Did you ever make mud pies?
Lots of times and as I got older I got pretty good at making them and then using them to dam the ditches and make the irrigation water go where it was needed. Of course by then I was using a shovel instead of a spoon to collect the mud from the sides of the ditch. I never did eat any of them that I can remember nor did I offer them to anyone else to eat, we just played with them in the mud.
Did you ever go skinny-dipping?
Yes, but only once that I can recall. We had been hauling hay from the field to the stack-yard out beyond the barnyard. It was a very hot muggy day. We had worked most of the day and had hay leaves that had stuck to practically every part of our body especially the uncovered parts like our necks and wrists. However many of the leaves had also worked themselves between our clothing and skin and become pasted to our skin with the sweat. I think dad must have been thinking of mom when he suggested we go up to the canal behind the old slaughter-house and get into the canal to clean up before we went to the house. So we went up to the canal and took off all of our clothes and jumped into the 2 feet of water running in the canal. I remember it was a really sandy part of the canal and we would lay down in the water to wash ourselves off and it seemed a bit funny because we came up covered with almost as much sand as we had lost in hay leaves. However the warm water was really refreshing and it felt great just to cool down a little in it. The water was always warm toward the end on the day and cold in the mornings since it came from the river several miles away and would warm up from the sun during the day and cool off during the night but there was always a delay by the time it got to us. The best time for swimming was just after sundown since the warmest water was flowing past the house at that time if the day. It was a pretty fun experience and it was far enough from the house that there wasn’t a real threat of our sisters coming past to see us.
Did you have a special nature place you went to explore?
Yes, our farm. It was a learning place no matter where we went on it. Part of the time I spent up above the canal going past beehives that were there and also lifting up the rocks to look for scorpions and other wild creatures. Part of the time was spent exploring along the canal and watching for deer, rabbits and coyotes. Some of it spent down by the springs and the resultant marsh where we had to be really careful how we crossed it or we could sink into mud to the tops of our shoes. Then the one other spot of the most visits was the pond and rock pit next to it. In fact recently on a trip to Duchesne I wandered down there again and was amazed to find that the rock pit was filled with water as well as the old pond. We use to dump our trash into that pit so now there are lots of pieces of old things in and under the water. It is no longer used that way and a lot of it was covered over when we did use it but I was surprised to find water in it now. Generally with a farm you didn’t need a spot or special nature area because the whole thing was just that in reality. I grew up seeing porcupines, badgers, rabbits, coyotes, deer, elk, bear, bullet or chicken hawks, eagles, and numerous varieties of birds without ever having to leave the 40 or so acres of the farm.
Did your father ever make a special gift for you?
I don’t remember dad ever making a special gift for me but I do remember when he made special gifts with me. There was one Christmas in particular when I wanted to make a pencil holder similar to one I think that I must have made in school out of a piece of wood from a tree limb. So dad helped me go down by the pond and find a cedar tree from which we could cut a limb and then showed me how to cut it into pieces and how too take off the bark and drill the holes and then varnish them. They were fun to make and I spent many other hours learning things like that from dad. I went with him a lot of times to work during the summers and was able to help him repair various things in the schools and from that learned a lot of skills as well. Dad was a good teacher nit only by instruction that was planned but also by spur of the moment teaching and instructing while doing work around the farm. He was also very patient so it was not a problem to him when we made mistakes, he simply showed us again the correct way until we learned it.
Relate your family Father’s Day traditions or tell me more about what kind of person your father was.
Since I don’t really remember much about the traditions of Father’s Day, (which was not made an official holiday until around 1978), I will write about my father. Dad was a very hard working person. He was also very loving and full of humor. A letter from Mom to Dad the day after his passing best explains it.
“Jan 29, 1978
Darling, today as I rode to fast Meeting, a bluebird streaked across the street in front of me – suddenly I realized that this miracle of spring enjoyed by both of us would be seen only by me this year. Then tears started as they o so easily now. So many things have had meaning in the sharing and now I must see and hear alone, but you are in my thoughts and I feel our love so strong that it makes the experiences so dear to my heart. If only you could know how many people have expressed their love for you and your family. Friends are so precious and ours have been just wonderful. Your love of life and fun and that irrepressible sense of humor have made our lives happy. Tonight we miss you terribly but we have been happy thinking and talking about those wonderfully shining memories. You’ll always be so close to us- guiding us, keeping our family close through the biding ties of love and caring that have been your special gift to all of us always. Goodnight dear.”
Tell about some good advice your father gave you.
Dad was a rancher growing up and even though his parents were LDS he picked up the habit of smoking. When mom came along when he was 32 she was able to change his ways and he gave up smoking. Well his advice to me was to never start but if I wanted to he wanted to be there with me. His knowledge of what it was like and that I wouldn’t really want to get a habit like that was enough for me to never make it even a temptation.
Tell a favorite memory of your father.
The favorite memory of my father that comes to mind right now is each morning when he would come down to my room and wake me up. He let me sleep a little longer while he went and brought in the coal for the furnace and then he would tell me to get upp again and with the door open begin clinkering the furnace, in other words affair amount of noise. I would then get up and we would go out and milk the cows and do the rest of the chores together. He never sent me out to do them alone but was always there to help me each morning. At night I usually did them by myself since he was still at work when I would need to do them.
Where did you go to swim and what kind of suits did you wear.
First we wore swimming trunks that were fairly short and tight on the legs. We would have considered what we wear today as boxer shorts back then. I went swimming nearly every afternoon in an irrigation canal that ran above our home. It was about two feet deep in the deepest spots and the most popular thing to do was to float on inner tubes in the canal. We would sometimes just hang on to the tubes and paddle our feet but the canal wasn’t deep enough to do that without slapping your toes on the rocks every so often. We would usually carry the tubes about a half mile to the bridge and then jump from the bridge into the water with the tubes under us. (Don’t think that we were super brave jumping from the bridge because it was only three feet or so above the water and we couldn’t jump from the upstream side since our tubes with us on them wouldn’t fit under the bridge. If we really went to a swimming pool then we would have to travel for a half an hour to the Roosevelt city pool or 45 minutes to the Price city pool. It wasn’t until I was out of high school that we had Starvation lake to swim in just upstream from town.
How did you learn to swim?
By going with Beverly Caldwell, a professional lifeguard, nearly everyday for the summer after graduation. We went to Starvation reservoir , Roosevelt and Price city pools with her coaching my every move until I learned to swim well enough to earn my Swimming and Lifesaving merit badges for scouting.
Relate your happiest memory of your youth.
Wow, how do you take so many happy memories and try to chose just one. I suppose that if I did try I would probably end up with a conglomeration of several as one.
There was one memory that might not be considered as extremely happy but a good memory none-the-less. It was one time when Lynn and I went to help Uncle Mont drive the sheep from the Indian Canyon ranch to town. I was on a horse the entire day and knew it had been a lot longer than I was used to doing. It was a lot of fun though and something that the older brothers had a lot of chances to do before I was old enough to do it. I think it was actually the last year that Mont ever moved the sheep down the canyon with horses.
