliver.  I was a mail plane pilot.  I took my blue bag and got into the swing that swung East and West from the near catalpa alongside the North edge of the patio and made my flight, and then I let her know how it went and what happened. One day, they left me at 831 with Therma for her to tend me.  It was just the two of us for a day.  Here is what we did:  I rode the little black and white wooden horse with red wheels around the kitchen with an ice cream cone in my mouth while she did laundry in the basement.   Whenever I needed a refill, I would call her and she would come up and get me another. One night, when I was 3 or 4, a woman came and sat and talked with mom in our living room after we had all gone to bed.  I got up and peeked through the curtain.  Just felt I should report it.  I asked her about it and who it was years later but she couldn’t recall.  How convenient. For Christmas one year, someone gave me a white Bugatti model made of that tough, kind of flexible plastic.  I also remember my fat red Indy car that had a R-R-R-R motor inside that sounded when the wheels turned.  I still have the box, in good condition, since it was used for years later to hold Christmas lights, that originally held the big black siren that was bolted to my tricycle handlebars.  I was still in diapers when I got that.  It was before I got my blue pedal car, which was when I was 5.  So I must have been 3 or 4.  No, I guess not 4.  Or maybe I wasn’t in diapers.  But anyway, I was riding the trike the following Summer on the back grass and I had ants in my pants. Sometimes we were put in a playpen on the back grass.  I barely remember that, but a similar memory was the exciting time when dad got the car top carrier off the South side of the garage and set it where the playpen had been, and we played raft in it.  It was also exciting when we painted the interior - the front and living rooms.  Dad had the ladder going up from the lawn into a front (NorthWest) window, and the associated plank extended through the front room to the living room, to stand on, I suppose, to paint the ceiling.  One time we painted the basement, and one time, we painted the closet blue.  One of those times, I painted Joe’s hat while he was stooped in front of me.  I just laid my brush right on his head and gave him a good stroke.  It was funny, as I recall.  But he might tell you it was someone else, I don’t know for sure.  I mean, it may have been him painting me.  But  I think not. Joe was cool.  He always got you the coolest Christmas presents.  He would take you to Grand Central and you could follow him while he walked briskly through  the store.  He sometimes took me to the county detention center.  It was abandoned.  It had bars and it had beds inside and a crumbling basketball court.  He took me there once at night.  Or maybe just told me he would.  I don’t remember.  I just remember it when I could see, which was in daylight.  We went there once and someone told me they saw a sign in one of the rooms that said, Don’t Let Him Out.  It was our scary place. When Ben came home from his mission, we started on a family regimen.  We like all got up at 6 am and had breakfast and we would all of us jog down to the county complex and back.  Ben fell once and hurt himself.  When we had supper in the evening (not as part of this regimen but always), all us boys stood behind our chairs while mom bustled with the last preparations, then we would kneel for family prayer by our chairs and then we sat in them and had the blessing on the food.  Then you had to stay in your chair for about an hour or more unless you got excused to go to the bathroom or something, and then you came back and sat until dad was good and fed and enough stories had been told and after some number of cycles of asking to be ultimately excused from the table, you would finally get a yes and go back out to play (Summer or Winter).  But in the meantime, lots of jolly talking went on, and sometimes I would slip under the table while they were doing that and tie all the pairs of shoes together - all those big black oxfords, and you couldn’t really tell them apart and which was who - they all looked the same. When the family dwindled to 3 kids, a change occurred at Christmas.  Joe started a tradition of blue lights and blue balls exclusively on the tree.  It was nice.  We would watch the patterns of needle shadows changing on the ceiling. I could easily sit here and write all my memories down, from 1960 till now.  I feel funny doing just what I have done so far because it already seems kind of a glut.   Perhaps I will just write a book, just for the sake of remembering it all myself.  I enjoy writing down every last little dittle and dream I ever knew. Remember the blue and white striped wool mittens we wore while playing fox and geese?  And whoever didn’t wear those wore the red nylon ones with the pull string.  The blue and white ones spent the most time at the kitchen heat register drying out.

