This post contains the story of Dorothy Batt Cleverly's early life. During the year before her unexpected death early in the morning of Monday, November 1, 1982, she worked with unusual interest and diligence on the history of her early life. She had completed the history up until the birth of her second son in January 1937. The numerous diaries begin at about that same time and document with uncommon detail the remainder of her life.
This story of her life, from her birth in September 1915 until January 1937, was first published in the Cleverly Newsletter in September 1985 as a tribute to her on the seventieth anniversary of her birth. The history was in manuscript from at the time of her death, with arrows drawn to show where she wanted some paragraphs rearranged and with miscellaneous memories written at the end with the notation that they were to be added elsewhere in the document. I had the privilege of editing this history into its present form for publication to the family. It later appeared as the first chapter of Dorothy’s Diary: The Early Utah Years (1998) and as the thirteenth chapter of Batt & Lee Ancestors (2005).The picture of Dorothy was taken in Laketown, Utah, circa 1924 (when she would have been eight or nine years old).
I entered this world at 7:30 a.m. on a sunny, nice day in the fall of 1915. It was Monday, September 29, and my parents—Hazel Jane Lee and William B Batt—had been anxiously awaiting the arrival of their first child. I was helped into this world by Dr. Hayward and my father’s sister, Pearl Batt Hulse, a graduate nurse, at the old home of my grandparents—Charles and Eliza Brazier Batt—on the corner of Fifth East and Fourth North in Logan, Cache County, Utah. I weighed in at nine pounds.
My parents were very happy at both my safe arrival and my timing. My father, who had graduated that spring from the Utah Agricultural College in Logan, had to be in Driggs, Idaho, for his first teaching assignment as coach of the high school there. My parents were all packed and ready to leave, which was why they were staying at my grandparents’ home.
Dad left the next day for Driggs, and Mother and I remained at Grandpa Batt’s for three weeks. Then Mother and I left by train for Idaho Falls. My mother’s father, Orrin Strong Lee Jr., met us at the train and took us ten miles out to his ranch, where we stayed a week at their big, two-story red brick home. Then Grandpa took us back to the train, and we went on to Driggs to a happy reunion with my father. Grandma Lee [Martha Jane White Lee] didn’t want us to leave, but my mother was anxious to go home and be with her husband and child, and Dad was anxious to get acquainted with his new daughter. My mother had missed him very much, and they were glad to be together and about the business of raising their family. I was the first of four children to grace their union.
My father loved me very much, and I always had a special spot in his heart and life as his first child.
Mother said I was a good baby, who grew and developed rapidly without any problems other than I didn’t like to sleep nights. She said I didn’t fuss but would lay and goo half the night. I still like to be awake at nights. After I grew older I was always afraid I might miss something. I’m a night person to this day. I like to be up to read, sew, and meditate. In this quiet time with myself I’ve solved many of my problems through life. I get along fine as a person who doesn’t require a lot of sleep.
I had a very happy childhood. When I was fourteen and a half months old I was joined in our family by my sister Ruth, and we were very close until we were married. We had a brother who came along six years later, William Brazier Lee Batt, who received the family name. We teased him unmercifully all his young life, but we loved him very much. Two years later we were joined by our baby sister, Berniece, to delight our young girl hearts.
Our father taught school most of our young lives, so we moved a lot through southeastern Idaho and northern Utah in an effort to better ourselves and allow him to more adequately take care of his growing family. He loved the earth and wanted to be out of doors and grow things and make his living from the soil, but he had been trained as a coach and school teacher and thought in this way he could make a better living for his family.
Dad graduated from Utah State Agricultural College the spring of 1915 and that fall had his first coaching job at Driggs, Idaho. When school was out in the spring of 1916, we moved down to Ririe, Idaho, where Dad managed the 5,000-acre Bingham Dry Farm for his father-in-law, who was owner with two other men from Idaho Falls. I was ten months old at the time.
Grandpa Lee built us a small four-room house on top of a small hill that sloped down on all four sides from the small yard. We walked down a path in back to the barn yards, where all the teams of horses and equipment were kept, and to the shops and bunk house. Or, we walked down a path in front to a small creek, where Mother had to carry all our water from—water to drink, bathe, wash clothes, and our every other need for water. She washed on a board and had to cook three meals a day for twenty-four steady farm hands and care for a ten-month-old baby.
In the fall of 1916, when all the crops were harvested, we moved down to Clark Ward, three miles east of Rigby in Jefferson County, Idaho, to spend the winter in a new farm house on Bishop Schoel’s place. Dad did odd jobs that winter. This was where my sister Ruth was born on December 13, 1916, when I was fourteen and a half months old.
In the spring of 1917 we moved back to the dry farm for a second summer. Mother’s youngest sister came up that summer and stayed with us to help Mother with her work and us children. Sometimes in the afternoon Mother and Minnie would take Ruth and me and walk down to the creek and sit on a quilt under a willow by the water, where it was bcool. One time they were wondering why the branches hung so low. They looked up and saw that they were loaded down with ticks. We got out of there quick. There was no other cool place to get, no trees anywhere, just the rolling hills covered with grain in the hot sun.
That summer our Aunt Minnie was washing clothes on a wash board in a tub on two chairs out on the front porch that ran clear across the front of the house. A big thunderstorm came up, and she was struck by lightening and fell to the floor. She was okay after a while, but everyone was really scared.
At the end of that second summer on the dry farm, our mother rebelled and said she wouldn’t stay there another year and carry all that water and care for two babies and cook for all those men. So that winter when the crops were over, we moved down to Grandpa Lee’s ranch and stayed in their big two-story red brick home and took care of things while Grandpa and Grandma spent the winter in California.
Grandpa and Grandma Lee were well-to-do, owning the home ranch, 160 acres with big apple orchards and farm land and great herds of sheep and year-round hired men. The big two-story brick home had all the latest inventions—a bathroom with a cistern water supply, hot and cold running water, and electric lights from a Delco night generator—when most people hadn’t heard of these modern conveniences yet. They had the latest, most modern cars out, and would go to California for the winter and to Chicago for the World’s Fair.
They also had the dry farm, which was finally their undoing when the big drought hit. They also had several other farms. They lived a good, hard working life among hundreds of friends, near and far, and farmed and built up a great community in the desert they homesteaded.
In the spring of 1918 Dad ran Grandpa’s home ranch at Milo, Idaho, and did so for the next two years. We lived in Grandpa’s little white four-room house on their land a half mile northeast of Grandpa’s big house.
While we were living on Grandpa Lee’s big ranch, Grandpa had a big apple orchard and had horse-drawn sleds out through the trees that they loaded the boxes of apples on that they took in to the apple shed, and us kids would ride and eat the good crunchy apples and watch them make cider in the big cider press. I don’t remember them washing the apples or anything. The worms and all were dumped in, but oh, it was delicious cider. There was always a tin cup hanging there to sample our fill.
At this same time of our lives the snow would drift in the lane at the side of Grandma’s big house, and our uncle Perry, Mother’s youngest brother, carved us out a play room in the drift tall enough he could stand up in (and he was six feet tall). This was just before he got married.
