Chapter 1 A Chapter 1 B Chapter 2. Chapter 3 Chapter 4A Chapter 4b Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8. Chapter 9. Chapter 10
After five years in the house on Wyeth I decided to move. The house was so terrible nothing could be done with is so I looked for a long time for another one. I finally found our house on East Sherman. It had two bedrooms and a bath upstairs and two bedrooms with a bath with a shower downstairs. What heaven that was! One bathroom had always been a problem with so many of us. I had to pay a man to take our old house off my hands. Kenneth had one bedroom downstairs and Dale the other. The rest of us were upstairs. Kenneth and Dale shared the downstairs bathroom. In this house was where we played musical bedrooms. As the children came and went, someone was always ready to move into a bedroom that became vacant, if only for a few months. The new house had a beautiful kitchen. I have such good memories of our family meals in the bright and cheerful dining area. The living room was large. Kenneth frequently brought groups home after a dance. A funny thing happened one night. Dale had taken our car and gone somewhere. It was in the winter and I was so worried about the ice and snow when anyone was driving. Kenneth brought a large group home for cake and ice cream after a dance. They were there for an hour or an hour and a half. I slept in the front bedroom with Roger also there in a single bed. I lay awake worrying and wondering why Dale had never come home. I had checked outside and there was no car. I called the police. I called the hospitals. There was no report of an accident so I just paced the floor and worried. Finally, about 4 a.m., I had sense enough to go down to Dale’s room. There he was, sound asleep. He had run out of gas about two blocks from home so he just left the car. He had come in at the same time as Kenneth and his friends came so I hadn’t heard him. But what a night! Kenneth and Dale took turns with the car each weekend while Dale was a junior and senior in high school and Kenneth was a junior and senior in college. One would use it on Friday night and the other on Saturday. The next weekend they would reverse the days. If one needed the car on a night it was not his, they worked it out. They both took friends with them when they had the car so when they didn’t, they rode with their friends. The rest of us really didn’t need the car those nights. It worked out fine. Roger had gone through the first three grades at Jefferson. With our move he went to Washington. In the fourth grade, he had the worst teacher any of my children ever had. She was a mean old woman and she didn’t like him. His fifth-grade teacher was great. Carolyn was a sophomore at Poky when we moved. It was not a good move for her. There were no girls her age in the ward, a fourth ward again. For two years she attended classes with the girls older than she and they liked her and became her friends. But after they finished mutual, the girls who were one year younger than she was were so nasty to her that she just quit going to mutual. The boys in the ward treated Dale terribly too. He quit mutual and went less to other meetings. Moving to that ward was a bad move. It had never occurred to me that anyone would treat them so badly, or I’d have never moved. I had never been in a ward before where the kids tried to drive other kids from the church. During the years we lived in Pocatello, we took quite a few trips, especially in the summer. Our trips were mostly to the hills, Yellowstone Park, Teton Basin, etc. Sometimes I skipped a house payment to take a trip, but it was always worth it. I wanted to take the children on trips as we had always done when their dad was alive. I figured it was something that had to be done when the children were around, not when I could afford it—which would probably have been never. My children came to love the hills as I do. Ann decided she would like to go to Utah State to school. So in the fall of 1961 she enrolled there in social work. She lived in the dorm with a girl I felt was all wrong for her, but Ann liked her so she stayed with her. Later, she realized that all I had sensed was wrong with the girl really was wrong. But she lived with her for three years first. I kept working at the Green Triangle to keep her in school. One summer she lived with her Aunt Zula and Uncle Nephi at Dayton and worked in a food processing plant at Franklin. She was always very fond of her cousins, Ida Ruth and Lucille, who worked with her. There was some fun, besides just work. In the spring of 1964 Ann graduated from Utah State with a degree in social work. She had loved her years there. The summer of 1963 Carolyn, Ann, Roger and I took an especially good trip. We went up through Glacier National Park and on into Canada to Lake Louise and Banff. We went on east a way through the grain fields. On our trips we always camped out. Roger told me he wasn’t going again if we didn’t get a tent. We camped at a lake at the foot of a glacier one night and nearly froze. We always had scanty equipment; sleeping bags and quilts and we’d cook over a fire. If we’d waited to get better