I will tell you about Lagoon.  Lagoon had a large, large outdoor swimming pool with high diving boards and such like.  Therefore, dad frequented it with his family in tow.  He would gather us around his bed Saturday morning and we as a family would vote whether to go to Lagoon.  I was always the dissenting vote and we always went to Lagoon.  We would walk past all the rides that the regular people got to ride (you know, regular people who had sugar in their peanut butter and a TV in their house) and come to the First Aid station (at the entrance to the pool) with its fat red cross painted on the door.  This was the scariest part because I had once seen them carry a body on a stretcher through that door, and coming past it always struck a sickening fear in me.  But it was fun to get a ticket and then go through the steel rails and turnstile.  Then you came into the locker room.  If it was the men’s, there was a big tiled wall and pit area where you could just go to the edge and pee into the tile and it would run down drains in the floor.  It was built for that.  Then there was the showers where dad showed you how to rinse the chlorine out of your trunks after swimming and then wring them out good.  In those days and prior, “modesty” was the term used and it meant keeping yourself covered in the presence of members of the opposite sex but otherwise don’t bother at all, regardless of age or station or familiarity.  Most mothers did not anticipate small boys having memories last into adolescence, so they freely brought their small sons into the women’s locker room, where as I have set you to expect, there were unconcerned and nude women without the private booths of today.  So then you went out and you could start out by warming up in the kiddie pool near the entrance fence and then venture into the shallow end of the huge pool from there, which had its own slide.  Built right in the water (you climbed the ladder from inside the pool, not the deck), the big slide was between the shallow and the deeper parts.  Rather than buoys, a white wooden fence marked the border of the diving pool, separating it from the deep swimming end which had a floating merry-go-round like they have on bearings in the parks and whose fence bordered the Lagoon pond.  You could watch the sea monster rise out of the water from the deck of this end of the pool when the river boat came by in the pond.  I at least never learned to swim really, despite the many trips to this pool.  I would wear a life jacket and I would dog paddle but didn’t learn to swim well until high school gym class.  South High had the biggest, best pool, and swimming was one thing I learned in high school.  Up from the deep part of the pool was a sloping lawn and snack bar.  Regular people got hot dogs from the snack bar and would eat them and sun bathe on the grass like a beach.  This is where mom would slather us with Coppertone.  Dad would launch us in the pool - we would put our foot into his hands and straighten up and he would launch us.  I also liked diving for things and going down the big slide.  The pool was much bigger then that it would have been now.  One year, there was a girl lifeguard there who liked to sing along with her radio while she sat on the diving pool tower.  She would tilt her chin up and sing to the sky and the entire pool of patrons, “DANCE WITH MEEEEEEEE, I WANT TO BE YOUR PARTNER, CANN’T YOU SEEEEEEE - THE MUSIC IS JUST STARTING…..”

Sometimes, especially if it was a stake Lagoon day, we would get to do the rides and everything and stay all day.  At the pond, they had a ton of carp under the rocket ride that would pile themselves up so thick, trying to get food that you would throw, they would some of them actually be up out of the water on top of the others.  Hundreds of little wide-open mouths straining for a piece of bread.  Joel would throw some bread, then he would fake and they would respond the same.  Then he would spit and (like our dog Dee Dee) they would swallow it up with all the enthusiasm they had for the bread.

Joel was cool and he knew about stuff.  He would go to the arcade and do all the arcade stuff.  He learned how to race the Indy car without crashing once, full throttle all the way.

I loved Chicken Bones.  If you don’t know what they are, they are candy.

There was a circus wagon with a lion in its cage who would say how hungry he was.  You could put your paper cup into his mouth and he would suck it up.  He always had a drool of red liquid of various tint.