That lane, in summer, led up to a Japanese family’s little house. They worked for Grandpa and would invite us to delicious dinners, and Grandma would take our silverware because they ate with chopsticks. Also, the lane led to the long rows of sheep sheds and lambing pens down by the willows on Willow Creek.
Mother said I would follow Dad everywhere he went. When he went out to irrigate with the big ditches full of water, they were afraid for my safety. He’d spank me and take me back to the house, and as soon as his back was turned I’d go again and follow him. One day he whirled around, grabbed me, and threw me in the big feeder ditch that ran along the side of the house. Mother was standing on the bank crying and hollering at Dad that he was going to drown me. When I came up the third time he took me out and gave me to Mother. It cured me; I never did follow him again, but I never did lose my love for water.
It was World War I and that fall our hay crop sold for $50 a ton, an outlandish price for hay. We were suddenly “rich,” so we took a trip to Salt Lake City on the train from Idaho Falls. We had planned the trip for quite awhile, and Mother made us all fancy new clothes for the occasion out of her trunk full of fancy ball gowns from her college days. She made Ruth and me fancy dresses and, the pride of our lives, matching coats and bonnets of green velvet. We were so proud and excited. While standing out in a hard wind waiting to get on the train, my bonnet blew off down the track. I was so scared that I had lost it, but Dad chased it down, and we were on our way.
In Salt Lake City we went to see Aunt Doll Adams, Dad’s oldest sister, on Harrison Avenue. It was the bad flu epidemic of 1919, and thousands were dying all over the country. Nearly everyone was sick. Uncle George was real bad, and Aunt Doll and Mother were up night and day caring for all the sick. Aunt Doll’s baby, Lucille, was in a clothes basket, and they were afraid she would get it.
We never did forget that happy time, happy for us kids. Every night we had to get ready for bed, then we got to listen to “Amos and Andy” on the radio, and then to bed.
In the fall of 1919 we moved from Grandpa’s little white house to Taylorville, Idaho, eight miles south of Idaho Falls and east of Shelley between Shelley and the foothills, where Dad bought a 120-acre place with Uncle Jim Adams, his sister Ruby’s husband. It was an old unpainted house without a foundation. We about starved to death that winter and lived on meat and things Grandpa Lee brought us. Uncle Jim wasn’t a farmer, and Dad had second thoughts and walked out and left everything before we lost all we had. He even left Uncle Jim all the cattle and pigs Grandpa Lee had given them.
While living there I sat in a big ant hill playing among the big red ants. My curls were full of them, and I got bit real bad.
There was a bluebird that had its nest in a tree by the front porch while we lived there. A cat climbed up and killed the birds. Mother says I carried them around until I could finally be convinced they needed to be buried. Everyone thought I’d get sick from them since I’d had them so long.
The fall of 1920 Dad bought an 80-acre farm, the Pittman place at Milo, a mile north and a half mile west of Grandpa Lee’s. We lived in a three-room log and frame house, with a big water canal running in front, just up the road from our good friends, the Huffackers, where we spent many happy times. This is where I had my first love, their son Allan, who was a grown young man and used to take me for rides on his white horse.
While living here our only brother was born on January 19, 1921. When Bill was three weeks old, he got real sick and was operated on for mastoid, and for a long time they didn’t think he would live. It was the first time they’d performed such a delicate operation on one so young. During this long period Ruth and I stayed with Grandma Lee while mother was in Idaho Falls at the hospital with our baby brother. We missed them and we were happy when we were back together in our little family again.
At this time I remember Ruth and I were playing in the bedroom, and she was up on Mother’s trunk and fell off and hit her head on a nail in the plank floor and cut it open and bled all over.
Dad and Mother were down at the barn one night milking at dark, and I kept going down there and Dad told me to go to the house and watch the baby or he’d give me a licking. I kept running back and forth taunting him, and when he came to the house he cleaned up and without a word he picked me up and tanned my bottom good. I think from then on I really minded him.
More bad times were to befall us. When Bill was less than one year old we lost our place. With all the hospital bills, trying to farm without the money for seed and equipment, and taking care of a growing family proved to be too much. Our father had to go back to teaching—what he had been trained for.
When I was about six years old, Grandpa and Grandma got word that Aunt Vene’s youngest baby had died in Boise. Mother made me a new orange dress with black embroidery on the sleeves and bottom so I could go with them. It was a long, hot, dusty trip to Boise, and there were no good paved roads in those days. We stayed there a week, and I got to know my cousins real good.
In the fall of 1921, a few weeks before I was six, I started the first grade at Milo School not far away from home. Two or three weeks later we moved to Tetonia, Idaho. Dad was principal of the high school there and also coach. I got started in the first grade there and only went a week or two again before I got pneumonia and almost died. Mother said I’d turned black but through her frantic working with me she saved my life. The doctor said I could not return to school that season.
During that period Mother sat with me night and day. One night she dropped off to sleep, which she desperately needed, and the coal oil lamp had crept up higher and smoked the whole house. Long black webs of soot were all over everything. It was a wonder we weren’t dead from the fumes, which woke her up. The neighbors came to help her clean the dirty mess. That winter the big family who owned the drug store and lived upstairs above it all burned to death. They were trapped and couldn’t get out. I was always afraid of fire after that.
We had so much snow that winter that a big snow plow would come through ahead of the huge black steam engines, and all you could see was a little black from the front of the trains because the drifts were so high.
When Bill was just learning to walk we went up to Swan Valley on a two-week fishing and camping trip with friends. We lived in tents way up above the Snake River in the pines. It was great fun. One day Bill got lost and they were afraid he’d get down to the river or an animal would get him. They hunted all morning, and the kids did, too. We finally found him wandering around up the mountain through the trees and dense brush. He had on a red coat and that’s how they spotted him.
I remember the men chased a big horned sheep all over the mountains. They finally killed him and put him to cook in a big iron pot over the bonfire. He cooked night and day for a week, and we never did eat him. It was too tough, but each day they’d throw in vegetables and we had good soup.
We went on a lot of fishing trips in this time of my life. My mother loved to fish, and so did Grandma and Grandpa and all their family. We’d go up the Snake River for a day or weekend above Heisie above Ririe. They would fish, and we’d ride the ferry boat back and forth across the river with the caretaker or play under an abandoned bridge where the river had cut a new channel and left it high and dry in the sand.
One day we were under the bridge when a car came over and stopped. We said, “We’re billy goats gruff. Who goes over our bridge?” A man got out and said, “I’m the big gnome who’s come to get you,” and he came running down under the bridge. We were scared to death until we saw that it was Grandpa Lee’s brother who had come to join us for the day.
Up in this country it was real steep, and on our Swan Valley trip the cars couldn’t make it up, so they’d tie ropes to Model T Fords and to trees and push them up backward, then change ropes and go a little further until they got to the top. The gas tanks were under the front seat and worked on the principle of gravity flow. Up in this same country one time we came down around a sharp curve to get on a ferry, and it wasn’t there. It was still across the river, and the river was real high. We about went in the swift river. We were really scared.
