JAMES
CLARENCE (J.C.) NIELSON
and
ELDA
PETERSON
(and Jens and Mary Halvorsen Peterson)
written
by J.C. NIELSON,
typed
by his granddaughter, JAN.,
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| Leroy, Elda, Mary and Jens Peterson |
Fathers
education consisted of six weeks of schooling.
He was a great reader, and said he learned reading from the Desert
News. He was also quite a mathematician
of those days. Mother went to school
three years and became a school teacher.
How long she taught , I do not know.
This is a short introduction of my father and mother. From here on I will I will tell you some
things of their lives as I remember them as they were told to us.
They
took over running the Fountain Green Co-op store. When they had run it two years, they found
themselves in debt $40. That was a lot
of money in those days and they had one awful time getting that $40 paid.
They
moved over to Huntington, Utah. Their
first home was a hole in the side of a deep wash. Their granary was a wagon box in this
hole. A flood ran them out. They built a log cabin with two rooms. Their bedroom was in the attic. The entrance was a pole ladder that went to a
small door in the end of the gables.
When Father and I went down there to put a stone on Katherine's grave,
that being the year of 1923, he took me to their old home. His remark was, "There has not been a pole on the fence
or anything changed since we lived there forty years ago." There is a garage on the premises now where
the old house stood. The first year that
they lived in Huntington, Mother said
they lived on boiled wheat and venison.
There were a great number of deer
in the mountains. When they would get
short of meat, they would take the wagon, go into the hills and kill several
deer and bring them to town and butcher them.
Mother said she had to feed the men five times a day. Uncle Pete wasn't married then, but was
farming with Father and helping and trying to get a start for himself.
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| Mary Halvorsen Peterson Jens Peterson |
I'll
have to go back a ways because I forgot to tell you that Father was one of the
first county commissioners down in Emery County.
Uncle
Ras Beck, that's Mother's brother, he lived in Colorado, the San Luis
Valley. He wrote and told the folks how
much grain he had harvested that fall, and it was more than the whole town of
Huntington had produced. So father and a
man named Sanford pulled stakes and started for Colorado. Mother had to drive the team, and Father
drove the stock. When they got out to
just this side of the Colorado River, just as your entering that little wide
spot where they turn-off to go to the Arches Monument, their road came to an
abrupt end. They were on a cliff, and it
was very steep down. So, they took the
horses down, but they had to take all of there provisions and wagons and let
them down over the side of the cliff,
The wagons were taken apart so they could let over the cliff by a rope,
there being a post set in the rocky flat where there being a post set in the
rocky flat where the wagon was. The
trail from there down was or is to this day visible, only wide enough for one
horse. In 1936 I was working on A job
out in that area, so I did a little
research work, so I found some of those old timers out there where this
was. So I stopped one day and examined
it, and that post was still standing there with rope burns on it embedded down
into the post three quarters of an inch showing how many things had been let
over this cliff. The new road has cut
into this cliff now until the post is gone and that old land mark is almost
done away with.
From there on they went
down to the Colorado River. The
Colorado River is floating quick sand all the time. They had to keep testing it to see if the
stock could go over it. They stayed
there until they found the quicksand was cleared away, so they drove across the
river and started towards Colorado. They
traveled a full day, When night time
came. No water so they had to take the
stock back to water them. Mother was
there alone with the children, and a cougar was up on the hillside letting out
screams. She had never handled a gun in
her life, so she picked up the gun and got up in the wagon, sat on the spring
seat got the children with her and had this gun across her knees when Father
got back with the stock. Being a
courageous woman as Mother was, I believe she would have used the gun on that
cougar if he had come near.
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| Mary Peterson, La Rhea, JC & Elda |
Father
used to torment Mother about Mexicans starting to talk to her in Spanish. Mother had black hair, and she was sunburned
to beat the band. This Mexican started
to talk to her in Spanish. She shook her
head and said, "I don't understand
you." Father used to kid her about
the Mexican saying, "Ah, you can'ta
foola me. You a Mexican. So am I."
They
first located in Richfield, that's were Sadie was born. Then they moved to Sanford. His main mission was to locate another
town. The town of Ephraim was breaking
up, so he and Sanford located this town
of Sanford, Colorado. "Father
surveyed all the ditches that came into Sanford. The instrument that he used was a board which
he had made a groove in. He would set
that up on the ground and get it as level as he could, and then he would pour
water in the groove, keep adjusting it until the groove would fill with water,
and then he would lay a couple of sticks across the top of this board and site
over them and do the surveying that way.
My
earliest recollection was the family pictures.
I was about five years old. We
spent quite a little time getting everybody all dressed up, looking fine. We had to walk up four blocks in the middle
of the town,, and this photographer was a traveling photographer. He had a big tent pitched in the public
square. The whole family was on that picture
with the exception of Earnest. He was
not born yet. And of course Katie. Marcellus was in baby clothes. As I remember it, that was the first suit of
clothes that I ever had, and was I a proud little boy.
"I
can't remember every having toys like the boys have today. We would get willows and make sticks about
three feet long and call them stick horses.
We would run races with those stick horses, and oh, were we happy having
fun with those sticks. We spent many an
hour racing and maneuvering, handling those sticks in one hand and running like
furry. And then we would play
hockey, but we would use tin cans for
the puck and any stick we could pick up for the club. We'd choose up sides, and we would play hard
and have the great time of our lives.
Those were the things that made life worth while. We had to produce our own play things,
produce our own games, and it developed us very much I think.
Our
Easter day, we would hide eggs. We'd
gather eggs and hide them around the barn and the place, and if I could find
somebody's eggs, I would steal them and hide them someplace else. We would try to see who could bring in the
most eggs on Easter Morn. That lasted
just about one week before Easter Sunday.
Then we would have our colored eggs and our Easter Day.
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| Elda Leroy Nielson |
Another
game we used to play quite a bit was baseball.
Now we didn't have bought bats.
Sometimes we didn't even have a mask for the catcher, so we would save
our nickels and dimes and finally we bought one. Then we would make our bats from a piece of
round pole, and our balls were made from yarn.
We would wind them just as tight as we could. Then we got quite expert at putting covers on
them. We would sew leather covers and
put on these baseballs. Then we would
play in the street. We didn't have
coaches like they have today. Nobody had
the time. They were to busy trying to
feed their families, but we children had an awfully lot of fun playing
baseball. Later, as we got a little
older, we would go to Manassa and La Jara and Richfield and play the teams from
over there. During this time, I got to
be what we thought was a pretty good picture, and I pitched a good many games
in the neighboring towns and at home. In
Manassa one time, we were playing and Jack Dempsey, the great fighter of all
time, was up to bat. I miss-threw the
ball and made him dodge it. He threw his
bat down and said, "Don't you dare
do that again." I deliberately
threw the ball at him. He came out to
meet me, and I went in to meet him.
Before we got together, there were some grown people there who stopped
us. There were no licks struck. So, I knew Jack as a boy. It seemed that he would rather fight than
eat. He loved to fight. That is one reason, I guess, that he became a
world champion.
Then
on holiday, a fellow by the name of Walt Gilling would put up a lemonade
stand. That's about the only stand we
had. We had two stores in town. They'd sell candy and nuts. We'd have games and races and what not. Oh, we just had a great time. then on the 24th of July we usually had a sham battle. They'd have an immigrant train come in from
some direction into the center of town, the public square, and make a circle
and the Indians would attack. Well, when
I was a boy, it scared me every time I went to the 24th celebration. Later, as I got older, I participated in
these as an Indian. We sure had a lot of
fun in those. And you know, the people
from all over the valley would come and see that sham battle. It was something great, and to this day, the
24th of July is called "Mormon Day" out there in the San Luis
Valley. Sanford puts it on one day, and
Manassa the next day. You can hardly get
standing room in those little towns to see what's going on because they just
turn themselves loose. Everybody helps put
it on.
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| Elda |
What
I started to tell you was the money we had for our holidays. Many a 4th and 24th I got 25 cents. That had to do me. My folks just didn't have any money. Money was scarce in those days. There wasn't any circulating around, but we worked
hard. Father always kept meat on hand,
flour on hand, and we had milk. We never
went hungry. But there was no money to
spend.
Our programs on these holidays were held in what we called the Old Bowery. It consisted of some poles set in the ground, some more poles slung across and then some willows cut and put on top for a shade. The Church hadn't been finished yet, so we'd get in this Bowery and get what we thought was an awfully good program. I remember one song that was sung. A fellow by the name of Steve Taylor composed it. I don't remember who sung it, but it went something like this; I can only remember part of it. "A is for Anthon Nielson, the school trustee, B is for Bishop Bertelson, as big as can be, C is for Chris Block," That's all I can remember.
Our programs on these holidays were held in what we called the Old Bowery. It consisted of some poles set in the ground, some more poles slung across and then some willows cut and put on top for a shade. The Church hadn't been finished yet, so we'd get in this Bowery and get what we thought was an awfully good program. I remember one song that was sung. A fellow by the name of Steve Taylor composed it. I don't remember who sung it, but it went something like this; I can only remember part of it. "A is for Anthon Nielson, the school trustee, B is for Bishop Bertelson, as big as can be, C is for Chris Block," That's all I can remember.
The
San Luis Valley has an elevation of about 7500 feet, and it is very cold, and
we had very good skating. That was our
Winter recreation in those days. We had
a pond right close to Sanford. We'd go
down there and build us a fire and skate in the evening. Sometimes we'd have a hay rack ride, and we'd
go down on the river bed. It was a
couple of miles from town. And we'd
flood a piece of ground. The farmers
didn't care. We'd just flood that
ground. We'd wear out that out and then
go flood another piece. We got so we
were pretty good skaters. We played
pom-pom-pull-away and all kinds of games, and we had a lot of fun. Now my brother Melvin, was about the best
skater we had out there. He never took
his feet of the ice. He just weaved his
body. Sometimes he would be the last man
caught, and it would take the whole bunch of us to get him because he'd just
dodge all around us. I once saw him out
run a horse on the bank.
Everybody
in this part of the valley were farmers or cattlemen or sheepmen. There was no industry, not even a dairy. We had to milk our own cows. We couldn't sell any. The only thing we could sell was to make it
into butter. We would get 15 cents a
pound for the butter. Nearly everybody
had chickens and eggs. We'd buy those
eggs. They'd get 10 cents a dozen for
those eggs at that time. We were happy,
just as happy as we could be. But I
don't want those times to come back.
When we children would get about eight years old, Father would start us
working. Our first job was to help shock
hay. Now to shook hay, it is mowed into
a swath. Then the rake comes along and
rakes it up. Then it dumps it and makes
wind rows. Then we would come along with
our pitch fork and put five of these swaths in one pile, and we'd call it a
shock of hay. Then when we got ready to
haul the hay, we would line them up so we could drive down between them, and we
could load up very readily. It was all
done in a systematic manner. That was
the way we usually started to work. Then
our next job would be to rake hay. We
had what we called a self dump. We just
touched a lever, and it would dump the hay out from the rake, and then it would
come down and you'd go on and you'd rake some more. (The rake lifted the hay from the wagon to
the stack or barn)
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| Castilia |
That
was quite an industry at that time. We
put up stacks and stacks of hay every Summer.