When I was too small to know anything, mom wanted to take me on the hammer one night after dark.  I don’t really know whether it was called the hammer but it was the plane nose and cockpit that rotated in a vertical plane on the end of a boom and simultaneously spun about an axis tangential to the circular path of the vertical plane.  Then the plane of the circle would tilt to one side as well, if I recall.  Meanwhile, there was another unit directly behind, facing the other way and spinning similarly, and a pair of cockpits opposite, at the other end of the boom, which was pinned in its middle.  I did not want to go.  So she told me we would go on the plane to Ogden and see Aunt Louise and Therma.  This persuaded me to board.  We went up and we went upside down and around and around and when we landed, I was surprised to find we were in the same spot we started from.  I was thus introduced to the thing of adults saying stuff that really meant something else, and while I am at it, adults asking lots of obvious and pointless questions, such as Where did you get your pretty red hair?!  I do not mean to infer my mother was of that ilk, but she did pull that one on me.

Another time, when I was a little older but not by much, they persuaded me against my better judgement to go on the big roller coaster.  I was in too much shock during the ride to notice ever bonking myself, but when I returned to solid asphalt, they gathered around me to see the shiner I got.

Speaking of dark of night (though it usually happened in daylight), I once stood engrossed in watching one of the rides after dark with my family.  But after a while, I noticed they had moved on without me.  I panicked but before long turned around to see them amusing themselves by watching me from behind on a distant bench. I once spent some time in the security office playing with a little batman figure or something like that while the professionals tracked down my folks and negotiated a reunion.  I did not like getting lost at Lagoon.  That is why I always voted against going there.  Well, maybe not always.

Picnics were good.  Sometimes, if we were there with a group, like the stake or Univac, we would have a picnic and a drawing and a program in a pavilion.  You got to get pop at those.  Mostly though, I remember going into the hills above Farmington after a swim and eating Carl Buddig beef (or similar) on white bread with dad, and then coming down past the long line of antique cars parked out in the front yard of that one house.

My favorite ride was the speedway.  As we drove home on I-15, I would imagine myself getting the opportunity to drive on a little lane along side the freeway in one of the speedway cars.

I recall 3 pieces of advice on marriage from dad:  1) Take her swimming before you propose 2) One of these days you will wake up married 3) You are unable to imagine now how wonderful it will be when you have children of your own.

I took him up and found out he was right on the last two.  I lucked out in spite of lack of opportunity to observe the first.

My love for my wife and 2 girls is filling me like the fizz in a bottle of pop.

My love for the children seems powered by my wife.  All the cuteness is because she is there to share and understand it.  All of my laughter is plugged into Sharon.  If you showed me all the beauty and she wasn’t there, I would just die.  I tell her, Sharon, ya make the children cute.

I learned not long before dad died that he had actually intended to get a TV for us but he was going to keep it outside in a weather-proof entertainment center to keep us out of the house. For the same reason, he did not allow comic books in the house. Pretty much all the comic books I ever read, I read out under a tree or in the garage or the clubhouse I built for George (the dog) and me. Dad wanted us outside where kids belong. So he never got around to building the entertainment center and we always thought he just didn’t believe in TV. Which he didn’t, but that’s not why he didn’t get one. To my knowledge, dad watched a TV show once in his life - when Joel insisted we watch Where the Red Fern Grows as a family. He also went to the doctor once - when he cracked his ribs while pulling one of us (I think it was Sue) in our giant swing he built, which he “pushed” by pulling a rope tied to it and a pulley. He slipped once, and fell on his ribs on a rock in the irrigation ditch. I didn’t have a TV at my house, but I had an open irrigation ditch running the full length of our property. It’s gurgling would wake me up Summer mornings for the day’s play. This was especially exciting when I knew it was my birthday in August.  Sometimes, I would be laying in bed and I would hear the water coming and I (or my mom) would shout, “ditch is running!” as I jumped into my clothes (which consisted of a pair of shorts) and ran out to see the water coming before it could reach the end and begin to fill up.  Now that I’m older, I cannot always go carelessly running barefoot on any terrain but I sure did then.  Part of it is being heavier now and part of the reason is you have to wear shoes to work every day so your feet soften up and lose that thick padding.