I never liked to fish because Mother would drag us around for hours and mosquitoes would eat us alive. We would put wet mud all over our arms and legs and faces to keep from being bit. A lot of people drowned each year in the treacherous waters and the snags and undercurrents. Sometimes we’d see floating puffed up bodies going down the river that had come up from being caught on a snag or something. I caught my first fish in the churning waters of the river from the bridge by the dam or catwalk. I can hardly remember.
During this period of my life we used to go to fireworks a lot on the Fourth of July in Idaho Falls. They’d shoot off a ball with a loud bang and down would come beautiful silk American flags or fancy colorfully dressed people floating down through the air. It was beautiful. I’ve never seen the likes since, but I’d think if they could do it then—the 1920s—they could sure do it now. They would have gorgeous fireworks displays. Never have I seen their equal since.
In the summer of 1922 we moved back to Clark Ward and lived in a little house with a square mile of cedar trees around it. Dad and Mother taught school, and I started school again in the first grade. They let Ruth go too because Mother was teaching, although she didn’t turn six until December 13. We went all through school together in the same grade.
While living in the cedars we had to bathe in a round wash tub. One night Ruth was having her bath in front of the stove, and I threw our little pup in the tub with her. She was scared to death and backed up into the stove and had a big “Coals Hot of Blast Point” brand burned on her bottom.
That fall Mother canned a lot of peaches. She would put all the leftover juice from each batch together and boil it down to make the best hot syrup. She’d also fix us a lunch, and we’d go back in the cedar forest to play. There were bobcats, the people said, but we never did see one. In the fall our kitchen window got broken out, and I slept on a cot under it. I was scared to death for fear a bobcat would get me. I remember as I laid in the dark I could see men dressed in white come in the window and walk around the room, but their feet were in the air and not on the floor, just walking in the air. I still think they were my guardian angels protecting me from my fear. I felt calm and could sleep when I saw them.
While we were all at school we left Bill with a Swedish couple on our way to school until he got awfully sick. We found out they had been feeding him black coffee everyday, so we hired a girl from then on.
We moved to a larger and nicer house in December. It belonged to Ben Miller and was a new five-room yellow frame house north of the schoolhouse on the west side of the road. I remember it had real dark stained woodwork, lots of big windows, built-in bookcases, and a window seat. The rooms were big and light. I liked it there. It was so nice.
I remember we went to Idaho Falls in our old Ford and bought lots of good food, oranges, candy, and nuts for Christmas. We had a big goose Mother cooked for Christmas dinner. Grandma and Grandpa Lee, Aunt Minnie, Uncle Morley, Dad’s brothers, and others came. It was a happy time.
After Christmas we went back to school and I got real sick. I kept my coat on and stood by the big potbelly stove and still froze to death. But, I wanted 100 percent attendance that year, and I did and got a certificate for no times tardy and 100 percent attendance.
That spring, 1923, we moved to Rigby in a big two-story house on a corner lot owned by the Cornells. We had a lot of friends there and played ball. We had a big lawn. We had neighbors named Birch, Ball, and then us, Batt. We used to say, “The Birch Batt will hit the Ball.” Our neighbor across the street had a goat, and it kept getting loose and coming over to our place. It ate everything—glass, cans, papers, your clothes or shoes if you left them around, and it even ate the neighbor’s wash hanging on the lines. Mother used to buy a wild cherry drink from the Watkins man that you mixed with water. It tasted so good. It was our treat on a hot afternoon. I had rheumatism that summer, and it hurt so bad I couldn’t walk up stairs and had to crawl on my hands and knees. Dad sold knit goods that summer and winter.
That fall we moved again. The new place was owned by the Noreens, was less rent, and was located a mile farther out of town on the same street. We called it “Lousy Noreens” because their kids in school had lice and were so dirty. We had to walk to school from there, one mile night and morning. Dad would take us in real bad weather.
On November 26, 1923, our baby sister, Berniece, was born at our home during the night. They tried to keep us children from knowing what was going on, but we did. They didn’t want us to go in the room where Mother was. When we’d get home after school we’d have warm chocolate cake and applesauce. It tasted so good after our long walk.
That winter Ruth and I were in the second grade, and we got new black high button shoes above our ankles for Christmas. We got ready to go to Grandma Lee’s for the big day, and I put my new high button shoes in the old coal stove to get them warm. It was too hot and my shoes curled up.
Grandpa came to get us in a big bob sleigh with a big team of horses pulling it with bells on their harnesses. We went jingling all the way. We sat on new straw in the bottom of the sleigh with big warm quilts over us to keep us warm. We also had hot bricks for our feet. It was three or four miles to Grandma’s big house, and the snow was so hard packed and drifted we went right over fences and all. It was so fun and the snow sparkled as thousands of diamonds all the way. And oh, what sights and smells met us at our journey’s end! They had a great big front room with high ceilings and doors that slid shut to a big hall that went up to bedrooms above or down the hall to the bathroom or kitchen at the back. That is where we all had to stay until Grandpa opened the sliding doors—and what a fairyland greeted our eyes. When we thought we couldn’t wait another second, they slid back the doors and there stood the grandest and biggest tree I’ve ever seen. Grandpa had made a trip to the hills the week before to get it. It reached to the top of the high ceiling and was covered with hundreds of little lighted candles of all colors, great long ropes of popcorn and red berries, and all kinds of candy novelties hanging from the limbs—rocking horses, dolls, drums, etc. made from several colors of hard candy. There were huge piles of presents and beautiful dolls waiting for our hungry little girl arms. There were dozens of cousins and aunts and uncles there, too. What a happy time it was with everyone opening their many gifts.
Now that I am older I can realize the great amount of work and planning that went into it. There were even wash tubs of wet sand and shovels in the background. What a fire hazard to mar our happy time, but the men were alert and prepared for trouble.
Then, when we were all through and thought we would burst from pure happiness, Grandpa slid open the doors on the other side of the room and revealed a huge long table in the dining room with room for all, groaning under its load from all the many good things to eat. The final climax was when Grandpa came bearing on a big platter the huge turkey he’d raised and carved it in front of us all. There were such heavenly smells, and we could hardly wait for him to finish carving so we could eat it with all the trimmings of a great feast. We children were put to bed but we were too tired and too full to care. It was a glorious day, a storybook Christmas come true.
That spring we came from school one day, and there was no Dad or Mother or kids at home, something that just never did happen. They’d always cautioned us to never make a fire, but we were so hungry and cold we finally got one going in our coal stove, and I made our big three-quart kettle full of “velvet” pudding—milk, eggs, and sugar thickened. We loved it and ate, but no one came. So I said, “Let’s go to Grandma’s.” Ruth was scared and didn’t want to go but finally came when she thought I was going alone.