It seemed to me like we worked at it all Summer long. We had a number of acres of our own hay. Then we went out on a ranch and put up hay on
shares. We had about a hundred acres of
Lucerne on this ranch that we put up on shares, and then a couple of hundred of
wild hay that we put up on shares. I
don't know what shares we got, but anyway, it was a way of making a living in
those days. We'd have to camp away from
home for a whole week.
As I
got older, I got playing ball with the Sanford baseball team. By this time , I had a pony. I'll tell you about that pony later on. Father would tell me about 11 o'clock on a
Saturday, "Well, you get to Sanford and help play that game."
About
this time in my life, I went up in the mountains with my father to look after
the cattle. We had to ride fence. It took us one day on one half of it and
another day on the other half of the fence.
Father was cutting a load of poles, and I was riding the fence. I got half way around and was coming to
camp. I was coming down a draw and there
was a service berry bush leaning over the trail. So, I leaned sideways on my horse to keep
from being brushed pretty heavily, and as I raised up, there stood a black bear
on his hind legs eating service berries.
The horse turned and ran back. If
he turned the other way I couldn't have stayed on, but he turned the way I was
leaning. When I got down where Father
was, I told him about it. He got his
gun, and we went up there and looked over the situation. I don't know which tore up the ground the
worst, the bear or the horse. I know we
both got out of there in a great hurry.
That is the closest I've ever had with a bear, getting with in a few
feet of him. I have seen several in the
hills, but that's the closest one I ever ran into.
My
schooling wasn't very good. I'm not
happy with what I had. My first teacher
was an eighth grade student. I never got
any phonics. I was quite a reader at the
time, but I don't think I got to much out of it. We had to memorize the words, not by
phonics. I did all right for the first
few years and got into the fourth grade.
Then I was kept out of school at intervals in the fall until work was
practically done, then taken out early in the Spring. I didn't get out of the fourth grade for
quite some time. I think it was three
years. Then the Church started an
academy. I went through the sixth and
seventh grades that Spring. The next
year I went to the academy again, and passed the eighth grade. Then I went one more year. I got very good grades in the first year of
high school, but for the life of me, I don't see how I could have gotten very
good grades in history and English, but I got them anyway.
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| Elda as Queen |
During
the year that I went to the eighth grade, we organized a basket ball team in
the school. There were five of us that
made it. There was Melvin, my brother,
myself, Archi Smith, Dice Biniger, and John Brady, and for our substitute we
had George Spresterback. We had no
indoor field, so we played outdoors most of the time. We played Alamosa school outdoors, and we
beat them. So they made a challenge that
if we came up and would get on their floor, they would beat the life out of
us. We went up and played them on their
floor, but during the meantime, while we were getting ready to go, we would
have to clean the assembly hall and put the benches away, then get in there and
play on the floor. During the game, I
was a guard. A smaller forward was
playing against me. I went up and took
the ball away from the basket. It made
him mad, and as I came down, he hit me in the eye. It almost caused a free-for-all. I called for time to get the tears out of my
eyes. I saw what was going on, and I
motioned our boys back, and I washed my eyes out and went ahead to play. After a few minutes of playing this time, (we
had a coach that learned us all kinds of good plays and lots of dirty
plays). I started working those dirty
plays on him, and he was on the floor the biggest part of the time. Finally he came up and apologized and
said, "I'll never tackle you again. Please lets play ball." When we got to the dressing room that night,
there were some people from the East that watched it. One of them came in, and said he had never
seen team work like we had. We had an
old Pittsburgh player that coached us for these games, and we sure appreciated having
him. We traveled all over the valley in
different places. We played that year
and the next year, and we never lost a game, never even came near losing a
game. I was very happy to think that I
made the team because there were quite a few working for it, and it helped me
out when I came to Utah because we started a club in Mapleton, and played there
some.
Now
I'll go back to my baseball games. At
about fifteen years of age, I played with the main team of Sanford. On Saturdays only, about 11 o'clock when we
were on the ranch, my father would send me down to play my game. I played with Sanford, I think it was three
years. In baseball I was third
baseman.
When
I turned 20, I went to Denver for the Winter.
I wanted to get some experience in the carpenter trade. I'll tell you how I started in that later on. I went to Denver with a fellow by the name of
Earl Spencer and lived with him and his wife.
I worked there all Winter, and of course being a country boy was quite a
rube. The boys that I ran around with
didn't bother me much. They helped me
out all they could. I worked all Winter,
and I learned quite a little bit about the business. Along toward Spring I began getting homesick,
so I went back to Sanford, and went to work with Lorin again. Lorin was responsible for me learning the
carpentry trade. I shall endeavor to
tell you how it happened. It was quite
late one Fall, just before I turned 16, and I didn't want to go to school that
late. I was complaining. Lorin said,
"Why don't you get some manual training?, I'll help you
out." He'd been to school and knew
what to teach me. Well, he bought me
some tools and some lumber. We went and
saw Uncle Pete. He had a two room log
cabin. He let us use that free gratis,
and we put up a stove. I went in there,
and I made joints, all different kinds.
After awhile Lorin said, "I
think it's about time for you to make something." Mother said,
"Make a wash stand."
Lorin designed it, and I went to work on it, and Orin, my youngest son,
has that wash stand up in his basement now.
I don't know whether any of the rest of the children want it or
not. It isn't the best job, but I was
quite proud of it, I'll tell you, when I was 16 years old. I worked with Lorin around there for some
time. We built a house or two, a few
houses.
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I
remember one house we were on was down on the Hagard ranch. Ernest was a small boy. He wanted a burro. So, I bought two burros from Mr. Hagard. He wouldn't sell just one of them, so I had
to buy two. Two dollars a piece. We bought them and took them up home, and
Raymond Kirby bought one of them. Well,
Ernest took that burro and trained it.
He couldn't ride it with anything but a bridle on it. Father was running a store by this time. He'd ride it over to the store and tie it up
with the halter, take the bridle and take it in the store. Kids around town would go to get on that
burro, and it'd buck them off. Ernest
would come out and put the bridle on him and get on him and ride away. It's funny how you can train a burro. They're a mighty smart animal.
I
went to work for a contractor in La Jara, and I got some quite good experience
from him. He took quite a liking to me,
and he and his wife wanted to go back East.
He had his foreman, but he had me run the books and write out
checks. (he was not very well educated,
but his wife was) When they came back
she came, and we went over the books.
She said, "You're not a very
good bookkeeper, but you kept them so we can tell that you haven't taken any
money." That was quite an
experience for me.
I
went to Antonito to work. I got in a
shop with a fellow by the name of Mr. Schupe.
During the time that I was working in Antonito, the folks moved here to
Utah. That was in 1911. I stayed there because I had a pretty good
job. During the time that I was in his
shop, we had a sanding machine that didn't gather dust like they do now. It just flew all over the room, and we wore a
nose muzzle. That dust got into my
nostrils. It was bothering me very
much. I went to the doctor, and he told
me to get out of there for awhile. I got
out of there, and I went back down to Sanford.
A
fellow by the name of Bill Spencer was getting ready to go and freight to a
reservoir up on the Rio Grande river.
So, I went and drove a four-horse team for him freighting cement and
reinforcing steel. It took us three days
to make the trip, so we made what we called our half way camp. It'd take us two days to go from the camp
down to Creed and back. Then It'd take
us one day to go from the camp to the reservoir and back. One day we got up, and turned our horses
loose. The grass was knee high. It was my turn to go get the horses. Mr. Spencer, at that time was a U.S.
Marshall, and he was also a game warden.
His pistol was laying on the table, and I asked him if I could take
it. He said, "Go ahead." I went around the first little hill. It was quite a high hill, but I wasn't up on
it very far. Something jumped out from
under a tree. It scared the deer
down. The deer came down a trail that
went angling up this cliff. I had to
step back to keep her from running over me.
She had her head back, looking back.
As she passed me, I wondered why I didn't shoot her. About that time she dropped dead. I went and dressed it. When I got into camp, Mr. Spencer said, "Where have you been?" I said,
"Well the horses were over the second canyon." He said,
"Oh." My breakfast was
sitting on the table, and I said,
"What would you do with a fellow if he killed a deer?" He said,
"I'd help him eat it."
So we left the horse unharnessed and his boy and I went out and got the
deer. That's the first deer I ever
killed. I never even knew I shot
it. I guess I was to excited.
There
was a little stream that we were camped on.
We had fish all the time. We'd
take a fishing pole with two fly hooks on it, and you'd drop it in this little
stream. It was probably six feet
across. You'd get one fish on, and then
you'd let him pull the other hook around until another one got on. You didn't take them out for one fish. You always got two everytime you took fish off. Maybe that's the reason I don't like fish so
well today.
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It
was while we were in this camp that our last load was to be gotten. We only had one load to get. Mr. Spencer went to Creed after it. His son, Marvin, and I stayed and hunted
deer. We didn't have any luck at
all. We saw a few, but we never got a
deer. During the night we had an awful
rainstorm, and our tent was pitched right by a big cliff right next to it. When we woke up in the morning, we had the
nicest spring right between our beds that you ever saw. We talked it over and decided that we would
have to go down and help Mr. Spencer with that last load because he was going
to have trouble with as much rain as there was.
It was muddy, and it would be hard pulling for his four head of
horses. So, we each took our four head,
got our chains and dragged our double trees with us. We met him about 5 to 10 miles from
camp. We hitched twelve head of horses
on that one load. We found places that
needed everything that those twelve head of horses had. We were sometimes pushing mud with the
axle. That was quite an experience for
me to be in such a rainstorm as that was.
Then to cap it all. All the wagon
bridges, all the railroad bridges, the telegraph lines and all the telephone
lines were all knocked out. Of course,
we were way up in the mountains above Creed, a full day's drive, and there were
no lines up there, but we got word. When
we took this load up to the reservoir (we were tied up there until they got the
bridge built again) the contracting outfit wanted us to cut some timber at a
sawmill. We moved our camp over to the
sawmill, and we sawed logs into lumber for a week, maybe two. When we got down in Sanford, my folks had
written to everyone in the county except me.
When I got home, the first thing I did was send word that I was all
right. Of course, they didn't know. My mother was quite a worrier about her
children. We had quite an experience
during that storm.