equipment, we’d never have gone. We came home through Montana. It was a great trip. The spring of 1963 dale graduated from Pocatello High School. He had signed up to go in the Navy. The last year he was at home was a bad year for both of us. He just wanted to get away from me. I tried so hard to make things better between us, but they just seemed to get worse. So as soon as he graduated, he left for boot camp at San Diego. I just felt terrible. I truly thought I’d never hear from him or see hm again. But after a couple weeks I got a letter from him. All the time he was in the Navy he wrote frequently and sent money home for me to save for him. That school year of 1962-63 was one of the hardest I ever put in. Dale was a senior at Poky and Carolyn was a junior there. Ann was a junior at Utah State and Kenneth a senior at I.S.U. It was a tough year to make ends meet and I was so worried about Dale that I was just miserable most of the time. Kenneth and the girl with whom he had been dating, Sarah Lloyd, decided to get married. They were married in her ward chapel on July 19, 1963. Sarah had not wanted to be married at the temple because her father couldn’t be with her. They did have a beautiful wedding. They even had an orchestra and a dance at the reception which followed the ceremony. Dale came home from boot camp and was part of the wedding party. We had a family picture taken at this time. I have really treasured that picture. My parents were the only ones of my family who came to the wedding, though some of them lived quite near. The Chases attended in force, as they did everything when we needed them. Kenneth and Sarah had a honeymoon at Lake Tahoe. Kenneth had bought a new car, a Dodge. It was the first car he had ever owned and he was proud of it. He got a job teaching school in Alamo, Nevada and he and Sarah moved there. Kenneth was 25 years old and Sarah 22. Dale loved boot camp and was happy to be in the Navy. He spent three years there and by then he was glad to get out. He never liked the rest of it as well as he did boot camp and wouldn’t reenlist. Getting away from me had made him feel better towards me. When we moved to the house on East Sherman, I changed schools so I could still walk to school. I taught at Roosevelt for two years and Roger went to Washington Elementary. I had a good principal there too, Murray Layne. In fact, in all my years of teaching the principal at New Sweden was the only poor one I had. I made a wonderful young friend at Roosevelt, Annabel Leslie. It was her first year of teaching. She became Carolyn’s friend and they did lots of things together. She was Roger’s friend too. After two years I transferred to Irving Junior High to teach English. I taught, first under Sam Fairchild who was wonderful and then under Ray Holcomb who was at first a good principal, and then because of personal problems a poor one. Mr. Holcomb was always especially good to me. I was very fond of him. My friend, Aileen Johnston, transferred from Roosevelt to Irving with me. When I transferred to Irving, I arranged for Roger to go back to Jefferson for his sixth grade. I did this because he was going to be transferred anyway and I wanted him where he knew some people. Also, I liked having him near me, he could come to my room after school, and I didn’t want him to go to Bonneville where he should have gone. I had my car for my use now, so Roger and I went to school together all this year. After graduating from Utah State in social work, Ann came home and began to look for a job. While looking for a job in her field, she got a temporary job as a waitress in a café. While working there, she met Ferdinand Zdenek, “Zeke.” He was a geologist who was working in the area. He was the neatest fellow but he was not LDS. How Roger and I liked him! Roger was in the seventh grade and Zeke took him on a few trips. Ann went with Zeke for some time. They became engaged and he gave her a beautiful ring. She finally decided not to marry him and returned his ring. He kept in touch with me for a few years and then we lost track of each other. But how I liked him! Ann finally got a job working for the LDS Social Services in Salt Lake. She really liked her job. She worked for them for eight years. My parents were married April 8, 1914 so we had a reception for them on their golden wedding anniversary in Rigby on March 28, 1964. All their children and grandchildren were present. Many friends called to wish them well. It was quite an achievement to reach that fifty hear mark. Over the years that we lived in Pocatello; I saw quite a lot of my parents. I went up to Rigby about twice a month to see them. Roger went with me most of the time. When the girls were at home, they often went too. The children were especially fond of their grandmother. I enjoyed spending time with my parents. If they had been able, they would have liked to help me financially. My parents always quarreled a lot, but I feel they really cared for each other. After spending one year at Alamo, Kenneth and Sarah moved to Babbitt, Nevada where Kenneth taught social studies in the junior high. They had a son David, born April 16, 1965. Carolyn graduated from Pocatello