We started out and it was getting late and we had walked a long way after we left town, but we never did see a soul. Our parents had always cautioned us to never get in a car with strangers so when we saw a car coming in the dust ahead of us, we went off the road down in a borrow pit on the side of the road and hid. When it passed we saw that it was our father and ran up the road after him hollering, but it was too late and he had gone. He was alone so we thought something had happened to Mother. We were scared and started to cry and run on toward Grandma’s. It was almost dark when a man came by on a horse and said, “Dorothy, Ruth, is that you?” We were glad to see someone and started to cry again. He was a good friend of our family, someone we had stayed with many times, and he asked us where we were going alone at night, and we told him our tale of woe. We were not far from his place, and he got us up on his horse and took us to his home. His wife fed us and put us to bed and called Grandma’s and told them we were there. Mother and Dad were going to stay at Grandma’s, and Dad had gone home to get us. When he couldn’t find us he was scared and called Mother, and she told him all that had happened. He stopped for us but they said we might as well stay until morning, seeing we were all asleep. We never did try anything like that again.
When I was in the second grade or so I was spending some of the summer at Grandma Lee’s at her big brick home on the home ranch, and we’d been to Idaho Falls shopping. On our way home, near the highway which went between his place and the barnyard and the old sheep sheds on the other side of the road, Grandpa stopped the car and told me to go over in the sheep sheds and get the eggs, as a lot of chickens had gone over there. Grandma got mad and said, “She’s got her good clothes on.” But he said it wouldn’t hurt, so I went and had a pinafore on and I got it full of eggs and went to the house.
Grandma met me out on the front lawn and took the eggs from me and threw up her hands in horror. I was literally crawling with lice. She wouldn’t let me go in the house and stripped off all my clothes and got the big round wash tub and washed me and my hair several times with lye soap to make sure she got them all and threw all my clothes in after. Then she took me in the house and put me in the tub in the bathroom and I had another good washing. She didn’t let Grandpa forget that for a long time.
That summer, 1924, we moved back to Rigby, northwest of town, to the Bordon’s place. We could walk to the store while Dad was in Logan all summer for both sessions of summer school. Mother would give Ruth and me each a nickel about every day when we walked up town to the Post Office for our mail. We wanted to go even without a nickel, as we were sure to get a letter from our dad, whom we missed and loved very much. Besides, it made our mother very happy when we’d bring her a letter. She missed our father very much, too, and loved him so. While up town we’d go next door to the drug store and each get a big glass of fountain drink and always a “Green River,” which tasted so good after our hot, dusty walk. I suppose it must have been a mint drink of some kind, but it was always bright green and cool. The taste buds don’t have that long of a memory.
While living there that summer Ruth and I played paper dolls most every day and had great fun with our make believe families. We had a big bay window with a window seat where we played for hours. Mother would lay Berniece in there on a rug, and we taught her to crawl by putting things too far away for her to get, and she’d finally crawl and get them. We didn’t have the conventional paper dolls, but we’d spent many happy laborious hours cutting from the colorful big Sears and Roebuck catalogs for dolls, furniture, and all.
I was baptized on August 2, 1924, in the tabernacle in Rigby by Omer Cordon and confirmed August 3 by Clarence Heart.
That fall while Dad was still in Logan going to school, and toward the end of the summer, he came home for a weekend and took us all to Logan to stay for two weeks with our dear little English grandmother, Eliza Brazier Batt. She wasn’t very tall and was quite heavy. Grandpa Charles wasn’t there too much, as he was overseer of the Utah Agricultural College, but our grandma was always there and we loved her. She was very strict and things had to be just so, but she was delightful and such a very good cook. She wore long dresses and a big white apron, the only way I remember her, but she did dress up because she always went to church, and she spent a lot of time at the temple doing work for her family names. She left books full of page after page of names. No one knows how they are related, but she knew who they were and didn’t bother to put what relationship, just cousin or aunt so and so.
Each meal was right on the dot, and we had to be all washed and sitting in our places when it was time. She wanted us to eat all we wanted, but we had to clean up our plates. After lunch Grandma said, “The body needs 40 winks to keep going.” No matter how busy she was she’d lay down for a few minutes, not much longer than it takes to wink your eye 40 times, but it gave her the strength for the rest of her busy day. Of course, when we stayed there we had to have a nap too, and be quiet for Grandma to have hers.
They lived in their new white brick house on Fifth North just a block or two below the college and had a big cool basement for us to play in. There were always a few pennies for us to walk over a block to the Skanky corner store for treats.
Dad and Mother would take us up on the beautiful Agricultural College campus and walk around. It was so beautiful with flower beds everywhere that Grandpa had planned and laid out. He was the school’s first gardener, coming from England just as they were building the college. He had taken care of the great gardens and estate of the poet Shelly in England. Grandpa was with the Agricultural College for fifty years.
Grandpa always seemed stern to us and not too fond of children, but in his old age he seemed much closer to us. He always had a moustache. My dad says Grandmother was a creature of habit and if Christmas came on Monday, she still did her wash. She was on the go all the time working from early morning to her early retiring. She always said, “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” I remember a holiday at their home once when she served a big English dinner with plum pudding for dessert. She poured brandy over it and set it afire—something we had never seen. It was one of her English customs.
While we were at Grandma’s that summer, or whenever in Logan, we’d go over to the big clean Agricultural College farm building, where we could have all the ice cold buttermilk we could drink free. I’ve never tasted any so good since.
In the fall of 1924 we moved to Laketown, Rich County, Utah, on the south end of Bear Lake, where Dad had the school principal’s job for the next three years. We were in third, fourth, and fifth grades there. That was a happy time in our lives. We first lived in a house on the corner and west of the high school. We had a lot of raspberries there to pick and bottle.
When we lived in Laketown I had a real good girl friend that lived on a ranch out toward Randolf, and she had a brother a little older than her. One day their parents went away and left them home alone. He was out shooting birds, and she went out and told him to stop, that he shouldn’t kill Father in Heaven’s birds. He got mad and shot her and killed her. They let school out, and we all went to the funeral, and he sat there and didn’t even care. From that time on I hated guns and never would let Ivard buy one when we were married or let any of our children have guns.
One Saturday Mother, Dad, and the little kids went 50 miles to the other end of the lake to go shopping in Montpelier, Idaho, and left Ruth and me alone all day. While they were gone we got out our Maytag washer and started the clothes and got the boiler of water on the coal stove to heat and did up all the wash and hung it on the line. We had to get a chair to reach to do it. Then we emptied all the water by bucket, carried it outside, and mopped the floor and cleaned the house. Mother was so proud of us when she got home. She was always sickly and taught us early how to work and do things. If we didn’t do it right we had to do it over until we did. We soon learned. Mother always said, “If it is worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well.”
That fall while still living at this same house, Dad and Mother went to Salt Lake City to a teachers’ convention for two to three days and left us home with a 20-year-old neighbor girl to tend us. We had an upright coal heater in the dining room next to the upstairs door and had a big roaring fire in it. The stove pipe got all red so we could be warm before we went upstairs for bed. When we opened the stair door to go up, smoke billowed out, so she shut the door and ran across the street to get her father, who was the town electrician. He came running over and went upstairs. The stove pipe went up through the ceiling and through the floor of the room above to heat it and then into the chimney up by the ceiling. It was smoldering from a throw rug by our bed that had gotten against the chimney. It had burned clear through the floor back under our bed, and the bedspread was scorched. Mr. Thompson got the fire out and took care of the wiring under the floor.