I
went back up to Antonita and went to work in the shop again. Then I got playing ball with the Antonita
team. We had a baseball league there in
the valley, and Antonita and Del Norte were the winners, so they had to play
off for the championship during the county fair. We went up to Alamosa (that's where the county
fair was) and the two main pitchers got to many drinks under their belt, and
the manager wouldn't let them pitch. Me,
being a substitute pitcher, he put me in the box. I threw twelve innings, and there wasn't a
score made until the twelfth inning, not on either side. The Del Norte manager came up to me after I
was through with four innings, and said,
"Lad, you'd better quit pitching.
You're going to through your arm away the way you're
throwing." The catcher was
signaling for a spitball all the time, and that's hard to handle. But, how they made that score, they knocked
the ball into the right field, and a dog picked it up and ran off with it. Well, they let the batter make the circle,
and I asked the umpire why he let that go by.
He said, "Oh, we've got to
finish this game some way." So,
that finished the game for the championship of the San Luis Valley League at
that time, and I have never been able to get my arm into shape. I tried after I came to Utah to get it in
shape so I could pitch ball for Springville.
But, It just wouldn't work. I
would throw several evenings lightly then when I would turn loose, it would
feel like my shoulder was unjointing and flopping back together. Boy, it would hurt. I'm sorry I didn't take his advice because I
would have liked to play ball here in Utah.
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After
being raised in that open country out there in Colorado, this country seemed so
close and tight. I didn't feel that I
had room to expand or even move around.
There were only six hundred people in Mapleton and 3,200 in Springville,
but I still felt awfully crowded.
They
were building the Mapleton amusement hall when I came here. They finished it that Winter. I went over to the committee and asked them
if I could come and donate them some work.
They asked me if I had any stock or paid any money on it, and I told
them, "No." They said, "You can't work." I went back home, and Father said, "What did they tell you?" I told him.
Bert Whitting was there. Bert
went over to the committee and talked to them, and pretty soon here came one of
the committee and wanted me to come over and work. There were four or five men working on the
East side on the windows, casing them and installing them. I took the West side. I finished it before that bunch did. Then I went over to the inside entrance doors
and set my jamb. I went up on the stage
after my casing. A carpenter by the name
of Willis Johnson said it looked out of plumb, so he crowded the bottom i a
half an inch. I cased it, and when I
went to hang the door, I found this discrepancy. I hit the ceiling and asked who'd been
monkeying with it. He told me he
did. He and I had quite a word row right
there about leaving my work alone.
I was
to be partners in on the Oak Spring Farm;
Rastus, Father and I. We called a
meeting and would be discussing things.
When I would say anything, Father would say, "What do you know?. I got so that I didn't take any active part
in the meetings from then on. He put me
to raising the damn. I hauled dirt in on
the damn for the little reservoir there and I raised it a couple of feet. He decided that it was high enough so he sent
me down to prune some trees. I had
pruned a few trees with Charlie Whitting, who was considered a very good man on
pruning trees. I went to pruning them
just as Charlie was, and Father came down.
I had five or six of them all done.
Boy, did he tell me off, and he ran me right out of there, and he told
me never to prune another tree.
Well,
that was enough for me so I left the farm and hunted me a job, but I looked
like a kid. I was 21 years old, but I
still looked awfully young to be hunting carpentry work. L. J. Whitting turned me down flat. I finally found that they were building a
Spanish Fork High School. A contractor
by the name of Henry Evanson was the man.
I kept tantalizing him for a job until one day he said, "Well, I guess I'll have to hire you and
fire you to get rid of you." I
said, "Well that will be fine. Will you try it?" He took me down in the basement and gave me a
room to do, and he gave me $18 for finishing the room. As he went out, he mumbled these words, "This room doesn't need to be finished
to good." The next time he came down,
he examined my work, looked it all over, congratulated me on it, and said, "Will you finish the office?" I said,
"Yes, I'll be happy to finish the office." I was only in this room three days. That gave me six dollars a day for my
work. The carpenters wages then were
three dollars and twenty cents at that time.
The next day he came down, and said,
"You can't afford to finish that room for three dollars and twenty
cents. I'm going to get Harvey Whitney
to do it for me. I'm going to give you
class rooms to finish." Well, we
got $40 for finishing a class room, and I could knock them out so I got $6 a
day right along. After all the other men
had left, there was Victor Lafferson, a young fellow about my age or a little
younger, and I who stayed and picked up the odds and ends for wages. We were there a couple of months after school
started.
About
this time I met Elda Peterson, this being
a dance on 10 January, 1915. I
saw her across the hall. She had on a
beautiful black dress. I asked a friend
who she was. He told me. I went over and asked her for a dance and she
danced with me. She knew who I was. There was a fellow trying to get out with her
that night, and she was afraid of him, so she asked me if I would dance the
medley with her. "I said, "You bet, I'd be glad to." The next change was the medley, so we went
into step and danced the medley. I led
her over to the cloak room. She went
after her coat, and I went over to our cloak room and got my coat. I waited in line, and when she came along I
froze on her. When she got outside, she
said, "I didn't mean
this." I said, "Well, but I do. I'm going to see you safely home tonight. "That was the beginning of a courtship
and a mighty find life for me."
That
Summer I went out to Goshen Gap and worked for L.J. Whitney on a strawberry
ditch. It was cemented all the way. We got through with that ditch early in the
Fall, that is , quite early. There were
no cars out there to get in to see my girl very often. I owned a buggy and a horse by this time, but
it was left up on Father's and Rastus' farm.
When I came in, I had a horse and buggy to take her out with.
When we got through out there, I came home and worked around Mapleton and Springville that Fall. I courted Elda, and I had to beat Horace Fuller's time because she was engaged to him. I finally did. We became engaged, and I got the size of her finger and went over to Provo to buy the engagement ring. Well the ring I picked out was a little to small for her finger so they had to cut it into and build in a piece. The next morning Lorin had the midwife up there. Ferl was the baby, and that midwife told me how big a piece had to be put in the ring, how much I paid for it. I don't remember seeing anybody that I knew from the time I left Mapleton 'till I got back.
At
this time, Father wanted me to go back to Colorado with him. He had to go out and make some collections,
and he thought it would be nice for me to go with him. He knew I had a little money saved. I said,
"No" I'm going to get married." He said to me. "Who to?' I said,
"Elda Peterson." He
said "No. You're not." I
said, "What's the matter, Father,
isn't she good enough for me?" He
said, "That's just the
trouble. You're not good enough for
her." Well, I said, "I have
her parents consent, and I don't have to have yours." So, we're going to get married." We got married on 12 January 1916, just one
year and two days from the time I met her.
You know, all during our courtship, and all this time, I never felt that
Elda was ever a stranger to me. I felt
that I'd known her all her life.
We
had a little experience at the temple that was unusual. I think I ought to say something about
it. When we came out of the temple into
the breezeway, I had taken off my shoes and tied a certain knot in them, tied
them together. I thought, "Well, this will identify my shoes when
I come out." Lo and behold,
everybody that was in the temple had the same style shoe and they tied them
together the same way I did. I finally
wound up by finding a pair of shoes that fit me, and I went out. I don't know whether I got my own shoes or
somebody else's. We went over to get
something to eat not far from the temple, and we saw a nice wedding cake
decoration. We were supposed to pick one
up, so we bought it. She said, "You'll have to put that in your
suitcase because mine is plumb full.
When we got home, she never even had a handkerchief, not even a pair of
stockings in her suitcase. She had to
write up to the temple, and she got everything back in fine shape. I guess we were both a little bit flustered.
Cel and a bunch from Mapleton decided that they would take us off the Orem train and have a lot of fun with us that night. Well, Ernest was going to school over in Provo so he came down to the Orem train and met us. He got on the train and told us we'd better be careful. So we got off at fourth North and went two blocks West, then walked over to where Erik Boreman's home is now, and there was a livery stable there. We hired a livery rig and driver to take us home. We went right down through town and saw this big bunch waiting around town to create some fun with us. Well, I don't know how we got by them, but we did. Ernest called Lorin, and Lorin had gone down and told Roy Peterson he was to meet us on fourth North. Well, he got excited, and he came out on eighth South, waiting there for us to come. Roy didn't find us. We kidded him a lot about not knowing North from South. Grandpa Peterson and Grandma Peterson and Lorin and my Mother gave us a nice reception at the Peterson's. Father wasn't there. I think the present that we appreciated about as much as any was the present that Bert and Aunt Sadie fetched us. It was a big box of groceries, mostly things that he'd raised on his own farm such as hams, carrots, potatoes, cabbage, what ever he had off his farm. Sadie and Bert were having quite a hard time financially at that particular time, but we sure appreciated that box of vegetables.
We stayed at the Peterson's until we could
find a place and buy what furniture we would need. Elda worked at house work for $3.50 and $4 a
week, and she earned enough money to buy our first bed, springs and mattress. We rented two rooms of a house that Leonard
Stone now owns. We paid $3.50 a month
for that place. We didn't have any
electricity in Mapleton at that time, we had coal oil.
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Elda
went to town one day to buy some hardware for a small cabinet. Father saw her writing out a check, he came in from Colorado. He beat her to me, and he said, "Do you think it's business for a woman
to write out a check?" I said, "When I married Elda, we were partners,
and we're going to stay that way."
"I don't think that's good business." Later on in this narrative, we will show you
how Father changed.
I
went to work for L.J. Whitney on houses that Spring. One night when I came home, Elda shoved a
letter in my face and said, "What
does this mean?" I read the letter,
and it was from the Spanish Fork sexton inviting me to come down and pay for
the burial of my baby. Elda was hurt,
and I didn't blame her. I said, "Well, let's go down and see what this
is about." I hadn't unhitched the
horse yet, so we got in the buggy and went down there and hunted him up. When I handed him the letter, he looked at me
and said, "Oh, you're not the
fellow. You're not the guy. I beg your pardon." Elda felt a whole lot better, and so did
I.
Sometime
early that Spring Chris Larsen got us to move into his home and keep house with
him free of rent and he furnished most of the groceries, just to have somebody
moved in with him. After we'd been
there a little while, he wanted to know if I wouldn't go in with him on his
farm. He had a nice 40 acre farm, and he
said, "I think you ought to buy you
a nice piece of ground. I'll help you by
backing you up." We located a piece
of 8 acre ground and paid $1,900 for it.
Chris helped me borrow the money.
About that time, Father decided that he would come and help me, so he
came and signed the mortgage. Only a
couple of years later, I stepped into the bank, and they said, "Now listen, you can have Chris and your
father off of that note if you want them."
I said, "I'd sure like to
stand on my own two feet if I can."
And they let me do it.
We stayed
with Chris Larsen for some time. He was
a widower, and he started chasing a woman down in Spanish Fork that worried him
to beat the band, and he just tormented Elda about talking and telling her his
troubles. He even got so bad that he
took his valuable papers and rolled them under the rug in the middle of the
floor because he was afraid that she was just trying to take him for what he
had. I don't think so. We were very well acquainted with her. She seemed to be a very nice woman.
