Hazel Jane Lee was born on November 20, 1894, in the family house in Leorin, Idaho. When Hazel was born on that long ago November day, those attending her birth said they couldn’t save both the mother and baby, something about their having the wrong kind of blood. They saved both. Sally Ann Miles, her grandmother, was the midwife; there was no doctor.
“I always told Mother I was born with an earache and sick to my stomach,” Hazel said. That may not have been far from the truth. She was sickly most all of her life, through all ninety-nine years of it.
Hazel was the sixth child of eleven children born to Orrin Strong Lee Jr. and Martha Jane White. There were five on each side of her. She used to tell her older sister Zella that she, Hazel, was the kingpin in the family. That made Zella mad.
During childhood Stanley was her pet brother. They both played dolls and pretended they were farming. In an orchard on their farm, they used to mash down the grass, which was about two feet high, to make rooms to play in. Their dad made them a dollhouse out of a piano crate. It had a door, glass windows, curtains, and he put it under a big umbrella crab-apple tree.
She also remembered an old wagon they had with a canvas cover that had been across the plains several times.
She and Stan, who was two and a half years older than she was, never disagreed once that she can ever remember. At Logan when they were older, nobody thought he could be her brother. Each of them had a saddle horse. They used to run races, usually bareback, for about half-mile stretches. Once, while racing, the horse stopped right at a gate that was locked, which was unusual, and she sailed right over, her two pigtails flying as she flew through the air. On another occasion, she got a horse in a ditch. She slipped, and the horse fell on top of her.
Hazel used to go everywhere, it seemed, with her dad. He used to take sheep way out in the hills. She didn’t know why, but she always went with him. On his workbench, if he sawed, she sawed; if he hammered, she hammered. Similarly, she had a small churn to churn with when her mother churned, and she made bread too when Mother did. She also made quilt blocks before she ever went to school.
At conference time she said they usually went to Grandma White’s down in Oakley, Utah. There must have been special train rates at conference time; they never actually went to conference.
She remembered as a fairly young child riding on a wagon from the granary out to the threshing machine. Before she was old enough to go to school, she helped to drive lambs out to where they would shear wool in the spring. It was hot, dirty, dusty, and fun.
She went to school in the Leorin School District. They usually walked to school. In the wintertime, they skated the first half mile down the Bybee Ditch along the highway, walked a little ways, and then skated some more until they finally reached the school. They drove horses to school if the weather was really bad. They rode on a sleigh and put the horses in a big long shed by the school. Everyone wanted to ride on the bobsled runner.
When it rained, they thought someone should come after them, but they didn’t, so they had to walk home from school. They would take a lunch box, dip it full of water, and pour over themselves to make Mother sorry for not coming to pick them up.
When asked what they did in school, Hazel simply replied, “Worked.”
The school teacher often boarded at their house. Mom and Dad were usually on the school board. One teacher who stayed with them smoked, so they could always tell whether he had come by. Another teacher put jam on everything he ate.
In about the second grade, she wanted to go to Utah when Mom and Dad went down at conference time. A knock came at the school door, and a neighbor girl came to take her home; she was going to Salt Lake. Most of the kids had never been past Idaho Falls. They had made her a black-and-white checkered dress, with red slippers.
She used to let the dust on the roads squash up through her toes. Even the main road was dust in those days.
In 1989 Myrtle died at age 9 with a ruptured appendix. It took Hazel fifteen years before she got over crying about it. The following year, in September 1900, Bessie and Mark came hand-in-hand down the road. They got sick that night and died five days apart. She remembers their making an oxygen tent out of sheets placed over a stick frame. They probably had diphtheria. About that time they also had smallpox at Christmastime. They were quarantined then; nobody could come within a mile of the place. They had to boil their clothing and bedding. They had to bathe in the smoke house where the meat was smoked and put on sterilized (baked) clothes.
During the wintertime, they used to go to two big canals where they could skate. Sagebrush grew on the banks. They lit the sagebrush for light and heat, and skated until midnight. Snow used to drift on the south side of the house half as high as the house. They would dig out rooms, hallways, etc. and played in them what seems like all the time.
They had another riding horse that they took once to go to Primary. The church was two miles away. The horse would not cross a bridge that went over Bybee Ditch on their place. They went home bawling because they would be late for Primary. A hired hand said he’d make the horse cross the bridge; he ended up in the canal. They never did get to Primary that day.