He said everything was all right, but we were scared, so we went down the hall to Mother’s room and all slept in her bed. We couldn’t go to sleep, so she told us stories to get our minds off things. Then, when we were about asleep, the bottom slat under the mattress fell down and we all slid down. Then, in our jumping around, the top slat broke, so we got out and got the mattress on the floor and slept there the rest of the night.
During that trip to Salt Lake Dad and Mother bought all our Christmas and hid it. On another trip to Montpelier for a day, Ruth and I snooped and found everything. That was the worst Christmas we ever had. We never got one thing we hadn’t seen, but we didn’t tell them. We’d learned our lesson.
Christmas was always a very special time for us. We would go to bed at night and then get up early the next morning to a fairyland of beauty. The house was all decorated, and there was a breathtaking tree to delight our young hearts. Sometimes the presents were few, but love was there, and we had a joyous time no matter what because the Spirit was there.
All holidays were memorable occasions. Nearly every holiday we would get up to find a special new dress, usually made through the night while we slept. On the Fourth of July we would try to be first up to shoot off the first firecracker. There would be parades and picnics with family and friends. On May Day we always had a lunch and went on a picnic. At school we always had a May pole and danced around it and braided the colored streamers.
That summer we moved all our things into the basement of the high school and stayed there rent free while Dad went back to Logan to summer school. We had a lot of fun that summer in one end of the long basement. Ruth and I made a play house among our stored things and played house. We lived in the home economics room. Sometimes it would thunder and lightening real bad, be pitch black, and then light up all those long rows of basement windows. We’d be scared to death. We had our bed out in the big open basement on the opposite wall across from the home economics room and had our mattress on a long table they used at lunchtime. All summer the town baseball team played on the school diamond and we would watch them. They just played in their regular clothes. When everyone left, Ruth and I would go around the bases and find nickels, dimes, and pennies. We were rich. Sometimes we would get over a dollar at a time each.
That summer we went to Logan for a week and stayed at Uncle Gladstone’s (Dad’s brother) with Aunt Nettie and their son, Sunny.
That fall we moved into an old bachelor’s big two-story house across the street south of school. His name was Thompson, and he lived with us kids and had his room upstairs. He farmed the place. We stayed there the rest of the time we lived in Laketown. He was good to us and let one of us kids take his horse and ride all over the country and down the lake to our family’s good friends, the Nebekers. Mrs. Pearl Nebeker was a piano teacher, and I loved to hear her play “Kitten on the Keys” and “Nola.”
The Nebekers had a girl, Mary, our age, and a son, Shirley, a year older than I, whom I spent most of my time with riding around the hills and catching rattlesnakes for his glass cages. Ugh! One day when we were riding up on the hills we saw a great big rattler, and Shirley got off his horse and cut the leg out of his long underwear and tied one end in a knot, and I held it open while he put the snake in it. We’d go down in the swampy meadow and catch chipmunks or gophers—something like that, I can’t remember. We’d put them in snake cages and the snakes would swallow them whole. There were big lumps in their bodies where they’d be.
Nebekers had a farm between the hills and the lake, and there were lots of rattlesnakes everywhere. The men had to wear high leather boots, and when they lifted piles of hay onto the wagon with their pitch forks sometimes there would be one or two snakes dangling from the pile. Once they found a big one in a door that went under the house in the kitchen. We used to stay down there a lot overnight. Ruth never liked it when I went off all day like this, nor I suppose Mr. Thompson, who had to come find me so he could feed and care for his horse at night.
We used to go down to Nebekers a lot as a family and visit and go swimming in the lake. Sometimes we would go boat riding in the moonlight and us kids hold on to ropes tied behind the boat and go along in the path of the moon across the water—a fun time.
In the summertime Mr. Thompson had his nephews from Randolph, Al and Dale, come and visit, and we had great times together riding horses and such. That was the time I decided I could fly and jumped off the roof of the shed with an umbrella, but I had a hard fall to the ground. The umbrella just turned inside out and was no help at all.
Sometimes Ruth and I would walk a couple of miles or so up on the foothills at night and bring the cows down for Mr. Thompson, and one time I stepped in a hole and hurt my ankle. Ruth went back home to get someone to help me because I couldn’t walk. I think everyone was gone but Mother, and by the time they came it was dark and scary. I could hear the coyotes howling. I hobbled, and Mother half carried me. By the time I got home my ankle was so big, and it hurt real bad. Mother soaked it, and I had to lay with it up in the air for nearly two weeks and missed school.
That same winter I was sick half the time with mumps, chicken pox, and two kinds of measles. Mother let Ruth sleep with me. She said she’d get them anyway, but she never got one thing. Finally everything disappeared, and I went to school on Valentine’s Day. It was cold and I stood by the stove and broke out all over again.
I had two real good girlfriends in town on Main Street, Emma Lou and Phebee Weston, cousins who lived across the street from each other, where I stayed a lot or they stayed at our house. Emma Lou was my best friend. Phebee was older and thought she was bigger than us.
That year when school was out and the hay loft in the barn was practically empty, Ruth and I made us a play house up in the loft behind a pile of hay and played there all summer. We had books to read and stuff to eat. Little kids couldn’t find us up there. We’d play “Hide and Seek,” and while Bill counted we’d go in the barn and climb in the loft and he’d go around the yard yelling, “Dorothy, Ruth, where are you?” Mother would get mad at us but didn’t tell Bill for fear he’d try to go up and get hurt.
While we lived at Thompson’s house Ruth walked in her sleep. Dad and sometimes Mother would be up late studying, and Ruth came downstairs and would go out and climb on the open well. Sometimes they’d hear a noise, and she’d be up on the railing on the balcony upstairs or over the porch below, and they’d hold their breath and pray that no harm would befall her. She never did get hurt. She’d always go back to bed and never know what she’d done the next day or how scared her parents were for her safety.
We had lots of friends in school and at church. I think about everyone belonged to our church. There weren’t any movies, but several times a year plays would come to town with live people in them, and we’d go see them as a family. We loved them. I especially loved the Xylophonist who played music between acts and changes of scenes.
I was always in torment because I was in love with this high school boy or that, and they never even knew I existed. I always fell for older men.
The farmers would clear the sagebrush in the summer that had grown along the roads and ditch banks and make great piles. When it was good and dry we’d have huge bonfires, and the young people would come from all over town and play “Run, Sheep, Run” and “Kick the Can” and go all over town. The high school kids and older young men and women didn’t seem to mind that us young kids were there too. But as I recall, sometimes we didn’t find them all night. It was great fun, but I don’t see what our dear mother was thinking of to let us out like that for half the night.
As my mother was sickly ever since I can remember, we learned to work early. My mother would show us how and help us until we knew the correct way. If we didn’t do things right, we had to do it over again until we did. She always told us, “If a thing is worth doing at all, it is worth doing well.” It didn’t take us long to do it right both to please her and to keep from redoing it. Ruth and I would sit, many a time, on each side of Mother and learn to sew on buttons, make buttonholes, darn socks, or embroidery. She was always teaching us things and it was fun. We could do a lot of things our friends didn’t even know how to do. We learned to cook the same way, and she read to us a lot, even when we were in junior high school.