We
got the farm work done, and I went down to the Spanish Fork sugar factory and
went to work. I worked there for quite
some time. During this time we decided
that I would run my farm and he would run his.
After I worked there for quite some time, they had to lay off some
men. I' being one of the younger men,
was laid off. So, I went to work with
L.J. Whitney out on the government ditch again around the point of the mountain
from Lincoln Beach. While I worked on
that sugar factory, I was getting rich, I thought. I was getting 50 cents an hour. We worked 10 hours a day. That'd give me $30 a week. We were sure getting ahead at that time, but
it played out.
About
this time the ICS correspondence school sent word to me that they had a job in
Salt Lake for me. They only offered me
$15 a week. I couldn't live on that in
Salt Lake, and I didn't know anywhere else to go, so I had to turn that down. I asked Father if he could help me out while
I worked my apprenticeship in Salt Lake, and he was in no financial condition
to do it at that time. I had to give it
up and go to work at my trade.
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So, I
went out west of Lincoln Beach on the ditch project. We also took a tent, and Elda went with
us. She cooked for Lorin and Melvin, two
brothers of mine, and her brother Roy.
While I was there, I built my first boat. We fished, hunted ducks, and took rides, and
finally the boat was stolen. A fellow
asked me one day if he could borrow it to just take a little ride. He went clear across the lake we found out
latter, and that's the last we saw of the boat.
He just left it and walked into Eureka or somewhere.
About
that's time I became what they called in those days, a walking boss. Now it is classed as a general foreman. When it became cold, Elda went to her
mother's. I was the foreman, and when
Grant was born, I came in. Mr. Whitney
got so mad he fired me. I got Ernest
Strong to take it over until I could get back, but evidently that did not suit
Mr. Whitney. So, he fired me for not
staying out there. He went out there and
put in another man, a total stranger, as foreman. He sat in the tent all Winter long drinking
his liquor. The next Spring Mr. Whitney
came after me to go out there and help him finish the job. By this time, I had gotten some work on my
own. Just a few days after Grant was
born Sam Fullmer got me to build on to his house. That is the starting of my going for
myself. From then on I picked up on job
after an other, and I made a very good name for myself. I worked for Whitney at times and other times
and other times when I didn't have something to do. Mr. Whitney always underbid everybody. He was a fine man, but sometimes his judgment
wasn't the best in the world. When he
wanted me to go back and finish that job, that was the next Spring. By now I had all the work that I could take
care of.
My
second contract was with the city of Mapleton on the city hall. We also built two cells in the city hall for
the jail. That was my introduction, and
I had learned something from Mr. Perry's job.
I decided that I was figuring too low on the labor, and I did fairly
well on this job, but not to good.
From
there I went down to Carbon County and worked on the Carbon County mines camp. They were new mines in those days. I worked building homes, hotels, post
offices, what not. I went with Ernest
Strong. He was the foreman for a Salt
Lake contractor. During the time we were
there, this Salt Lake contractor took sick, and he told Ernest that we would
have to contract to work by piece work.
There was Ernest Strong, Elias Strong and myself there, and we took
contracts on them. I think we were
working for around $7 a day by this time if I remember right. We took contracts for these cottages to
finish them, and when we got through, we added up our earnings, and we made $14
a day. Boy was I happy. About this time World War I was on. I was registered and put in a group that was
back quite a ways. They kept building up
towards me, and just in time the armistice was signed, I got notice that I
would be in the next draft. The
Armistice was signed on 11 November, 1918,
so I did not get in the army at all.
I don't believe i missed anything.
About
this time, they began selling bonds to put the war over, and they made the
bonds with a coupon on them. When the
interest came due, you could clip that coupon and send it in and get your
interest. About the time that coupon was
due for interest collection, they would float another bond and they would have
a committee come around and sell you bonds.
If you didn't buy the bonds, they would say, ""Well, we will report you as
unpatriotic," so we would buy the bonds and have to sell the other bonds
we had in order to buy these new bonds.
We would take them to the bank and sell them at a discount, and the
money people would but these bonds, clip the coupon, and get interest plus the
discount, but they didn't pull that in the second world war. Due to the fact I lost so much money on those
bonds, I started working sixteen hours a day around Mapleton. I remember going to work early in the
morning, working eight hours before noon.
Elda would come and get me and transfer me to another job. I would eat my lunch on the road. Then she would come and get me when my
sixteen hours were up. I worked that way
for a long while. In November I think it
was, I just couldn't get out of bed, so we got Dr. John Anderson up there. He said I was just completely worn out and he
made me stay in bed for a certain length of time. I wouldn't advise anybody to work that
way. It's not good. You're not supposed to work that long. My posterity, I hope, will take this heading
and not try to work that way.
Mapleton
hired me to go up Hobble Creek canyon and cement a ditch for them. A cable broke on the a mixer, and I couldn't
get a cable in this county so I got on the Orem (train) and went to Salt
Lake. On this Orem was H.T. Reynolds. He was one of the leading men in
Springville. He was a banker, a
Merchant, a contractor, and we considered him very wealthy. He was a very fine man, and we got to talking
about our lives, and this, that, and the other.
In our conversation, I told him about having the opportunity of going to
Salt Lake and studying architecture under Waren Staganza. He said,
"Why in the world didn't you come to me?" I would have lent you all the money you
needed to live on, then after you got through your schooling and you served
your apprenticeship and went into business for yourself, you could have paid me
back." That is not all that Mr.
Reynolds did for me. When I was doing
subcontracting for these contractors, I would go in and talk to him about the
job that was offered to me, and he, being a contractor had figured all these
jobs, and I would tell him what I was being offered, and he would either say
, "Go ahead. I believe you can make a little
money," or "You better leave it alone." I never failed to take his advice. If he told me to go ahead, I knew that I
could have all the money that I needed to put that job over. I have had some of the finest acquaintances
in this world. Mr. Reynolds and Mr.
Perry are two men that will always be in my heart.
I am
going to dwell on your mother's folks lives a little bit, and I am very sorry I
don't know more about them, but I'll tell it as it was told to me as I remember
it. Grandfather Peterson and also
Grandmother Peterson were born in Denmark.
They came to this country as immigrants and converts of the Church. They met and were married. They had two children by this marriage. Grandfather was a very hard-working,
industrious man. He got a job on the
railroad between Thistle and Fairview, and he earned quite a piece of money for
those days. When he came home, his
father took the money away from him, and wouldn't even give him enough to go to
a circus in a day or two. His father was
kind of an old Danish, domineering man.
After Grandma and Grandpa got married, he went out and sheered sheep for
a living in sheep shearing time. During
those times, there weren't any laws to make bosses furnish them good, pure
water and a nice place to live. They
went out to Thompson, Utah, and Grandfather got poisoned in that water out
there. He had to come home. It settled in his leg, and it was amputated. He bought him an artificial leg. He tried awful hard to wear that leg, but he
could not. The pressure on the leg in
the socket would work the bone right through the flesh. So, he had to give it up. After I was married into the family, we got
to talking one day. I said, "Lets go over and talk to that doctor
and see what's wrong." So, we
did. He said, "Oh, I just experimented on you. I cut the bone straight off. I never trimmed the edges." He said,
"We'll have to do it again."
I said, it'll be a free job this
time?" The doctor said, "Oh, by all means, no.!"
Grandfather said, "Well
then, we won't have it done." So,
he wore a peg leg from then on. He made
his own peg leg. He would double up his
knee, put it into kind of a notch in a black willow tree. One day he broke that off, broke the bottom
part off. He asked me if I could fix
it. I took a log and bored a hole up through
it. Then I took a piece of oak, and
shaped it to fit that, and we fastened it in.
He wore that the rest of his days.
Grandmother
was a very beautiful woman in her younger days.
They had two children.
Your mother was the oldest, her name was Elda. She was born 5 December, 1895. Roy was born a few years later. I don't know just when. Those were the only two children that they
had. Their first home was out by the
Olsen's sheep feeding coral on South Mapleton only across the street. The house is torn down, and there is a shed or
a machine shed built in the same place.
The home was out of old ties gathered up from the railroad.
In
the early days of your mother's life, they had a school house on South
Mapleton. She went to that. Silvester Allen lived in it after they quite
using it for a school house and centralized their school. They tell me they had three schools--one on
the north, one in the center, and one on the south. I don't remember the one on the north.
After
Elda and I were married, we could see him go to the school house , and we could
almost set our clock by the time he went.
He had a white horse that he rode, and in good weather, he would call by
and pick up Grant when Grant got to be old enough and take him with him. Oh, did Grant enjoy his grandfather. I don't believe Earl remembers very much
about him because he was pretty young when Grandfather died.
There
is a picture of Elda somewhere when she was a queen in a celebration in
Mapleton. It's enlarged. I had it enlarged, and it is in the family
somewhere. I don't know just where it
is. You can see from that, if you get to
see the picture, what a beautiful woman she was.
I
didn't tell you how he got his foot hurt.
He was hauling a load of lumber, and he was sitting on the front of it
with his feet hanging over the front. He
pulled down into a creek, and one of his horses balked and threw himself back,
and he hit one of Grandpa's feet and mashed it. That is one of the reasons that he had lost
that foot. When he drank this poison
water and got himself in bad shape over the water, it settled in his foot. That is the reason he had to have it
amputated.
Sometime
after we were married, we were living over on our little eight-acre farm. They decided they wanted a china
cupboard. They didn't feel like they had
enough money to buy one, I had no work in the winter time, so I said, "If you'll furnish the material, I'll
come over and build it." I moved my
bench and saw horses and tools over in their living room because I had no place
else to work, and I built the China Closet, and Hollis has it up in his home
today.
Earl
was born on 3 December 1919. When we got
our notification that he was on his way,
Elda would not let me get the doctor or her Mother to come over and
help. She just staved me off, didn't
think it was right, but finally I went and got her Mother. Then her mother and I decided we would call
the doctor. The doctor didn't get there
any to soon. He just came off another
case. In those days they delivered the
babies at home, and he carried the equipment along with him. We had to sterilize everything after he got
there. In those days they kept the woman
in bed ten days after childbirth. We had
an Evans girl, and she stayed with us ten days.
When we got Elda out of bed she left us.
That was to early, so she started doing her own work. Earl got the colic, he was sure a hard baby to
take care of for awhile. So we hired
another girl by the name of Wilson. She
got to stealing things, and one night I came home from work, and found out we
didn't have any girl. Elda wouldn't let
me hire another one. She did the work
herself, and got along very well. You
know, after a person lies in bed for ten days, they're not very strong. It was just to much on Elda to do her own
housework and take care of the two children.
We had quite a time for some little time. Finally I got another girl, and she stayed
with us and got Elda on her feet. At the
time of Earl's birth, we were living on an eight-acre piece of ground that we
owned in Mapleton. I began getting a lot
of work and had several men working for me this year. I didn't have much time to spend on the farm
and with my family. I was quite
busy.