My boyhood memories out in the yard have several categories.  One is rain, one is snow, one is bright morning fresh air sunshine with birds singing in the trees above, one is dead-still quiet dusty amber afternoon sunshine and far away images, perhaps with a distant single-engine plane droning far, far overhead being the only sound.  One is dusk in Summer when there are a number of possibilities -  Neighbors eating hamburgers with ketchup, while we chopped wood from the enormous pile from dad’s tree-topping, us climbing on heavy street dept equipment and jumping through the trenches they made, older boys riding their bikes to places so far I can only imagine what they are like, young adults coming home on their Triumph or Honda 750-4, or their new Camaro and having pizza for dinner, and elderly couples with their front door open, screen door shut, and Lawrence Welk blaring out onto the warm sidewalk.  And us playing war or wrestling or playing football.  Or Sue and I listening to the too-cool transistor radio out on the front grass that she got me for my birthday.  Radio Mystery Theater!  - HMMMM,  hmmmm, Hwaaaaaaaaah! - FRMMM-frmmm!  Or Roberta Flack singing, “Strummin’ my Face with his fingers….”

One of my most favorite dusk things was actually mostly a fantasy - riding my bike in the street.  I was not allowed to ride my bike in the street, and I was not allowed to ride it after sundown, but doing those two things at once was one of the funnest things I ever did or imagined.

…about belonging…

We were pouring concrete to build a sidewalk path through the rear fence at the Wilson Ward parking lot. Big gob of it landed right on my eyeball somehow.  Dad immediately jumped the walkway, chased me into the street (I guess I must have ran there), grabbed me firmly and licked that stuff right out of my eye with his tongue.  All better.

I kept asking Dad what his favorite car was and kept forgetting and then I couldn’t ask any more.  But John came through and helped me recall what he owned, liked and disliked.John said, ”On the subject of cars, dad I am quite sure told me he owned a Model A Ford for a short time. And then he had a 1933 Chevrolet which was - I’m quoting - a lemon. And after that he got the ‘37 Chevrolet. He was fond especially of the 1932 Chevrolet. He seemed to think that was about the most beautiful car ever made. But I don’t recall that he ever owned one. The thing that spoiled the ‘33 was they put - filled - in the sideline of the fenders so they had a downward flat surface on the flank, and that was not classic in his mind. The thing that he loved the ‘32 Chev for was it’s vertical radiator - flat. That made it a beautiful car. The ‘34 Ford he did not like because they sloped the radiator and filled in the sides of the front fenders and just (you know) modernized it too much. Those are my best recollections.”According to my own memory, this is accurate.  So dad owned 6 cars: Ford Model A, 33 Chev, 37 Chev, 51 Plymouth, 62 Buick, 70 Scout.John also noted that the plymouth was slower and lacked a good weight distribution compared to the 37 chev and was generally an “embarrassment.” Dad bought it in Idaho after riding the bus up there and drove it home. A pretty, shiny green car, the only new one he ever bought. On vacation to lake mead, a front tire blew and the car tracked nicely straight because they had designed the rims not to let go of the bead in a blow. But other than that, John and Dad considered it a lemon in terms of design and longevity. John said the 37 chev might as well have been a jeep the way dad could get it to go anywhere he wanted off-road but the plym would just spin its wheels in the gravel. The chev was kinda low-geared too.The buick had a 401 cu in Wildcat with 445 ft lb engine torque.  Dad used it to handle trees.  It could also flatten taxi cabs. I saw only about 3 others like it in my life. It was rare, powerful and most of all, solid. Even when scratched and dented, it refused to rust, and if it ran into anything, the thing absorbed all the energy, not the Buick. Dad took a nap in it every day at lunch break, whether at work or on a trip.  When he couldn’t replace a worn tie-rod, he deliberately avoided passing it on to the many enthusiasts who had expressed keen interest in it and sent it to the junkyard in an effort to prevent it from being driven unsafely.  Dad did not like the curved glass and full body styling of the 50’s.  He preferred the straight look of the early to mid 60’s, most especially the straight glass on the sides and rear that his Buick had.  I’m with him on that - love that flat glass.  Make our grilles and windshields flat and vertical, please.  Dad hated the curved side glass of the 70’s.  Most of all, he hated the view-distorting curves in the windshields of the late 50’s, such as the famous ‘57 Chevy had.  I find it ironic that while his ‘70 Scout and my ‘58 Travelall share the same door handles and hubcaps and are generally the same for construction methods and noise, the Scout had a flat windshield but my old ‘58 has curved windshield, rear sides, and rear lid.  The Scout was beautiful with its leaf spring suspension front and rear, the complete absence of any kind of carpet or lining inside, and its flat glass all the way around.  And the best-built hood and tailgate ever.  There were things about it that sort of reminded me of a ’30’s car.