Grandma Batt died in February 1926, and that summer we spent in Logan living with Grandpa Batt and helping him. Dad worked at the college.
The third summer, 1927, Dad got gallstones and was in the hospital in Logan over the Fourth of July. After he left the hospital he spent the rest of the summer selling knitted goods for Logan Knit all up through Idaho. Mother and the kids went with him, and I stayed at Grandma Lee’s. We had a big old Buick touring car with curtains that snapped on in bad weather. Dad built a big box on the running board with a lock on it where they kept the food and dishes, and they camped out all summer and went to Yellowstone Park several times that summer on their route. Ruth helped with Bill and Berniece.
We got back to Laketown late for school that fall. They weren’t going to let us go through Logan Canyon because it had been stormy and still was. Then another car had to get through, so they let us go at our own risk. I was never so scared in all my life. There were no oiled roads in those days. It took us all day for a trip that usually took about one and one half hours. We had mud up to the hub caps and were sliding from one side of the road to another. There were big steep dough ways they don’t even have nowadays and such narrow roads. We were all thankful to finally make it. Then we got there and found out Dad didn’t have a job. They didn’t even bother to notify him and had a new man in his place, all because Dad had expelled one of the problem Kurl boys.
So we packed up and moved back to Logan that fall of 1927. We couldn’t find a house, so we lived in a two-room house on Seventh North and about Sixth East, below the college barns and a block through the pasture to Webbers, friends of Mother and Dad. We went in the house on level ground, but it was on a hill and the back part of the house had a room built into the hill with screen walls and a dirt floor. It was so nice and cool, and that’s where we kept our milk and such. It had a closed inside porch where us kids slept.
We walked down the hill to the corner and turned right a few yards to our Webster School. We had a very good-looking man for our principal, Mr. Adams, who had a son, Lysle Adams, whom I really liked.
Esther Webber was my best friend, and I had a crush on her high school brother, June, for years. He got married and worked for the Forest Service and lived in Bountiful the last I heard of him.
I had blonde curly hair until I was about old enough for school. Then I had long golden brown ringlets, which my mother had to do every morning. She would brush them around her finger with a damp brush. It hurt, and I was so tenderhearted that I’d cry every time. Finally, when I was in the sixth grade, Mother had our pictures taken and I had them all cut off. I always liked my hair short.
Not long after we came to Logan Dad got a job for Union Pacific Railroad as a special agent. He had a run from Salt Lake to Pocatello leaving from Cache Junction about nine miles from Logan, so he was gone a lot. We were in sixth grade that winter.
When we moved to Logan from Laketown and I was in the sixth grade, the Agricultural College had people come to our school and tested us. They said I had a very high I.Q. and was able to go to college, but my mother and father wouldn’t hear of it. They said I would stay in my own grade and go along the regular way—grade by grade. But, it was still a drawback to me. I had the idea I could do anything, and as a result I coasted through school without putting forth the effort or reaching my full potential. I never should have been told about their findings and on my own could probably have reached great heights with my learning capabilities. It made me lazy in my efforts to achieve.
While we were in Logan the college put on a lot of operas, which the school children could attend in a downtown theater. I loved them—“Cavaliera Risk a Cana,” Shakespeare’s plays, etc. One thing I never did learn was how to spell. I wrote things like they sounded to me.
While we lived in Logan our family and the family of June Andrews went up to the girls camp in Logan Canyon and took our lunch and spent the day while our Dad and June Andrews, Dad’s best friend, hiked to the top of Mount Logan—pretty high. We had fun all day playing in the trees and the huge girls camp building. It had a balcony around the inside, which was reached by going up a wide flight of stairs. Off the balcony were a lot of rooms for sleeping. It was enclosed and had a big roof on top, but as I remember the bottom was just big framed windows without glass and at one end of the building was a huge fireplace with tables and benches to relax in, which was all very well in the daytime, but at night it got very scary to two lonely women and their children who were fearful for their husbands and fathers. The hours passed into early morning, and they had not returned. A fierce thunder and lightening rainstorm was raging outside as we huddled by the fire to keep warm. It was daylight when they returned, soaked and tired. That was the second time in my life I had lived through a bad thunderstorm and forever I was afraid of these elements.
We used to make a lot of trips to Idaho to see Grandma Lee in these years, and nearly always it was at night. Mother would make the back seat of the car over our luggage in between seats into a bed, and we children would lay and sleep. We had curtains that buttoned on to protect us from the weather, and it seemed like it would always rain. I loved to listen to the rain pelting on the fabric roof of the car and against the celluloid windows.
That fall we went out to the country and got ten bushels of apples for the winter and put them upstairs in an empty cool room, and they kept the door locked so we wouldn’t eat them all up. In the spring they had to haul them all out and throw them away. We might as well have enjoyed them.
The next summer, 1928, we moved to a big gray two-story house down by the Ninth Ward Chapel next door east on Fourth North. That’s the winter Mother read a lot to us. Sometimes we stayed up all night because we got so engrossed in Michael O. Hallern and other books by Gene Stratton-Porter.
The first of April 1929 Dad got a chance to get a little ground and a green hot house and have a place to have a cow and chickens. So we moved to the Haltner’s place on Sixth East and Ninth North. The cow wouldn’t let Mother come near to milk her, but she could get her in the barn. I couldn’t get her in the barn, but she would let me milk her. So it worked out fine. We raised tomatoes, peppers, vegetables, and flowered plants in our green house to sell. It always smelled so good in there. We also raised a patch of string beans, an acre or two for the cannery at Smithfield.
That fall, 1929, Ruth and I started junior high school in Logan, Cache County, Utah and had to walk downtown to school—quite a ways. We had swimming lessons as part of school. I loved it, but Ruth wasn’t too thrilled. She liked the gym classes, but I wasn’t too crazy about them. I hated to get undressed in front of everyone. I was bashful.
I don’t remember going to church much as I was growing up, but we did; it was just part of our lives. I remember religion classes. I loved them, and I especially remember when I was a Bluebird in Primary, because we embroidered a bluebird on pillow cases. I know Mother and Dad were active. Mother was Relief Society president at Laketown and taught Sunday School. Dad always worked in the Church and sang in the choir. When we lived in Laketown many a time he’d go fifty miles to sing at different things at Montpelier and other places.
On January 8, 1930, we moved to Salt Lake City so Dad would be closer to his work and home more. We moved into a house on D Street just north one-half block from President J. Reuben Clark and across the street from the grade school. We went to Bryant Junior High. By starting in the middle of school we were in the first half of work, so we made it up by taking the first half over again, the same work we’d already done. It was so easy.
When school was out we had our tonsils out, and a week and a day afterward I woke up early in the morning choking to death. A huge blood clot had formed in my throat and out my mouth and on the pillow. I was lucky someone heard me. I had to go back to the hospital, but after that I healed up okay. When we lived in Logan I had awful earaches and would have them stuffed with cotton and they would run clear down my neck. After I had my tonsils out, I never had any more trouble with earaches or rheumatism.