During
this time one evening, we were just finishing supper, the lightning struck the
electric pole right out in front of our place, followed the wires right into
the house, Kicked our telephone to pieces, burned all the wires up to a crisp
in the whole system, but it didn't set our house afire. We didn't have any lamp in the house at that
time. I had my carpenter overalls, so I
cut off a button with quite a lot of cloth and took some lard and put it into a
dish, and put the button down and lit the cloth. In olden days, they called that a bitch. That was our light for that night. Of course, the next day we rustled a
lamp. I had to rewire that whole
house. Every foot of that wire had to be
taken out because the insulation was burned, and you would just touch it and it
would fall off. I had Grant in my arms,
and Elda was still feeding Earl when the lightning struck. Grant and I were over by the kitchen
range. Elda said, it looked like a
spear of fire came out of that telephone towards the stove, and the first thing
I heard was, "Are you
alright?" I said, "Yes, are you?" I'll tell you it was quite an
experience. From then on, whenever a
lightning storm came up, and I was working in Springville, believe me, I had to
take off for Mapleton. Elda was sure
frightened of lightning and very nervous abut it.
I
believe this is the Summer that I built the duplex for Deeles over on second
north and second east, right on the corner.
The building still stands. Lou
Whitney was the architect. He put the
rafters 32 inches apart, and I was afraid that we would have trouble with
it. I went and asked him if he wouldn't
allow me enough to put the rafters the right distance apart. I would do the work free if they would pay
for the material. He said, "I've designed it, and you build it
it." I had an awfully lot of
trouble with that roof, and Mrs. Deele called Me up on day and told me she was
going to sue me. I said, "Have you got your plans?" She said,
"Yes." I went over and
showed her what was wrong with that roof.
So, she went down and jumped on Mr. Whitney. When he got hold of me, he said, "Now, I don't approve of you turning me
in like that." I said, "Well, you were making a fool out of me,
and I had to protect myself someway. She
threatened to sue." That's the last
I heard of that roof.
I
bought my first mixer during that time I was building that Place and other
places in town. I did some hundred
thousand dollars worth of business that year, and it was a very good year for
me. I make some money, but not what a
person is entitled to for taking all those chances. Everybody seemed to be wanting to figure
jobs, and too many were never prepared to figure a job. I had to figure very low, but I watched my
jobs very carefully, and I came out alright.
The
first day of that year of 1920 I bought my first automobile which was a rag
top. We were invited to Andrew
Halverson's for dinner that day. We
pulled into the yard. Then, when we went
to leave, Grant and I got into the car.
Of course, I had to back up to turn around. The Model T had pedals, and you pushed a
pedal down and it reversed it, a certain pedal.
Well, that caught on the floor board and held and I backed into a great
big ash tree and cave the back of that car in.
It broke the tail lights off which were coal oil. I pushed that back out, and I had to remodel
the back bow on my car. That was my
experience with my first automobile on the very first day that I owned it. I will never forget the expression on grant's
face when he looked up at me and smiled.
He didn't know whether to smile or cry or what, but he did make a
smile. Earl was only two months old
then, so he wasn't in the car with me.
Every place I went in that car, Grant had to go. That new automobile cost me $618. I remember that so well. Six hundred and eighteen dollars was a mighty
hard piece of change to get.
I
believe it was the next year that most of these carpenters that worked for me
decided that they just as well go contracting too. I had too much opposition, and I didn't get
very much work that year, so I went to work where I could find work by the day. One job that I took up was the asylum on the
building on the right hand side as you're approaching the old building that's
in the center of the street. I worked
there for quite sometime.
Grandpa
Peterson was very sick. Each morning as
I went up to work, I would stop and see how Grandpa was . One morning he was so very low that I stayed
right with him. I didn't even go back
over and tell Elda how her father was.
About this time, Earl was just big enough to follow his mother
around. Grandpa was lying in bed, and I
was sitting there at the side of him. He
said to me, "What time is
it?" and I told him. He looked at me, and he said, "Well I haven't long to wait." It wasn't just a few minutes, maybe a half
hour until he passed away very peacefully.
Then I went over to tell Elda about her father, and I found Earl and
Grant tagging their mother out into the wash house. Of course it was quite a shock to her
mother. She expected it, but we're never
ready for those things to come.
Grandpa
had the deed of the home in his own name, so I got a deed made out to
Grandma. I got Earnest (he was a notary
public) to come down. Grandpa signed it,
and Earnest notarized it. I went over and
had it recorded. That cost me 75
cents. Then they had several hundred
dollars in the bank. I went to the bank
to see what I could do to get that in her name.
Ray Maycock said to me,
"James, we know you well. If
you'll give us a bond for $1800, we will change it over." So, that's what I did. I gave them the bond, and we changed it over,
so Grandma had the money. I straightened
up their whole estate simply because there was no strife amongst the
children. Neither one of them wanted any
part of it. They wanted their mother to
have it. I got that straightened up for
75 cents. Grandpa Peterson died, 7 September, 1921, age 50
During
this time that she was in bed, Father had a daughter buried down in
Huntington. He wanted to put a marker
up, and he had it ordered, and it was ready.
Everybody seemed to be busy. It
didn't mater whether I was busy or not but every seemed to busy. So I voluntarily said, "We'll put it in my truck, and we'll go
down, but we will have to hurry because I've got to get back." Well, we left early in that morning, got down
there, and got the monument set by noon, and of course, I wanted to come
back. Father wanted to visit. He had some old friends there. We stayed over night. We came back the next day, and right at the
mouth of Spanish Fork Canyon, we had a cloudburst. A mudslide came down and buried a car or two
part way, and it was about three feet deep on the highway. We began pushing cars across. We would take one way and fetch another
back. They all got after Father to go
and get in the car. He was not to well
at the time, but he caught a cold. I
don't think he saw a well day from then on.
He passed away in January.
I had
a considerable amount of work this Summer.
One house that you might be interested in that I built was Ray
Burraston's over in Goshen. They came
over and had me build that house over there.
Hilda Burraston boarded us. We
slept in the house after we got it so we could make our bunks down on the
floor. We stayed right there. We didn't travel like we do now. The roads weren't good. We built that house for Ray on a wage
proposition. They seemed to be very
well pleased with their home, and they're still living in it today.
During
this Summer I bought a lot on Center Street.
I only paid $500 for the lot. The
next Spring I started to build. I built
the house, and I didn't quite get finished, but we lived in it and were very
happy there until we got it far enough ahead so that I had it finished. We put a furnace in a year or two later. We had it with only a cook stove. I'll tell you, it was cold.
Sometime
before La Rhea was born, Father was the mayor of Mapleton. His health was failing him. He decided resign. Leo Harmer, being a member of the council, was
appointed mayor. This left a vacancy,
and I was to take Mr. Harmer's place. I
served almost three years. I was asked
to take another term, but we, Elda and I, decided it would be best for us to
move to Springville. We had purchased
the lot on Center and 300 East the Summer before. We were hopping to build on that lot the next
Spring. I asked to be excused.
I had
a lot of experience that was educational.
One of my suggestions was (in South Mapleton the highway crossed the
railroad twice) that we see the landowners East of the railroad about a right
of way. I, being appointed a committee
of one, went to see them. Every one was
willing to donate the land which was a surprise to most of the council. I went back and got their signatures to that effect
and presented it to the county commissioner.
That is the present road east of the railroad from just south of Olsen's
feed yard to where the Spanish Fork road joins it. I feel proud of accomplishing that when only
one member of the board had faith in it being accomplished.
One
Christmas we went over to Burroston's to spend Christmas with them. Thirty four below zero. We made a bed in the back of the truck, a
little Chevrolet truck by this time.
Elda and I sat up front, and we had the kids covered up in the
back. We like to froze to death coming
home. When I got home, the water was
frozen. I had to borrow a blow torch and
go and heat out the pipes to get the water flowing. Reed Bird's family let my family go over and
stay with them while I thawed it out.
The
next year it seemed like all the men that worked for me went to
contracting. So, it was almost
impossible for me to get a house or two in Springville, so I bid on a school
house up in Dividend, and I got it. I
went up there and built that school house, and during the time I was there,
Uncle Ernest asked me if I didn't want to invest $600 on stock up there. There was also a deep hole man who encouraged
me to buy stock. I didn't do it. But, you know, during the time that I was building
that school house, if I had spent $600 on stock during that time, that stock
went up to $1800. It tripled
itself. That was the only school house I
built. I remodeled several. I worked on several churches, but I never had
the opportunity of supervising a church.
I'm
going back a spell. My first mixer was a
home made one. We had to put it in a
buggy and haul it around. It was made
out of a barrel, hand turned, and I'll tell you, we thought we had something
there. We didn't have to mix the concrete
with a shovel. That mixer went all over
Mapleton and mixed sidewalks, cellars. what not, and it helped out quite a
little bit.
I
built a home for a fellow by the name of Jess Groesbeck down on second
west. It was a Beneficial loan. When we got through, the loaning company
representative came and asked me to sign a lien right of way. I said,
"Well, that's hardly right."
He said, "Well, I'll tell
you what I'll do. If you sign it, I'll
see that your name is on the check when it comes for the balance of the
loan," which was $2800. Well, he
didn't do it. Mr. Groesbeck got the
money. He found out that I owed some
money to Kolob Lumber Co. It was
Reynolds Lumber at that time. He goes in
and pays my bill there. that leaves
owing me $1400 and something. I don't
remember the exact amount. H.T. Reynolds
told me he had the money. I went and
called him up and asked him when I was going to get it. He said,
"Well, you were such a doggone fool to let me in this house before
I got it paid for that you can't touch me, so I'm not going to let you have
it. I'm not going to pay you." The law in Utah was as follows; While the keys of a house are in the
contractors possession, it is his property.
But, if the contractor gives the keys to the owner, that makes the
property his homestead. Well, then I
went to Mr. Reynolds. I walked the floor
that night. The next day I asked him if
he could help me out, give me some advice.
This is the H.T. Reynolds that I spoke of before. He said,
"Now, let me talk to him. I
think I have a little influence with
him." So, he went and talked to
him, and he got the second mortgage out of him." It was only for thirty days. We were just about ready to close him out
when the sugar factory ( there where Grant's office is now) was running. A fellow by the name of Jones was the
superintendent. He came to me and
said, "Will you hold that up for
awhile?" We're going to raise the
money for Jess." I said, "Sure, I'll hold it up." It went on for a little while, and one day he
came to the house, Mr. Jones I mean, and he was red in the face and mad as a
hornet. He said, "Take that home away from that fellow. He will not accept the money we got for
him." So, I started the
procedures. I got the deed in my name. Of course I had to make the first mortgage
good, but they were very good to me. I
went and told them the condition that the thing was in, and they never even
sent me a statement for several months, I don't remember just how many, before
I got it sold. I sold it to a man by the
name of Packard. When I got through with
that deal, I was $972 short. If you can
manage to go to court, do it, because you'll lose out if you win.