Thanksgiving season on my grandmother’s small farm brought many sights, sounds and smells to a little city kid like me. There were the corn kernels, tens of thousands of them it seemed to me, that had been shucked off the ears to dry, covering white tablecloths spread out out on every possible horizontal surface throughout the entire house. Most of the rooms in the house weren’t heated, making them ideal for storing the many varieties of squash underneath every table and in every corner. There was the sweet, tangy smell of bushels of apples from the orchard in the cellar where they would be cool enough to keep, but warm enough not to freeze. They were joined there by the bottles of peaches and apricots and raspberries that had been preserved by long days of peeling, slicing, pitting and boiling in the steamy kitchen over the coal burning stove. There was the bellowing of the cows as soon as the sun went down in the late afternoon, making the call for my uncle to trudge down the snowpacked footpath to the barn in the gray before total darkness, past the mountain of manure piled a lot higher than i was tall, to sit freezing by the light of a lantern as the steaming streams of hot milk hissed into the cold metal buckets and cans, with each pull and squeeze of his practiced hands.

I didn’t realize then how harvesting and storing for winter really was a time of thanksgiving. So many things could go wrong with any one of the crops or with the cows and calves. Early spring freezes often left the orchards bare of fruit. So when all was safely gathered in, it represented a great blessing that had come by way of much work and worry through the year. Now i’m a grandpa, and my grandkids don’t see any corn or cows or fruit trees at my place. So how can i give them a sense of thanksgiving? What is it that they should both gather in and be grateful to have that will surround them with safety?

We often think of the experiences of our pilgrim forefathers at thanksgiving time. They were unwelcome in their own homeland because they believed in God, but in a different way than the established religion of their time. They were religious people who were persecuted by religious people, with some politics thrown in as well. The same thing happened earlier in that century with the growth of the Protestant Reformation.

In England, William Tyndale was driven from his own country by his own church, because of his desire to translate and print the Bible in the English language. Ultimately, he succeeded in doing so, but at the cost of his own life, as he was choked and burned at the stake for heresy.

Today, I would want my grandkids to give thanks for the miracle of having the words of the Bible among us, which we have only because of the heroic sacrifice of Tyndale and others like him, inspired by God. Over 75% of the sacred words and phrases that you find in the King James bible that you carry today can be traced back to the work of William Tyndale. I cannot adequately express my admiration for his courage, sacrifice, scholarship, and principles in preserving and conveying to us this great gift.

As great as the contribution of Tyndale and other reformers is, it is secondary, however, to the actual words of the prophets and of Jesus Christ contained in the Bible and the Book of Mormon. I would hope and pray that my grandkids would gather insight and strength daily from these precious scriptural gifts, enabling them to become followers of Jesus Christ, protected by his love and by their covenants with him.

If they failed to do so, they would be as one who was given a precious and incomparable gift, but refused or ignored it, like the people of whom the ancient prophet Zenock spoke:

Thou art angry, O Lord, with this people, because they will not understand thy mercies which thou hast bestowed upon them because of thy Son. (Alma 33:16)

 Rather than this, I would so much more earnestly desire that my grandkids would value and cherish these spiritual gifts that lead to Christ, and be as Paul wrote to the Colossians (chapter 2):

6 As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him:

7 Rooted and built up in him, and stablished in the faith, as ye have been taught, abounding therein with thanksgiving.

8 Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.

May this be the blessing granted to all of us in this season of thanks, in preparation for the season of Christmas.