While on D Street I fainted my first and last time. I was standing by the hot water tank in the kitchen and had a funny feeling, and the next thing I knew I was laying on the floor.
Also while living there, I tried to learn how to roller skate. Ruth and I would go along the street and cross the street where the street car turned and went up the avenues. I’d fall down in the tracks, and the streetcar would have to stop and wait for me to get off the track. I never did really learn how to skate good.
The next summer, 1930, we moved into a better house on J Street, about the third house below the little store on Sixth Avenue. That is where I had my first real honest to goodness boyfriend. He lived in the next house above us with his grandmother for the summer. I can’t remember his first name, but his last name was Searle. We were together constantly, sitting out on our step for hours talking or walking up the avenues. We spent a lot of time walking through the cemetery at the end of the streets. He even took me on a real date to a movie downtown, and we rode the street car.
Later we found a better place up around the corner on Sixth Avenue between J and K Streets.
While living in Salt Lake the love of my life was Rudy Vallee and his saxophone. I remember one night when we lived up on the avenues, they had a movie of his downtown which I wanted to see so bad. I cried and cried and told Mother she didn’t love me because she wouldn’t let me go. She got ready and took me to it on a streetcar in a bad rainstorm. I loved it.
While living in Salt Lake and while Dad was working on the railroad, he got a pass, and Mother and us kids went on a train ride to Boise, Idaho, to visit Aunt Vene Bybee for a week. That was great fun, the train ride and all. Aunt Vene had a big family, and her husband had disappeared and left her to raise them alone. My cousin Lee Bybee had an orchestra, and his brothers and sisters played for dances. They took us to White City (I think that’s what it was called), an open-air pavilion by the old natatorium where we went swimming. One end was a big rocky mountain with a waterfall coming down into the pool. I loved that week and fell in love with Lee. I always loved saxophone music, and I still do to this day.
I used to spend a lot of time in the summer at Grandma Lee’s. After they lost their big place and lived on their farm on Willow Creek, I went there to help Grandma but was usually out with Grandpa, riding derrick horse, milking cows, and shucking grain. Grandma would get so mad at me because I was getting most of the hired man’s wages milking cows. I’d get up before he did and have them half milked and kept a chart in the barn showing the number of nights and mornings. Because I’d come from Salt Lake, he didn’t think I could do it and told me he’d give me a nickel for all I could. I was in junior high that year and was rich. Grandpa paid me for leading derrick horse and shucking grain, much to Grandma’s disgust. She said I’d never be a lady. She was probably right. I had learned to swim in the canal when I was in the second grade and have a scar to this day on my knee where I dove in the muddy water on a shallow place and cut my knee bad. I’d ride horses until I’d have to walk home and lead them, I was too sore to ride any longer, or the hired man would come hunting me to take care of the horse.
Then in the summer of 1931 we moved out to Bountiful to get out of the city. The railroad assured Dad his job was permanent, and a while after we moved he was let out. A new bunch came into control from California, and all their friends were in new jobs. We lived in a purple brick and stucco house below the Bamberger tracks on Woods Cross Road and next door below Bill Page. We were there until the next spring.
That fall we started school at Davis High School in Kaysville. Dad took us up and the principal, Sam Morgan, was a good friend of his. When we were registering we found out we were a whole year ahead of them and skipped a year of school, putting us in the eleventh grade. We rode the Bamberger to school and caught it at a station in Bountiful. We went to church at the Bountiful Second Ward.
I read a great deal all my life and still do. When I was in high school, I could check a book out in the morning and have it checked in that night before leaving school. I read anything and everything. I loved the wild west—Zane Grey and Harold Bell Wright’s books— history, adventure, romance, and books about places and things I’d never seen.
While going to Davis High my favorite teacher, Hap Miller, who taught us English, told us in class that the biggest part of the class already knew the person we would marry. I said, “I hope I never marry anyone I know,” but he was right, I did. I already knew Ivard—slightly.
I took chemistry and usually did my experiments with several of the boys. One day we mixed up a mess and blew a hole in the ceiling. It scared everyone to death. I took Spanish two years but didn’t learn much—pure Castillian. No one ever talked like that, and I wasn’t interested. I wanted to talk it.
At the time I graduated from high school I wanted to be a nurse and even sent my papers in and was accepted but there was no money to go. I don’t think I would have made a good nurse because to this day if I’m around anyone that vomits I vomit with them. Ivard always had to take care of kids when they did this.
That winter we had great fun. We used to walk clear to the top of the hill, or someone would have a horse and pull us up on our sleigh, and we had a big bonfire at the top of the hill to get warm, and we’d coast clear down through Bountiful past the road that is now the freeway to Ogden and points north. We’d only go down about twice a night because it was so far back to the top.
The next spring, 1932, we moved down to South Bountiful in Steve Moss’s house on the corner across from Moss Dairy (where the crossroads to South Bountiful and the freeway ramp are now, on the road [2600 South] that goes up to east Bountiful). We lived there until Ruth and I both married in December 1934.
During our last year of high school we caught the Bamberger one-half mile south at Cleverly Crossing. We went to church at the old South Bountiful Ward, and many a time we walked the two miles and back several times a week. Between church and school we got to know our future husbands. We had a lot of friends and a fun time of life.
It was the time of the Great Depression, and Dad was out of work. Things were pretty lean. We had our own cow and plenty of milk and cream. We made our own butter and had chickens and eggs. The Red Cross brought us flour and things to keep us going. Hamburger was ten cents a pound, but who had ten cents! You could get a 50-pound sack of flour for 69 cents on sale, but we didn’t have that much either. Then Dad got on a WPA government work project and managed a crew up Farmington Canyon. Mother got a sewing class under the same project. She was always a professional dressmaker, and when we lived in Logan she sewed for professors’ wives and well-to-do people in town. Things were a little better after this. I did babysitting, mostly for Deb and Al Moss, that winter and earned 25 cents a day and sometimes all night. They drank and partied a lot, and I’d go and clean house, feed the kids, and get them to bed. Sometimes I worked eight or ten hours for my 25 cents!
I had two real good girlfriends, Afton Bair and Elaine Hatch. I was with one or the other all the time. Afton lived over by the church on our road, and Elaine lived a mile below on the next road. They were as different as night and day. Afton never cared about anything but boys, and Elaine hated boys but loved sports, and we spent many hours swimming. In the summer we would catch a ride with a Moss Dairy truck and go to Beck’s Hot Springs, which is not there anymore. We would swim for hours at the point of the mountain where the freeway ramps cross the Union Pacific Railroad tracks. We’d dive off the roof and always took the Red Cross swimming classes at Lagoon just to go swimming but in the meantime passing and getting our swimming and life saving certificates.
The summer before I was 19, Mattie Moss, the Mutual president, asked me to be her secretary, and I was that for two years, including one year after I was married. I really liked that position. I was in the choir too and walked over to practice every week or went with Dad. He was in the choir too.