This
summer that I had trouble with Mr. Groesbeck,
Jim Sumsion and Wilford Clyde were starting out as contractors. They got a job between Miton and
Antelope. There was one bridge on there,
and they gave me the contract of putting in that bridge and several box
culverts. We went out to work, but I had
to furnish my own cook house. Your
mother, Elda, went out to cook for us.
Rhea was very small at the time.
She had never been away from a toilet.
We had to camp out around Strawberry that night. Elda put a big diaper on her. When we got out and pitched camp of course we
built an outside toilet. Roy did the
work on it. He cut a small hole in the
seat. Rhea was standing there, and when
he got that out, he said, "Now,
this is the place where your going to sit." She patted it and said, "Toity,
toity."
There's
one other thing that I want to tell while it's on my mind. We were digging holes for the piers. Some of them were 20 feet deep. Our camp was right close to the bridge
site. I was on the other side of the
wide creek channel. LaRhea came toddling
out there. I looked up and she was
getting too close to one of these holes.
A carpenter by the name of Johny Jones was working for me, and he had a
very nice, slick-haired pointer dog. I
hollered at her to stay away from that hole.
That dog got out from under the shade and got between her and the hole
and nudged her back a ways. I tried to
buy that dog from Johny on that account and he wouldn't sell him.
We
had a lot of fun shooting ducks and one thing and another out there during that
time. Another thing that was quite
interesting to me was when Bryon Diamond, who was working for me, went out with
my gun shooting rabbits. He kicked up a
little dirt. Saw sand under it, so he
got down and smoothed around with his hands a little bit. We were having a terrible time finding
sand. He came and got me and we went
over and looked at it. I took the crew
over, and we uncovered it to see how big it was. I sent a sample into Salt Lake. They had never seen sand out in country like
that, so they sent the head material man out to investigate to see what kind of
a liar I was. He came out and said, "I'm sent out here to see what kind of a
liar you are. There's no such kind of
sand as that in this whole country."
I said, "Well, would you
just walk over here with me a few hundred yards?" We went over, and we had it all
uncovered. He examined it. We dug a hole for him to see how deep it was. He patted me on the back and said, "You go ahead and use that sand. "You don't even have to wash it." Oh, that was a god-send for me. I believe when I got through with the
concrete for that job, if I had another ten yards, I don't believe I could have
gathered up enough to put it in.
We
worked quite late that Fall. When we
came in, I had a Model T Ford truck with a ruckel axle in it. I'm not going to explain what a ruckel axle
is because it would take to long. We
started home with that loaded, came over Indian Summit down into helper, and I
had to have bands put in. Well, we had
the bands put in there at Helper, and couldn't get a check cashed over there to
save my soul. It took nearly all the
money I had, so we had to pert near starve coming home. I watched the gasoline. Well, we started up Price Canyon. We got part way (the job was a very poor job)
and it started slipping again. I had to
find a wide place in the road and do the work over myself. We built a big fire out of some logs that
were there. I put the family to bed, and
worked on that, got the bands all fixed up again, and the next morning we came
home, clear home without anything to eat.
We didn't travel like we do now.
It took quite a while to come from there home. But, boy was it good to get home and find
that we could get in where it was warm.
That is my starting of road work.
From then on, for sixteen years, it was one job after another. Sometimes I would contract, and other times,
I would supervise. Most of the time I
was contracting, though. Quite often the
contractor would board us, or we would be close to town where we could find
board, and I wouldn't want to put up a camp.
I
think I ought to say something about when Oran was born. We were living in Springville on Center
Street. Dr. George Anderson was our
doctor by this time. Everything just
went fine. Oran was a good, healthy
baby. He was born on the seventh day of
April. During that month I was doing a
job in Provo Canyon. I went to work one
morning, and I got a little nervous.
That old seventh sense said,
"You better get home."
So, I took Byron Diamond (he was kind of a foreman for me) and told him
what to do. I came home, and I hadn't
been in the house a few minutes when things started working. He was born that evening. I sometimes think we don't pay enough
attention to our seventh senses. That
gave us our full family, four children.
It
might be interesting for me to tell you about the job that we got up in Park
City. I had to put up a camp there. Your mother wanted to go up and cook. Oran was just a baby, just a baby, just a
little bit of a fellow. I was afraid
they were going to overdo it. Finally I
said, "If you'll get a flunky, I'll
let you go." She went up the street
to the Martin's, just a few doors, and hired a girl to go up and flunky for
her. Our agreement was, I would give her
so much a meal, and she could run the boarding house and have the profit. I did pretty well on the job. She did pretty well. She could run that boarding house and make
money when somebody else would spend money and lose it. Grant was around ten years old, maybe
eleven. We had to pump our water quite a
little bit. I got a pump and put a wheel
on the side of this Chevrolet truck I had, and we ran it with that. He ran the pump. Then he and Earl got to clipping wires to tie
steel. They would cut them about six
inches long, and then we would get them in bundles. I gave them so much an hour for clipping
those. We had a very fine Summer that
year. When we went to move on this end
of that project, a fellow by the name of Creer had that contract. They called it the Wasatch Grading Company. Well, Lynn Creer was the superintendent. I went and asked him if he would hold up
shooting the hill off until we could get by.
We were with in 100 yards of that when he shot it up. We had to by-pass and go around. It took us nearly all day to get over to
where we wanted to camp. That is the
last job I ever did under Mr. Creer. I
couldn't depend on him. He didn't care
whether I made money or whether I went broke or what. I just didn't take any more jobs from Mr.
Creer.
While
I'm telling you about your grandmother Peterson, I just as well go a little bit
farther along. After I lost your mother,
she still was down to Otteson's. She
would call me up very often on a Saturday evening. She would say, "I want to come up and cook you some
dinner tomorrow." Slam! The receiver would go down. I wouldn't get a chance to tell her whether I
would be down after her or not. She just
knew that I would come. I knew the food
that she liked and the food that she didn't have down there, so I would go down
to the store and get it. When I would go
down and get her Sunday morning, we would walk in the house, she would open the
refrigerator door. "Oh my, but you
do have a lot to eat." She would
lie down to rest, sleep for maybe an hour or two. Then she would cook dinner. I sure enjoyed Grandma. She was one wonderful woman. After I got so well acquainted with her, the
last few years of her life, I could see why Elda was such a wonderful
woman. After Mr. Otteson died, she moved
up to Roy's in this trailer house and stayed there. Well, it wasn't fair for Roy to buy all her
groceries, so I would buy groceries once a week and take them up there. I don't know whether I bought the right
things for her or not, but she was always so appreciative.
She
lived up to Roy's a few years, then she became sick. She had a fellow by the name of Dr. King, who
was a physician, doctoring her. He
didn't know what was wrong with her. He
couldn't work in the hospitals here. So,
he suggested we get her into the hospitals here. So, we got an ambulance and took her over to
Payson. Dr. Biesinger was just making a
start then. So, we turned the case over
to him. When he got over to Payson and
looked at her, he called me off to one side, and he said, "That woman is plumb full of
cancer." He didn't have to make any
tests. He could see it all over
her. He said, "We're going to keep her just as
comfortable as we can." She was of
a disposition that made friends, and they would take her down to give her a
bath or different things down the hall and she would always sing them a
song. All the nurses just loved
her. One morning they went in and washed
her and gave her hair combing and went back to get her breakfast, and when they
came back with her breakfast, she had passed away. It was not a severe passing away of Grandma
with cancer as might be thought. She
passed away very peaceable.
Grandma
Peterson died, 11 May, 1947, age 72.
Shortly
after I moved to Springville, they put me in the Sunday School superintendency. Then I got going on these road jobs, and I
wasn't here very often. when I was here,
I wanted to help out. One Sunday the
superintendent asked me if I would take charge of the three lower classes. There were three girls, teaching these
classes, so I went and visited them. I
asked them if they were satisfied where they were. We could have shifted them and each girl
could have been where they wanted to be, where they felt more capable. Well, I said, "I will have to take this up with the
superintendent, and I think we'll take care of it." So, I did.
I took it up with the superintendent, and he said, "We'll take care of that next
Sunday." All the time I was in the
superintendency he never had a superintendents meeting. He made all the decisions. So, when we got into Sunday School this next
Sunday, he got up and dismissed these three girls and took their classes away
from me. He put in three other girls. When he sat down to the side of me, I
said, "I don't like
this." He said, "Well, lump it then." I got up and walked out to the Bishop, who
was his brother, and said, Will you
recognize my resignation verbally or should I write it out?" He got up, and followed me outside, and he
said, "What's wrong?" I said,
"I'll tell you
sometime." I was pretty badly
hurt. I went on home. That's the mistake I made. I quit going to Church. I'm the loser. I'm the one that wasn't big enough to take
the rebuttal of some senseless fellow that worked his way up into the
superintendency. I would advise anybody
that hears my voice, if their feelings are hurt, to swallow it. Go right on.
Attend your church because when you stay out of church for a certain
length of time, it's mighty hard to get
back in there, mighty hard to get into the routine of wanting to go. I am 78 years old now, and I still have that
hard time. I hope to overcome it in the
future. I beg of all you grandchildren and
all my in-laws and all my children to forget about staying out of church
because when they get older they will see how much they have lost. It is true, since I have retired at the age
of 65, I have gone to school, I have studied books, I have a great testimony
that we have the right church, and I will bare my testimony right here before
you now.
When
I was a young man ( I have told you of this before) I went to Denver. My brother, Ras, administered to Aunt Laura
Nielson. I'm going to repeat it. We were walking down the street after the
operation which the doctor said that she could not walk another step, and 30
days was the longest she could live. In
the prayer Rastus promised her that she should live to raise her family. While we were walking down the street to his
hotel, there in Denver, his head was looking down. He never said a word for quite some time. He said,
"Jim, I was only a voice in that.
I know that she will live."
And she did! She lived for four
years if I remember correctly. She
raised her family. The doctor, he heard
that she was still alive. He got on the
train and came down there which was 265 miles, rented a livery rig and came out
to see her, went in the house, so she was going to sit down. "No, no, no. I want you to keep moving around." He said,
"I never thought that you would walk another step. There is some power which is much higher than
our science that we have today."
That is quite a testimony to me.
I Know I didn't keep in touch, in harmony with our Lord. So, it was quite a while before I got another
testimony. One day we were cleaning
house. That's after your mother
died. I was dusting the mantle, dusting
the pictures that were on the mantle.
There were quite a few on there.
Grant was right in the heat of World War II. I picked up his picture and started
dusting. My arms froze. I didn't seem to be able to move them. It was just as plain as could be as if a
voice spoke over my shoulder, my right shoulder. It said,
You will see that boy before the leaves are all on the trees this
Spring." In a short while I got
word from him that he had been wounded.