High School in 1964. She enrolled in English Education at ISU that fall. She went there one year. Then she decided to go to the University of Utah. She had a great year there and would have liked to stay and finish her school, but I got sick and had to quit work at the Triangle so I couldn’t afford to keep her at the U of U. Carolyn worked at a rest home and spent part of one summer in Jackson working in a laundry to help with her school expenses. She discovered she didn’t like life in Jackson so she came back to the rest home. While working at the rest home one day, Carolyn fainted. A young girl who worked with her had a child who had epilepsy. She thought Carolyn was having a seizure and that she’d have to get her tongue so she wouldn’t swallow it. When she couldn’t get her mouth open, she picked up a hairbrush and hit her in the mouth breaking out two teeth. Carolyn suffered a lot of pain before her teeth were finally fixed. Carolyn always had good girl friends with whom she had a lot of fun. By 1967 I had not been feeling well for a couple of years. I had pains in y stomach. It just hurt all the time. Finally, one day at school at Irving, I got really sick. I had felt terrible when I got up that morning, but the pain usually lessened if I kept working. I felt nauseated, weak and light-headed in addition to the pain. After a couple of classes, I felt even worse. In fact, I couldn’t sit up any longer. I told my class to keep working while I went in my little store room and lay down because I was so sick. I put my coat on the floor and lay on it. I didn’t think I could feel worse but I did. Two girls kept looking in at me. Finally they went for Mr. Holcomb. He took me to the hospital. I had a perforated ulcer. They kept me in the hospital for two weeks while the tried to stop the bleeding. I had a lot of transfusions. They gave me so much chalky, milky stuff to drink that I have never been able to drink milk since then, nor eat many things made with milk. After two weeks they operated on me and took out a little over half of my stomach. I was still getting lots of transfusions. My doctor finally told me that it wasn’t possible for a person to live if their body wasn’t making blood, but that is what had happened to me. The doctor couldn’t explain it, nor could the internist that was called in. They sent samples of my blood all over the country, but no lab could come up with an explanation. Finally, the decided to discontinue the transfusions and see if my body wouldn’t take over. All this time, for nearly six weeks, I was so weak that to turn my head just a little required more effort than I could make. I remember lying in bed so weak and light-headed that I was scarcely conscious. My neck would be hurting so badly I could hardly stand it because I had been in one position for such a long time, but I didn’t have the strength to turn my head. Just opening my eyes required more strength than I seemed to have. After a few days, my body did begin to take over and make blood again and I began to feel better. After the surgery, I had no problem with my stomach, the pain was gone. It was the problem with my blood which kept me in the hospital for so long. Once again, I had come close to dying. I was in the hospital for six weeks. Roger had a rather bad time while I was in the hospital. He and I were living alone so he was left home alone. He stayed a night or two with friends. Then Dale moved back home so Roger wouldn’t be alone. Dale came back from the Navy in the summer of 1966. He was glad to be back home and back in Pocatello. All my fears that I would never see him again when he went into the Navy were groundless. Dale lived at home for a while then moved into a fraternity house. When I got sick and was away from home for so long, Dale moved back so Roger wouldn’t be alone. Roger was in the ninth grade this year. He had never been anything but a joy and a delight to me. His ninth-grade year he lettered in four sports, football, basketball, wrestling and track. He was becoming a jock. He attended Franklin Junior High all his junior high years. He really had some good teachers and did well academically. While I was in the hospital, both Carolyn and Ann came to Pocatello to see me. They were both living in Salt Lake. Dale enrolled in I.S.U. in the fall of 1967. He was majoring in special education. Dale had started to go with a lovely girl, Ann Montgomery. He made a point of letting me know she wasn’t a Mormon. Some of the things people in the church had done to him plus my emphasis on church had really turned him off on Mormonism. Anyway, I guess that’s what turned him off. I like Annie instantly. I called her Annie to differentiate from my daughter Ann. When I came home from the hospital, Annie had been to the house, cleaned it and put clean sheets on my bed. She was around a lot from then on. She and Dale seemed especially well suited to each other. I was out of school for six more weeks. By then, I was feeling great. The only after effects I ever had from the operation was that I’ve never since been able to drink milk or any other drink with milk in it. I also eat very few milk-based foods. One other thing, I’ve