That summer Dad tried to teach me to drive, but he’d holler at me so loud I’d about go off the road. I was a nervous wreck. I really learned after I was married, when we went once up to Harold Duncon’s in Centerville. He and his wife kept urging Ivard to drink beer until they had him drunk. They thought it was funny. I was never so mad in my life. Someone had to drive us home and Ivard couldn’t, so I did. We had his brother Fat’s car, and I’ve been driving ever since and have never had a citation or accident. I got in a road block once and got a ticket for no exhaust.
That Christmas was very slim. I bought each one a dime or 15-cent present, and Bill painted a little powder box with crayons for Ruth and me—the only present I got. That year, my senior year, I had a black shirt Mother made out of a pair of Dad’s pants and a beautiful striped silk blouse Mother made from an old dress. Someone gave her about the only thing I wore all year.
My senior year I took courses and was too bashful to try out for the operetta we put on, so our director, Jack Stacey, put me in charge of costumes and praised me highly after it was over because it was the first year there wasn’t one costume lost or not a hitch in everyone having what they needed at the right time.
Ruth wouldn’t wear the same thing twice in a week and if she had to she wouldn’t go to school. It didn’t bother me for some reason. I could wear a pair of shoes longer, Ruth needing two pair to my one. No matter how late we’d come home at night I’d hang up my clothes. Ruth would throw hers on the floor with the shoes on top. When she wanted them again she’d have to stop and press them.
We graduated in the spring of 1933, and there wasn’t any money for a new dress or shoes, but at the last minute Bill was walking out along the road kicking up the dirt and found a $20 gold piece and brought it to Mother. She bought material and made Ruth a peach and me a green organdy long summer formal. We also had new slips with satin sashes and even enough for new patent slippers. We looked as good as anyone at graduation.
The first time I ever saw Ivard was when we caught the Bamberger at Cleverly Crossing, which was named after his grandfather. That Halloween I went to a Halloween party Afton Bair gave at her grandmother’s house, and she invited me on a blind date, which turned out to be with Ivard. I was never so bored in all my life. All the rest of the couples were going steady and here we’d never even spoken to each other. All they did was sit around and neck, which was disgusting to us. We went together on and off for a couple of years, but he never did have money to take me anywhere. He would take me home from Mutual dances or we’d ride around to Salt Lake and stuff in his brother Fat’s car.
There was a kid, Elmer Winegar, who used to come to see Ruth all the time. She was never home, so he’d sit and talk to me half the night on our front step, and I thought he was a big bully. He played a saxophone for our after Mutual dances, and Clint Mills, an old bachelor, played the piano. Lee Cleverly played the drums, and we had some good times. It cost us ten cents a night. I loved to dance and thought I was really something when Elmer would leave his horn and come down off the stage and dance with me and no one else. A lot of times he took me home after. I wasn’t his girl, but we were together a lot and all of a sudden I really liked him. He’s the only guy I could ever kid with and talk to like my own brother or sister. We used to have a lot of fun together, but somehow I couldn’t get serious. He had a hair lip, which wasn’t too bad, but I always thought if I married him my kids might all look like that. He took me for rides on his motorcycle and to visit his mother, who made the best apricot ice cream, and we’d go riding. We never went to places that cost money. Kids didn’t have much in those days. He was jealous of Ivard, and I think Ivard was jealous of him.
Sometimes I went out with some of the older boys in the ward that had jobs and cars of their own and could take me places—to Covey’s dancing or ball games or out to eat—but I didn’t find any of them I wanted to marry.
Ivard and I got quite serious and went together, but that wasn’t until the fall of 1934. We broke up that spring, and I never went with him once. Absence did make the heart grow fonder. We had a standing date for my birthday, September 29, and even though I hadn’t gone with him all summer, I just knew he would come. He did and brought me a tooled leather purse for my birthday, the first thing he’d ever given me.
He took me to his place to a birthday party for me. His dad and mother were in Idaho, and Annie and Bud were staying there from Nevada, his respectable oldest sister and her husband, returned missionaries and a school teacher. So I thought it was alright, and he had spent all that money on my gift. But, his sister Sarah and his sister-in-law Pearl, who weren’t so good, had talked him into a party, and he footed the bill. They fixed a good lunch and then brought on the beer. Ivard got drinking and didn’t take much, but he passed out. Annie and Bud had to take me home. I was never so mortified, hurt, humiliated, and mad in all my life. I cried all night, and that should have been the end of it. I didn’t want to live that kind of life. I never saw Ivard for a week and thought it was ended. Then he came over and apologized and said he was scared to come sooner. He said he wouldn’t do that again.
We went steady the next couple of months, and each Saturday night he’d come and take me to the ward show, and we’d go to the Mutual dances and church and to our place to eat. Once in a while we even went to a show in Salt Lake with Lawrence Cleverly and Afton.
My sister had been planning for several months on getting married in the Salt Lake Temple on December 19. I felt bad because I was the oldest and wanted to get married first, but Ivard hadn’t talked marriage. Then he took me to the Saturday night show the first week of December and afterwards showed me a wedding ring with my initials in it and the date of December 17, 1934. That’s how he asked me to marry me—had the date all picked and settled.
The next day he came to dinner and asked Dad and Mother if we could get married. His family liked the idea, but Dad and Mother tried to talk us out of it. They said it was too quick and Ivard didn’t have a job or anything to his name. He hopped milk for Moss Dairy for 50 cents a day. I wouldn’t listen. I thought if I didn’t marry now I never would and would be an old maid. Besides, I couldn’t believe it would happen to me because I’d thought we’d get married on my birthday and what a let down. I couldn’t get that excited again.
On Monday morning, December 17, 1934, Ivard got up at 4:00 a.m. to hop milk, then we went to see our Bishop Hatch to see if he would marry us that night. Then we went to Salt Lake City to the City–County Building to get our marriage license. Ivard had to take his mother to sign for him because he wasn’t old enough.
I had gotten up early and packed my things and washed my hair. It was cold and we were tired and I was sick, so we went to a show to rest. My mother had gone up early to Woods with her pressure cooker to help them can meat and had burned her hand bad. I thought she wasn’t even going to make it.
We went home and Mrs. Cleverly and Sarah fixed a lunch, and at nearly 9:00 Bishop Hatch married us. It was supposed to be at 7:00, but Mother was late. I wore a rust colored dress I’d made for Valentine’s Day in Mother’s sewing class, and we stood in front of the cabinet radio and were married. There were no flowers, no excitement, no chivaree, no nothing. It was just like any old day of the week. We had lunch and everyone left soon.
We went in Fat’s bedroom, which he let us have. We were so tired and scared we went to sleep. They didn’t have a bathroom, and in the night I had to go but was afraid and laid and wiggled till Ivard woke up wondering what was wrong with me. So he got up and took me out to the outhouse in the cold.
Ruth and Ray had planned their wedding for quite a while, and instead of being happy for us, they never did forgive us to this day, I think, and we have never been as close since. The night we got married all of us girls were giving them a shower, and I wasn’t even there.
When we got married Ivard’s brother Elwood (Fat) lent him $10, and Moss Dairy upped his wages from 50 cents a day to a dollar a day. We lived at Cleverlys and paid Fat back.