Well, I had to go back to Georgia to see him. That was another testimony. Your mother wasn't with me she was in
Heaven. I have often wondered if she
wasn't responsible for that message that I had.
Someday if I am good enough, keep myself clean enough, I will be with
her and she can tell me whether she gave me that message or not.
The
next incident was when Van almost drowned out here in the swimming pool. His mother called me and told me what had
happened. They were over to the
hospital. Rose and I got in the Car, and
we rode over there. I went into the
intensive care room where he was. They
had him on his stomach, his head about a foot, maybe two feet, lower than his
feet. I spoke to him, and he didn't seem
to pay any attention to me. I stood
there a few minutes. It came over me
that we ought to administer to him. I
went and asked his mother and father if we hadn't ought to administer to him. They both sanctioned it. We got Bishop Childs and his father and I
went in. His father anointed him. Bishop Childs was the mouth for the
prayer. All the time my hands were on
the boy's head, it was just like an electric shock going through my
fingers. When I came out, I was the first
one out of the room, LaRhea was across the hall from the entrance of that
room. She started crying. I went over and put my arms around her. I said,
"your boy's going to be all right." She said,
"I knew it, Dad, just as soon as I saw your face." Wendell came out just beaming, put his arms
around his wife's shoulders, and said,
"Our boy is going to be all right." In just a few minutes he turned over on his
back. He asked the nurses if he could see
his mother. That was the first thing he
was rational at. She went on in and
talked to him, and he was quite rational.
They had quite a conversation.
Now,
if that is not a very good testimony that there is a deity and that the
priesthood has power, I just don't know what it could be other than that.
This
goes back several years, in fact back to 1935.
At this time I got a telegram from Nevada. Work was awfully scarce and Dodge Brothers
wanted me to come down and be a concrete foreman. I didn't ask any questions. I got in my car and took off. When I got down there and reported to the
superintendent (his name was Oje), he
put me to work the next day. In a couple
of days he came out on the job and said,
"Say, what do you expect a month?'
I said, "Well, you set the
price." He set the price at $150 a
month and my board. That wasn't
enough. I could have gotten more, I
guess, If I had hung out for it. But, I
was to anxious to support my family.
They had been trying to put in headwalls. The men they had there didn't understand
it. I began having them excavate ahead,
and I was setting forms. Mr. Oje came
out, and I hadn't poured any yet. This
was on the second morning. He said,
"When are you going to pour concrete?" I said,
"When I get things lined out here and get organized." He said,
"Well, you ought to be pouring." I said,
"We'll pour this afternoon or tomorrow." When he came out the next time, he said, "How many you got poured
today?" I told him. He said,
"Well, I guess I had better leave you alone. You know what you are doing." I had those boys organized so that when we
got the head walls poured, we were only just a few minutes 'till we were on the
truck moving to the next one. Things
worked out very fine, and he asked me what I was going to stick them for wages,
and they set the price. We got the
concrete all in, but I want to tell a little bit of experience on what I had
there. There was a box culvert we were
putting in. It was only four feet
high. I built a runway up on top. The engineer wouldn't let me drop the
concrete down four feet. He made me run
the concrete in wheel barrows right down underneath that runway. The steel was bent over. They had to just stoop right over and almost
crawl. He made me mix the concrete so stiff
that we tried to tromp it down in the steel.
The steel was five inches apart each way. I remember that so well. I would go to him and say, "We're not covering the steel. It's got to be porous." And he said,
"Oh, your doing fine."
After a while I went to him and said,
"Just let me put one quart more of water per batch." The measuring devise was on top of the
mixer. I said, "Let me put just one quart of water in
there after it dumps the tank up on top."
"Oh well," he
said, "One batch won't hurt
us." So I put one quart of water in
and it made quite a difference in the handling of that concrete. So, I made a sample. He let me have a paste board tube about 12
inches long. I made one , and he made
one out of stiff concrete. We had a
round tub that was full of water, so when they sat over night, we submerged
them in that and let them cure. He sent
them to Carson City. One day he came
back with a smile on his face, and he said,
"You know, you learned me something." I said,
"Have I?" He said, "Yes.
My concrete only stood 2,000 pounds per square inch and yours went 6,000
pounds per square inch out of the same material." He said,
"I'm not going to bother you any more. You pour this concrete the way you
please." So we got along fine after
that.
That
is my job that I had my first experience of finishing a grade, hand
finishing. It didn't seem like they
could get a foreman on that job that could satisfy the engineer, so they asked
me if I would try. I was out there with
the crew waiting for the engineer to come along. When he came along, he was a Jew, I asked him
if he would show me just what he wanted.
He got out of his truck, and took a template out, an adjustable
template, and he showed me just what he wanted.
He wanted the slopes to be rounding on the top. We were supposed to use that and round it
according to this template of the steepness of it. I just put one man ahead of everybody else
with this template, and he would scratch it out until it fit, then they would
pull down even to that. I finished that
17 miles of roadway.
Then
they sent me over to Austin. That's the
first experience I had of building a grade.
I was over there before the hand work was ready. The superintendent over there asked me if I
had ever built a grade, I said,
"No." He said, "Well, we've got some good cat skinners
out there." The cats were just
coming in then. And he said, "You go out there and help them
out." Well, I bought me one of
these little hand levels that you pack around in a little leather case. I went out there and I would take willows and
tie them together, stick them up in the ground and get them so high, whatever
the fill said. Then as they were
building it, I could stand on the slope, look over that with this little hand
level and stand there and give those cat skinners a signal. We agreed on a signal. They were very cooperative with me. They knew that I knew nothing about it. I built two miles of road, and some of the
fills were pretty high, and some were cuts.
When the engineers came along to put the red tops in, they fooled around
there about a half day and finally they came down to me and said, "Put the grader on that. We're not going to red top that. You've got it so close, you just go ahead and
put the grader on that." The red
tops were the pegs for the finished grade.
That was my first job ever building a grade.
My
regular job was to do the hand work. So,
they got ready for the curb and gutter through Austin. The gutter was made out of flat stone and the
curb was made out of redwood timbers.
Then we had to build entrances into the storm system. We had quite a lot of trouble getting the
concrete in the form made for it. But,
don't ever let yourself think because you're a carpenter, some other tradesman
can't show you something. I was sitting
there trying to design a form. The holes
were about four feet deep, and only about 18 inches square. To make those forms and get them out and
reuse them, I was working on something
to do. There was an old miner sitting
there, and watched me make some designs, that is free hand sketches. Finally he said, "I've seen this done this
way." And he told me about it, so I
designed it. I put the carpenters on
them to make them. And you know, all we
had to take out was two bolts on each side of them and slip out a wedge. Those forms would come right out. My superintendent, he said to make forms for
each individual. I said, "Nope, I'm not going to. I'm going to make them so I can move
them." When he saw what I had, he
thought I was pretty good.
When we finished there, I moved over to
Winnemucca. They called me into their
home office, that being Fallen, Nevada, the Dodge Brothers did, and they wanted
me to play politics. They almost
controlled the Republican party in Nevada.
Silver State Construction Company was on the rocks, and they took it
over. They transferred me from this job
over to Winnemucca where the Silver State was working. They wanted me to be a Democrat and them know
that bullets and I helped put it over. (?)
They wanted me to move down there, fetch my family down there. I said,
"No, I don't like the environment down here, and I won't fetch my
family down." Well, they took me
out and they showed me how many churches they had there in Fallen, showed me
all the good things. And I said, "Yes, you've got 1700 people here, you've got 17 saloons, and you have some
other subversive things here that I don't like." Well, I wouldn't move my family down, so I
went over to Winnemucca. The
superintendent took a dislike to me. I
think he found out what they wanted me to do.
He made the job awfully miserable for me. I worked there about a week. I took it for almost a week. Then I went into Winnemucca and called up Mr.
Dodge, and he came over and met me. I
told him the conditions. He said, "Well, maybe it would be better for you
to take a little vacation and go back Springville." So, I went to Springville, and as I drove
into my driveway, Ace Thorn followed me.
He said, "I've got to have a
a cement man up to Logan, and I have not been able to find one." He said,
"Will you go up there for awhile?
Will you go up there and do the job?" And I said,
"I've got to go back to Dodge Brothers just as quickly as they call
me." I said, "They told me it wouldn't be over three
weeks." Well, they left me on the
payroll while I was in. Ace talked me
into going up, promising me that he would keep me on the job if he kept any
man. Just before Christmas, we finished
the job in Logan, and he was moving his men into Idaho on a job. After making me that promise, I had finished
most of this job there, that is the sloping down, cleaning up, and I did too
good a job to suit Paul. Of course when
Christmas came, they sent me home. I was
the only man laid off--the only key man.
When
I got home, they were finishing the Forth Ward Chapel, and I hadn't paid my
assessment yet, so Wilford Clyde came and asked me if I didn't want to come and
work on it. I told him I would. So, I
went over and worked on the church there.
During this time, Ace Thorn came over and wanted me to take a day off
and go south with him and look over a bridge job and help him figure it. He wanted to put me on it. I said,
"Nope. You fired me up
there. You didn't keep your word with
me, so I'm not going to go." And I
stayed with the church. So, they went
and got the fellow that was my inspector in Logan. He had been trying to get me off the job for
quite some time, telling them I was building the forms wrong, I was doing this
wrong, I was doing that wrong. They went
and got him. The job was a little over
$30,000. Well, he goes down there and
spends almost the total amount of that money getting the footings in. Well, they fired him. Then they came back after me to go down there
and take the job over. I said, "No, I'm working for Wilfred now. I'm going to go out to Moab and work for him." So, I worked for Wilfred for quite a little
while. That was my experience with Ace
Thorn. There will be just a little bit
more about him later on.
I
often wanted to build a very fine home for somebody. Dr. Don Merrill's job came up. I decided to bid on it. Well, I was successful in the bidding. It was on eighth north and University
Avenue. I had some difficulty in
satisfying them. There was a neighbor
lady right close that had built one home.
She was quite a politician, and of course, she knew more about building
than anyone in the whole world. I
finally had to have her notified that she couldn't come on the premises, she
caused so much trouble. I talked to the
architect about it, and he said,
"Well, why don't you have an attorney write her a letter to stay
off." Her husband was an attorney
and quite a prominent attorney in Provo then.
I went down to his office and asked him to if he would write a letter for
me. He got his pencil out and said, "Give me the address of the lady and
tell me what your difficulties are."
So, I told him the difficulties before I gave him the address of the
lady. When I told him who it was, he
just dropped his pencil on the desk, and he said, "You won't need a letter for
that." That was the last of that
lady on the job.
That
was the nicest homes that I have ever built.