had to be very careful of the amount of any liquid which I drink. I just can’t drink much of anything. Once in a while, if I eat something sweet or if I overeat, I get sick. The sickness just lasts a few hours and always seems to be my fault. I never went back to the Green Triangle to work. I had worked there nine years. The two years I didn’t go to summer school, I worked there full time. I hated every minute I worked there. The work was so hard. Because I was very fast, I did the work of two people. The two summers I worked there, I worked the coffee shop all alone during the lunch hour, that was a long counter, about six booths and about six tables. When I think about it, I don’t know how I did it. The money I made there was a great help. It kept Kenneth on his mission, Ann at Utah State and Carolyn at the University of Utah for one year. My tips were about $5 a might and those tips kept us in gas, odds and ends of groceries, lunch money and Dale and Roger (Carolyn didn’t like school lunches) and spending money for the three children. Their spending money was usually $1 to go to a movie and buy a little treat. They were very careful about money and asked for very little. I especially disliked most of the customers at the Green Triangle. A few of them were ordinary people, but most of them were the lowest kind of people. I hated the drunks. I liked most of the people I worked with. I’m sure forcing myself to work there when I hated it so much was what put me into the hospital. Even now, I shudder to think of that awful place. Carolyn had written to Eric Read for about a year while he was in Vietnam. He was the brother of a girl she had worked with at the rest home. Then they stopped writing for about a year and then resumed. Rick was sent for a second tour of duty to Vietnam. While there he had an R&R in Hawaii and Carolyn went to meet him. She stayed with her cousin Linda. When Carolyn returned, she and Rick were engaged. Roger’s sophomore year at Pocatello High School was good and not so good. He was outstanding in athletics, but he didn’t study much for his classes. He also had some friends who influenced him to start partying a little. He had always been such a good boy that I just couldn’t realize what was happening. I was worried sick about him. I asked Jim, who was then at the University of Southern Illinois if he could get Roger a job back there for the summer. He got him a job working with Dale Millis on an experimental wheat farm. Roger lived with Jim and Ileen. It was a good summer for Roger. Jim had left the farm and went back to school at Utah State. The years that he lived in Hyrum near Logan we had lots of fun times together. While Roger was in the eighth and ninth grades, we took several trips with Jim, Ileen and their family. Roger and Connie always had a good time together. After Jim finished at Utah State, he went to Denver for one year and got an M.A. in Library Science. When he graduated, Roger, my mother and I drove to the graduation. Mother was so proud of Jim. While Ann was at Utah State, Roger and I made many trips to Logan. We continued our trips when Jim and Ileen and family were there. Jim and Ileen liked to have us with them. We felt almost part of their family. That’s why I could ask them to let Roger spend the summer with them and why he wanted to go. This was the summer of 1968. I had begun work on my M.A. in English. After receiving my B.A. in 1960 I continued to take classes, partly because I enjoyed the classes and partly because I wanted a B.A. plus 15 graduate hours to raise myself on the pay scale. After a few years, I began to consider working on an M.A. in English-no Education. I was really terrified to try my first graduate English class. I didn’t think I was smart enough because the English program was so very difficult. But I passed one class, then another and another. My first grade was an “A”. I decided I was already on my way to an M.A. so I applied for acceptance in the Graduate English program and was accepted. Dr. William Shanahan was my advisor. He was fantastic! I had selected a thesis topic, “A Critism of Eighteenth and Twentieth Century Satire: A Johnsonian Approach”, and had begun work on it. After the summer of 1968 was nearly over, we decided to go back to Illinois and pick Roger up to bring him back in time for school. Ann was working in Salt Lake and had a new little car which we drove. Carolyn went with us. We went through Kansas on our way to Carbondale. What a desolate route! When we got to Illinois, we stayed about a week with Jim and Ileen. We really had a good time. Jim and Ileen had some good friends who lived in the same apartment building. They went on vacation and said that I could use their apartment while they were gone. They left the key for me. I went up to their apartment for four to five hours a day for about five days and worked on my thesis. What a wonderful experience! The apartment was air conditioned and no one bothered me. I was there all alone. I got a great deal done. It is the only time in all my studying that I really had ideal conditions. Jim took us to many entertaining places. He was working in the library. We really had