Dad always set aside two weeks every year for a camping trip back into the mountains where fishing was good. They went with teams and buggies. Hazel’s mother got sick once, and Stan and Hazel were sent to look for the horses, which were kept hobbled in a 2,500-acre field that was fenced. They heard moun¬tain lions (probably bobcats) when it got dark, and a bull was bellowing, and she was never so scared in her life. She cannot remember if they every found the horses, or if they came back on their own. Once up the river camping, her aunt had a rattlesnake curled up in bed with her.
When she was eleven years old, Hazel took piano lessons, but she learned more from her sister Venia than she did from the piano teacher.
When she was eleven, her Grandma White was sick, and Mother had to go care for her. One day during recess, while the teacher was on the roof fixing the bell, he saw the Lee home burning. Hazel was put on a horse—a big, tall, bony roan horse—and sent home, screaming and crying. When she was about a half mile from the house, the roof caved in. The horse reared, she fell off, and they never saw the horse again. Perry was still running around in his pajamas. The neighbors had to take Perry home to dress him.
The house had twelve rooms, and they never saved anything, except the piano and some of the living room furniture that they were able to get out. Dad saw what happened: The chimney settled in the old part of the house, and the fire started in the attic. The cistern was dry because it was being cleaned before being refilled. The canal across the road was empty. There was no water anywhere. Only the brick walls were left standing.
They lived in a tent that spring and summer. The next fall they lived in a big apple cellar that had a granary above it, with a wing that had been added on for the hired men. Mom was still in Utah with Grandma White, who was sick. For two weeks Hazel had to get vegetables from the garden and had to fix meals for the contractors who were there rebuilding the house and for all the farm hands. She thought she could handle pretty much any situation. “I was awfully cocky!”
When the new home was built, it had running water, generated its own electricity, and had both hot and cold water—the first in the Upper Snake River Valley. They also had about the second car in that end of the state. Some guy in Idaho Falls already had one. They thought, as kids, that there was never an end to money. They were always able to change their clothes every day after school.
She missed very few days of school. She would go even if she were sick. Nobody ever seemed to find out or make her stay home.
She never saw their home dirty. Before going to bed, everything was put away. Everyone had her own jobs to do. She never saw Mother with her hair uncombed. She was always dressed before coming out of her room.
When Hazel was in the seventh grade, the seventh and eighth grades were in the same room. She would get her own lessons and then listen in on the other grade. She and another girl asked the teacher if they could do eighth-grade work too. He said okay. Following the spring exam, they were the only two who got certificates. They had to take tests for eight subjects, the tests were made out, and the results checked over in Boise. None of the original ten eighth-graders passed.
Hazel wrote the school paper every year from about the fifth grade on up. She wrote a paper for eighth-grade graduation but got stage fright and had another girl read it. This girl absolutely ruined it. It had jokes in it about nearly everybody in the community.
A girl she always chummed with was always bragging that the next winter she was going to Logan to visit relatives. Hazel asked, “Why can’t I go to Logan?” In the end, Hazel did, and the other girl never did get there. The fall she was thirteen, turning fourteen in November, she and Stanley went to Logan on the train with their mother. They stayed in a hotel that first night. The next morning they went to the campus of the Utah Agricultural College.
They said, “We want to go to college here in Logan.”
She was at Logan for five years for college and preparatory work. The school gave her a list of people who took in boarders, but none of them wanted a girl. Dark came, and she had to stay a second night in the hotel. She and Stan both stayed at Bowmans’ that year. During that first year Hazel used to get terribly homesick, listening to the wind howling down the canyon, but by the end of the next summer she couldn’t wait to get back to school.
The next school year she stayed the first half of the year with the Amussen family (Ezra Taft Benson’s wife’s family before he married her).
She stayed at Cooks’ on Fifth East the rest of that year. They were always late for church, which was just across the street. Shortly after Christmas, she had her tonsils out. She was supposed to have been back to her apartment in two hours, and she got back in two days. Stan came in the Cooks’ buggy to visit her in the hospital, about two miles away. The folks had gone on home. That same spring she also had her appendix out. She weighed only 80 pounds and got so weak she couldn’t feed herself.
The elders were called in to give her a blessing (William Batt was one of them). She had been in bed about three weeks. Before they were through with the blessing, she could feel something like an electric current through her body. The next morning she got up, dressed, and walked two blocks. She got all the way better. She went back to school for a few weeks, but finally went home with three weeks of school left because of after effects from the operation. She got credit for the whole year.
