Mar 11, 2010

What was the first movie you ever saw and who starred in it?

I think it must have been Old Yeller. “Directed by Robert Stevenson. With Dorothy McGuire, Fess Parker, Jeff York. A boy brings a yellow dog home. The dog loves the family as much as they love it.” OK so I cheated and googled the cast.How can I be expected to remember who starred in the movie I was crying to hard to remember anything but the loss of the dog. Later I saw “Where the Red fern Grows”. Another very sad dog story and I have been marred all my life because of it. I still can’t watch those movies. I also remember “Bambi”, “PollyAnna” and other tear jerkers. I needed to have seen some funny movies I guess but we were lucky to even have a movie theater in town and real lucky to get to go to a movie.

Mar 10, 2010

What radio programs or stations were your favorites?

Finally an easy question. I can only choose from one because that was the only station we could get in Duchesne or the Uintah basin for many years. It was KOMA out of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Apparently the signal “skip” from back there was just perfect for the Uintah Basin. The main thing that I remember listening to also was the Dodgers baseball games. KOMA for some reason was the station that transmitted all of their games across the nation. I can’t remember listening to much else even though I most likely did since I eventually had a collection of 3 or 4 old radios that sat up in our attic for years. I was going to have a room of antiques but eventually was forced to get rid of them so the only one I got to keep was the big Zenith radio that we used in the barn to play music while we milked the cows and washed the milking tools. We even tuned into Greenwich time clock with it and listened to the tick tock of the station which is all it did except on the minute when it would say the time. Now that was fun only because of the novelty of being able to do it due to the age and bandwidth selectors of that radio and the fact that the signal from there must have also had the perfect skip.

Mar 09, 2010

Tell of a difficult or term paper assignment.

What, I can’t remember anything like that, I put all of those bad memories to rest a long time ago. Here again I believe the poor author of these questions must have had a pretty bad experience in school or watched a lot of other sweating out assignment given by her in class. I really do not remember the essays even though I do know that I had plenty of them to write and was never very good at it, especially the English part of it as you can tell evidenced by my writing skills here. In fact I hope you teachers in my family will please give e a little slack and if I ever am tempted to publish these stories I only ask that one of you do the corrections before it goes to press. (Either that or talk me out of it.)

Answering these questions has been like trying to write a term paper so maybe it is coming back to haunt me for not learning how to do it way back then.

Mar 08, 2010

When on car trips, did you play car games?

Wow I really don’t remember anything other than asking or listening to someone else ask “Are we there yet?” or “How much longer?” I am sure we must have done some games but the thing I really remember best is being squashed into the car. With 7 children plus mom and dad there wasn’t much room to move so most of the time I sat there as the second youngest squashed between two other siblings. Mom and dad in this day and age would have had to by a bus to put in enough car or booster seats. They would also have had to install a lot more seat belts, Oh wait, there were no seat belts, period, until I was in High school.

Mar 07, 2010

What was the naughtiest or meanest thing you remember doing in school? Were there consequences?

Wow the author of these questions must have had a pretty bad childhood since so many of the questions are asking about negative things dealing usually with behavior. Maybe the author is really a retired school teacher as well. The only naughty thing that I probably did in school was pull the girl’s hair or something like that. I really couldn’t be bad since I knew that my mother was an employee of the school and was not very far away at any given moment. While I was in grade school she was a teacher there and when in High school she was the librarian and taught occasional classes. Dad was also an employee of the school district for most of my school days even though he wasn’t always around the ones in Duchesne he knew all of the faculty at each of the schools so I really didn’t want to draw negative attention there either. For the most part though I was probably never in trouble because I had been taught to respect the teachers and faculty and to be good. The biggest reason however was most likely because I was the smallest kid, other than Ralph Mecham, and I had received my only beating in 6^th grade and didn’t care to repeat it.

Mar 06, 2010

Tell about how you spent your Sundays.

Sunday had a little more standard routine. We got up and milked the cows before going n and taking a shower and going to Priesthood meeting at 9 AM. We would then stay until 10 and go to Sunday school until about noon as I recall. We would go home for the afternoon and basically take a nap and then get up around 5 pm and milk the cows before going in and cleaning up, getting dressed and going to Sacrament meeting at 7 PM until 8:30 PM or so. We would then go home and have supper, usually the bread and milk I have talked about earlier or onions and salt with the bread and milk. Sometimes I would go with dad on his High Council assignments to the various small wards in the Stake so getting home would be a little later and leaving for Sacrament meeting, the few times that I went at night, a little earlier. Once in a while we would also have Family home Evening after getting home from Sacrament meeting. Most of our FHE’s were on Monday nights.

Mar 05, 2010

Tell about how you spent your Saturdays during the school year.