a great trip coming home. We were only 300 miles from Hannibal, Missouri. I liked the works of Mark Twain so much that I couldn’t be that close to where he had lived and where he had set some of his books and not go see it. So, we went to Hannibal. We saw Tom Sawyer’s home, Becky’s home, the cave and many other things mentioned in Twain’s books. Of course, it was a tourist town, but it was fun. It was close to Carthage and Nauvoo so we had to go there and see the jail where Joseph Smith was killed, the visitor’s center and other interesting things connected with the early days in the church. We came back by way of the Dakotas and went t the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore. It was great! We came home through Wyoming, through the north entrance of Yellowstone Park. It rained most of the time in the northern part of the park, but that only made it more beautiful. Such mountains! Such trees! We got back in time for Roger and me to start school; Roger as a junior at Poky and me at Irving. Ann went back to her job in Salt Lake. We had stopped in St. Louis where I bought a pretty blue dress to wear to Dale’s and Annie’s wedding. That summer of ’68 before we went to Illinois was really special. Dale and Annie had decided to be married. Annie had graduated from I.S.U. with a degree in social work. She did not want to go home to Caldwell for the summer, so she lived with us. Annie’s mother had died from cancer when Annie was fourteen. All through high school, she had kept house for her dad and two brothers. Her dad remarried while Annie was at college so her home was quite different. She didn’t want to go back there, and we were delighted to have her live with us. It was one of the nicest things that ever happened to me. We had fun together and I learned to love Annie. In many ways, we are much alike. The really wonderful thing was that Annie wanted to be part of our family. She didn’t want to marry Dale and then go away so that they’d seldom see us. She wanted to be around us. It was partly because her own mother was dead, but she learned to love us too. Before we went to Illinois, we sent out wedding invitations. Then Annie went to Caldwell to prepare for their wedding while we went to Illinois. They were married in Annie’s church, the Christian church in Caldwell Sept. 7, 1968. It was a beautiful wedding. Roger was Dale’s best man. Ann, Carolyn and I were there. Kenneth and his family were on their way to the wedding when they had a wreck on the Nevada desert. They were not hurt, but their car had been towed back home. They had a terrible time. Kenneth really felt badly when he couldn’t be at the wedding. Annie had some dear friends, Dessa and Mrs. Finck who helped her with the wedding. We had a lovey rehearsal dinner at the local café. I hosted it. It was very nice. Some of our old friends from Nampa came, also Muriel and Berniece Chase and Berniece’s daughter, Julia. Dale and Annie honeymooned in northern Idaho. They came back to Pocatello to live. Annie got a job working as a social worker at the state hospital in Blackfoot. Dale had a part time job and attended school full time. They had an apartment near us and were around for two more years. Annie was the greatest thing that ever happened to Dale. She really helped and encouraged him so that he was able to finish school. We saw them all the time. Annie liked to be with us. I love her as much as my daughters. In every way she has been a daughter to me. She has always been someone to whom I could talk when I was troubled or worried. How I love her! Rick had come home from Vietnam and he and Carolyn decided to be married. Rick was not LDS but he joined the church and was baptized in Saigon. They were married in the Fourth Ward chapel Feb. 28, 1969. Carolyn was a beautiful bride. Roger and Ann were part of the wedding party. The reception was held in the recreation hall. Bill Green, Verna’s husband, came to town a couple hours before the wedding. He was a help. For some reason, I was ready to fall apart. Carolyn graduated from I.S.U. with a degree in English Education the spring of 1969, after her marriage. Carolyn and Rick went to Tacoma, Wash. Where Rick was stationed at Fort Louis. A year later, May 22, 1970, the were sealed in the Idaho Falls temple. Rick was as wonderful for Carolyn as Annie was for Dale. Together they have grown. They had always reinforced each other. Rick has always been especially good to me. I love him too. Ann, too, decided to get married. She had met Bud Carter in Salt Lake. He was divorce, the father of five children and older than Ann. He was a fine man and was trying hard to care for his children. Ann and Bud were married in Salt Lake, Mar. 15, 1969. They were married at the home of Ann’s bishop. It was a beautiful setting and the wedding was beautiful. So was the bride. Many, many people attended. Once again, I about fell apart. Annie and Carolyn kept me calmed down. We had had three weddings in about seven months. I don’t know how we ever did it all. I really didn’t think I’d survive it all, but I did. I was happy for my newly married children, but it really left me and Roger alone.
No comments:
Post a Comment