Hazel roomed her last three years at school with Mary Frodsham. Hazel took every subject the school would let her take. She went to school in the dark, her face frozen, with the wind always blowing out of the canyon. Mary took subjects like art, music, etc. Mary hated to cake, and Hazel came home so late and so tired she didn’t care to eat, so they just ate out of cans. During that third year, her ulcers started.
Her fourth year, Hazel had a psychology class at seven o’clock in the morning because it was the only time the school offered it. At first she thought she wanted to be a nurse, but she finally decided to be a teacher.
Stan only went two years to school then decided he would rather farm than go to school.
Hazel met her future husband while going to school. Their house was at the other end of the block. In those days, you never talked to anyone unless you had officially met. Hazel talked to him one morning out on his steps. This was during her third year.
Walking home from Sunday School one Sunday morning that fall, she heard some pitter-patter behind her. It was William Batt. He was a star football player and the first president of the A Club. He wanted to know if she would go to the Ag Club Ball. The guy she was going with at the time, Grover Lewis, asked her after sacrament meeting if she was going to the ball.
She said, “Yes, I am. Are you?”
The ball was in November, and she went with William Batt, even though she had been going out with both Grover Dunford and Grover Lewis. She asked herself from among the three who would be a good father for her children. She prayed about it, and it hit her instantly that Bill Batt would be.
While she was back home at Christmastime, Bill Batt came up to Idaho, came out to the farm, had dinner, and took her to a dance. A couple days later Grover Dunford came up to Idaho Falls. He called but never came out. Back in Logan, Grover Lewis kept turning up everywhere, it seemed, and she finally had to tell him no more, to leave her alone. Bill came by and saw her having that final talk with Grover Lewis.
In March of 1914 Hazel had to be baptized in the Brigham Young pool at Logan High because the records of her eight-year-old baptism had been lost, and she could not remember when she was baptized.
She kept having dates with Bill. On his birthday in 1914, they took a picnic lunch over to a farm by the Blacksmith Fork River, and that is where she got her diamond. She once asked Bill, who was in his senior year, about how he asked her for their first date. He said he had watched her hat for a full year.
She used to receive a letter from him every day—with beautiful poetry—so fat that they took three two-cent stamps each. He came up to Idaho to visit once more during the summer. He had actually come up one other time to ask her dad if he could marry her.
Her dad got the material for her dress from Chicago, and she spent all summer making it by hand. They were married in October. He was already graduated and old enough to be married. “I didn’t want to take a chance on losing him,” Hazel recalled. He had sent himself to school and worked on the Logan police force for a year after school before taking up teaching.
No one from her family came down to Logan for their marriage in the Logan Temple on October 8, 1914. Grandma Batt (Bill’s mother?) did not attend either. They went back to Idaho Falls for a reception. Bill had come up and got her on the train. Nobody was there to meet them when they came back, so they hired a team, and the buggy had to make it through mud three feet deep. They had a reception the next night or two, Monday or Tuesday, she cannot remember for sure.
The first thing they bought after they were married was an umbrella so they could walk in Pocatello during the train layover. They stayed in Idaho Falls about a week. Almost everything they got at their reception was broken in their trunk of stuff when they got back to Logan.
They lived in an apartment their first six months. Bill worked nights on the police force. She was scared, had to have the windows all covered. A family lived in the rest of the house. It was a great big, filthy house located on Sixth North that no one had lived in for four years. A James family owned it.
Dorothy was born on September 29, 1915, at Grandma Batt’s house. When she was three weeks old, they went to Driggs, Idaho, where Bill was teaching school, the first place he taught.
That winter her dad bought a 5,000-acre dry farm and wanted Bill to be the manager. She urged him to sign the contract, but they went down there and got in a mess. He was supposed to get $100 a month and a new house built. They stayed the summer and enjoyed it. They got everything wound up in late October and went to the Valley for the winter. Ruth was born in December 1916, when they got down in the Valley. She was born in Clark.
It turned out to be a nightmare. Some of the fields were as far as seven miles from the house. They ate breakfast when it was still dark. They did everything with a horse. Sometimes there were twenty people in for a meal. They worked until dark and ate supper by lamplight. Hazel was supposed to get $85 for cooking for all those men. She got only one check for the three sum¬mers they were there. They were there about three years or so.
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