Most of the time I sent Saturdays either doing scouting, doing the wash with mom, or doing extra chores like cleaning out the barn. I really don’t remember a whole lot about Saturdays other than getting up a little later, 7 instead of 6, to go out and milk the cows. Then after breakfast we usually had to take our dirty clothes up to the back porch where we helped mom do the wash and hang out the clothes on the outside clothesline in the warmer months and inside drying racks in the colder months. Then on some Saturdays I would go out to the barn and wash out the gutter where the cows always had to go while we were milking them. If it wasn’t cleaned out every week then it became pretty rank and you couldn’t sit next to it while milking the cows. (A slight design problem on the cows I believe.) Of course it was also that way on goats also even though goats didn’t get quite as much relief when their load was dropped since it was a lot smaller that what a cow could produce. I never had to milk the goats actually since we had sold them before I got very old but I do remember dad milking them quite often as I watched. In the spring some of the Saturdays were spent plowing and planting the garden. Needless to say there was always something to do around the farm and occasionally I would get to go hunting rabbits with my friend and our .22 rifles. I do remember a couple of times that we would go arrowhead hunting as well with Mrs. Rasmussen, our neighbor, since she really was good at knowing where to go. We also spent a couple Saturdays with her finding petrified wood as well. So it wasn’t always work just most always.

Mar 04, 2010

Did you ever get in trouble for saying a bad word?

It only happened maybe once or twice and after that it was easier to withhold the word than it was to get the soap out of my mouth. Mom did strictly believe in using soap to wash out ones mouth for saying a bad word and I didn’t like the taste of it at all. I still puzzle to this day why Clair had a swearing problem but he must have been able to evade the soap treatment or just liked the taste. He even was told by dad that if he would stop then dad, a hardened rancher, would also stop. None of us knew about that challenge until we were listening to Clair as he spoke at dad’s funeral. He said then “I wish I would have stopped then.” Clair, as far as I know has not sworn for many years. So, yes, I must have said a bad word even though I can’t remember what the word was, I can remember the taste of soap. Even now if a word happens to slip just as it did when the truck pulled in front of me when I was going 50 miles an hour straight to ward where he was pulling, I feel bad and wish that I could take it back.

Mar 03, 2010

Did you ever pretend to be sick to stay home from school.

You kidding? I wanted to be to school, at least in the later years because I could get to see and talk to Marie. Now when I was in elementary there might have been a time or two even though the only time I remember being sick to stay home from anything was for Stake Conference when the afternoon session was being held in Altamont and I had already been to the morning session in Duchesne (Yes, we had two full two hour sessions back then on Sunday, one at 10 AM and one at 2 PM) and just didn’t want to spend the rest of the day in church, let alone travel for a half hour to get there and a half hour to get back.

I did have one day that I wished that I had stayed home from school however. Mom had been riding me about how my hair was getting to long and was starting to curl up on my collar. I had a pretty full head of hair back then and it was always pretty straight until it got to the collar and then it would start to curl. So after mom left for school at 8 and the bus wouldn’t get there until 8:30 I figured I had plenty of time to cut my hair. I worked on it frantically but basically I really couldn’t bend my arm around and get it going the right direction to get the back of it like I needed to do. Well needless to say the bus came and I was still trying to cut my hair but I didn’t want to try and run to school that morning on foot for the 2 and ½ miles so I dropped everything and had Leesa tell our bus driver Jinks Ivie to wait a couple of minutes. He still just about gave up but I made the bus, got to school and got teased for my haircut the rest of the day. I gladly let Dad fix it up that night even though I knew he would cut it a lot shorter than I had wanted when I started that morning.

Mar 02, 2010

Tell about a school principal you remember.

I think the author of these questions may have asked this one since you remember principal’s best by the number of times that you are sent to their office or the number of times they interact with you for positive reasons. I had to go back to my yearbooks to even figure out who my principals were and had only remembered one and he was principal during my senior year and was married to the lady who taught me to swim so I remembered him because of the church and scouting association as much as the school association. My principals were in 7^th and 8^th grades: Mr. Rogers, 9^th grade: Mr. Browning, 10^th and 11^th grades: Mr. Griffith and in 12^th Grade: Mr. Caldwell. I remember Mr. Roger’s a little, Mr. Browning not at all, Mr. Griffith a little now that I look at his picture, and Mr. Caldwell very well. We must have been pretty hard on principals since they only lasted one or two years. Duchesne was a small school that was used for resume reasons for most of those men. Mr. Caldwell on the other hand was there for several years I think because he became a part of the community and wanted to stay there and eventually also became the Superintendent of the Duchesne County School District. I was also good friends with them probably because of their son that was only a year older than I as well and we went to the same ward all the time with their family.