It was three stories, basement, first story and second story. The bedrooms were up stairs. During this period of time, the clothes chute
from the upstairs bathroom was to small to let the clothes down. So, I went to the architect and asked him if
he couldn't give me a little more room to make a bigger chute. He said,
"I've designed it. You build
it" So, I put the clothes chute in
and lined it with tin. It was 13 inches
one way and three inches the other way.
Several years later I went to Dr. Don Merrill for an examination. We sat and talked about one thing and another
for some little time. He told me that he
had taken out the old cupboards and put in new ones in the kitchen, and that
was the only remodeling he had done.
Then I asked him about the clothes chute from upstairs. He said,
"We got a sheet in it, and we've never been able to get that up or
down, so that's never been used."
My relations with Dr. Merrill were very nice, but that lady that lived
right next door didn't give me a very good time.
It
was during this period that they came to me and wanted me to teach school. They were trying to get a vocational school
started. That is what they called it
then. It is now the Industrial School,
and is located in north Provo. I
understand that its out there on that location.
So, they bought a big piece of ground out in Orem. They're going to build a bunch more buildings
so that they can accommodate more students.
It has proven way beyond our expectations. In order to get that started, they had one
teacher in American Fork that taught carpentry, one in Provo, and I taught in
Spanish Fork. I believe welding and
those other things were taught in those other towns, and welding was taught in
Spanish.
During
this time we were teaching, we had to visit other schools. In Salt Lake we went up there and
visited. Our high school asked if I
wouldn't come over and give a lecture on the steel square. So, I went over to the high school in
Springville and give a lecture on the steel square. It passed on from there that I understood the
steel square very well, so I gave lectures all the way from Salt Lake City
clear down to Nephi. I remember one time
in Salt Lake, there were two gray-headed men in the audience, and they looked
very intelligent. When I got through
giving my demonstrations and lecture on the steel square, they came up to me
and asked what college I went to. I
said, "Well, I'm sorry to say that
my college experiences are hard knocks.
I only had two years of high school, but I have studied all my
life." They said, "You have sure done well in your
vocation. We've got to congratulate
you." Then they introduced them
selves to me, and they were retired doctors.
The reason they were going to this vocational school was to do wood work
for a hobby. That made me feel very well
when doctors would compliment me on what I had accomplished without too much
schooling. I taught school over in
Spanish Fork for three years, nights, just one night a week.
Then
they decided to put the school over in Provo and centralize it. The coordinator's name was W.E. Johnson. He wanted me to be a teacher over there and
it would be a full-time job. Well, there
was opposition. Some of my supposedly
friends decided that they wanted their husband to teach that school. Now, I had learned the trade. So, he started working in Provo at the
private clubs and influential people, building up the argument that it ought to
be done by a Provo man. So, they put
pressure on Mr. Johnson so he had to give in to them. I didn't get to teach on a permanent,
full-time basis which was less money than I could make on my trade, but it was
educational. I sure wish I had that
experience for a few years. It would
have helped out very much in my speech and in my English because I had to study
those things in order to teach the teachings that I was required to teach.
We
didn't have any particular textbooks at the time. I choose the textbooks we used in Spanish
Fork. John Tolman chose them in Provo,
and the fellow in American Fork chose them over there. But we didn't have much choice. Some of the successful contractors of today
were my students. One of them was Steve
Miller of Springville. One of them was
Dick Miller from American Fork. Another
was a Stevenson from Payson which went into cabinet building, and he was a very
good cabinet man and did very well at it.
And Clark Elmer. He had some
success in contracting, but then he got to playing politics. He left the building trade and went into
politics and I don't know just what he is doing now. I understand he was put in the state road
commission.
The boys worked with me on this Dr.
Merrill home. During this period, Grant
decided he wanted to go selling. He had
a chance to go selling for Utah Tailors.
I let him have my car for three months to try out to see if he was a
salesman. He did very well. When he came back at the end of these three
months, he bought himself a car. And
from that time on, he kept his mother dressed about as nice as any woman in
Springville. He changed his samples so
many times a year. Each time he would
come in, open up his sample case, and say,
"Mother, take your choice.
Have what you want." Many of
the dresses were very expensive and she was dressed very nicely. In his travel, she would take a map, and when
we would hear from him, she would mark down where he was and trace from the last place we would hear
from him. So, she knew just exactly
where that boy was all the time. I never
saw a woman watch anybody closer than she did Grant while he was back East
selling.
Earl
stayed with me until the job was done or else until school started. We had to dip shingles, and Oran was just a
small boy, so I gave him the job of dipping the shingles. We built a trough with wires across it, and
he dipped the shingles in the paint and hung them up in this trough and let
them drain. The next few years weren't
very eventful. We just built a few
houses and worked and did what we could.
Shortly after this, a few years after this, I think it was 1942, Grant
was sent to the army. It wasn't long
until Earl was sent. Then in 1942,
shortly after Grant was drafted into the army, they kept calling me from the Union
Hall, wanting me to go over to Geneva.
They needed key men over there. I
kept putting them off and finally they said,
"Well, your no better to be drafted than the boys are, so we will
just have to draft you." I
said, "Give me two weeks, and I'll
be over." So, I went over and Earl
went with me, and we went in and signed up, gave a history of where we had
worked and what we had done. They sent
us out where they were building a temporary hospital, and they had the
foundation in and the joists on. The
foreman asked me to be scratch man.
Earl was helping me scratch. We
worked there for some little time, then they transferred us up to another
job. But I'm getting ahead of
myself. They asked me to take a
crew. They sent a laborer out to talk to
me. The foreman of this outfit that I
went to work for didn't know anything about carpenter work. He didn't know anything about how to handle
men. He was just a big-headed
dunce. He sent this laborer out to ask
me to take a crew. I sent word
back, "No." I wasn't going to take a crew. Finally he came back, and said, "Well, they say you got to take a
crew." I said, "You go back and tell them I will not
take a crew." So, the carpenter
foreman came out and said, "Why
won't you take a crew." I said, "I want to find out what kind of an
outfit I'm working for before I get tied
up to strong on them." He got quite
angry at me, but I would not take a crew.
Finally I got acquainted with a general foreman by the name of Jones, a
very fine fellow. So, he got me
transferred over to his area. They were
building barracks. He asked me if I
wouldn't take the night general foreman.
So, I took the swing shift general foreman, and we built barracks there
for sometime.
Before
long, I had a run-in with my first boss.
They were going to put me in as general foreman over the blast
furnaces. They were just starting them
then. I hadn't been notified of it. The man that was supposed to come out and
tell me didn't tell me, so he came down and told me, "There's something going wrong down in
the country." I said, "That doesn't bother me any. That's none of my business." He called me quite a name. I laid my glasses on a pile of lumber and
made for him. He got out of there. So, then he jumped the fellow that was
supposed to have told me. And I quit
that night. I just wouldn't work any
more for that guy. I decided I just
wouldn't work for him any more. He got
after those fellows, and they gave him quite a bad talking to, and he fired all
three of them. The group was a blue
printing expert, the general foreman, and, I don't know what the other fellows
title was. But there were three of them,
they were fired for insubordination. I
came home from that shift at mid-night after notifying them that I wouldn't be
back anymore.
The
next morning I was sitting out on the porch reading a paper. Another company sent a man over to see if I
wouldn't come and work for them. They
had heard that I quit. So, I went over
to work for them the next day. I worked
on the power house. I worked there for
some time, they chose me as general foreman in what they called the
Eleven. That was the number of that
unit. In this we had quite a number of
substations. We had one big building,
production and laboratory office building.
The last job we had was gatehouse number three. That is the gatehouse that goes up over the
railroad tracks and through the checking house right on top of a creek or a big
ditch which was up about 20 feet above the ditch. That was my last job. When we got through with that, they told us
that was all. So, I came home. This Mr. Jones that I worked for before came
over and wanted me to take a couple of more buildings. I was so tired that I just didn't want to go
back over there. I rested a little while
and then, of course, I began working around town here.
During
the Time I was general foreman, I lost your mother. One Monday evening when I came home from
work, she said, "How would you like
to go and watch an operation tomorrow."
We'll it surprised me, and I knew that she had a lump under her left
breast. I said to her, "What is it?" And she told me that she had found another
lump under her arm as she was bathing Saturday.
So, Monday she went down to the doctor, and he wanted to take them off
and have them analyzed. I said, "Well, I will be right with
you." The next morning when we got
up, she was fixing me a little breakfast.
We had to be in Payson by seven o'clock, so I called my superintendent
and told him what was going on. He
said, "You go and stay with her and
don't worry about the job. We'll take
care of it." They gave her a local,
and when they started to take the second lump, she flinched. So, they gave her another local, and it
blocked one half of her heart. It wouldn't
pump the blood out of her lungs. They
worked with her--Dr. Orton and he got a doctor from Spanish Fork to help
him. They worked just as hard as if they
were digging a ditch. The sweat just
poured off of them, but they could not get that heart working. Along about 4:30 the next morning, I had got
my folks there and my children that were home and Grandma and Uncle Roy were
there, I asked to have her administered to.
Lorin anointed her. Bert was
mouth. Bert didn't administer to
her. He administered to me. I didn't realize that we were going to lose
her until after he got through administering.
I turned to Sadie, and I said, "Bert
didn't administer to Elda, he administered to me." She said,
That's right." He also
administered to her to rest in ease which she passed away very quietly. That is the first of my knowledge that I was
going to lose her.
I
want to say more about your mother and grandmother. At one time she raised flowers and could tell
you the care each one should have. When
Decoration Day came, she gathered flowers and gave them away. The pleasure of giving was her reward. A flower club was organized. Elda became president. The Kiwanis Club asked her to talk on
flowers. She accepted. I accompanied her. Her talk was so good that other clubs began
calling her. I was at all of her
lectures. I was so proud of her, it's
impossible for me to describe. One time
here at Springville, she took the subject of beautification of the city. The creek from Center Street to fourth east
was a jungle of willows. Her suggestion
was to build a rock wall on each side of the creek. It has been accomplished. Every time I see that wall, memories come back, very happy ones.
Well,
I was a mighty lonesome man for some time.
Mr. Tolman, My superintendent, sent word by Lorin. He was working for him. And he came over to the funeral. He got me off to one side, and he said, "Now, I want you to stay home for a
week." And I thanked him for
it. He put his arm around me. "James," he said, "I know how to sympathize with you. I lost my first wife." That's the first time I heard him say
anything about that.
I stayed home about a week then went back to
work. I went into the office, and
said, "John, what do you want me to
do today?" Shall I take my tools." And he said,
"no sir, you look over the job today. I have Steve Miller and Don Watts looking
after the job. I've devided it up
between those two boys." I went out
and began looking around. After awhile I
ran into Steven. He was looking after
part of it. He said, "Shall I take my crew back?" And I said,
"John said not today. After
awhile, I ran into Don, and I told him the same thing. They were in the office and talked it over
with John. The next morning I took
over. Of course, I didn't feel capable
of doing it and I told John. He
said, "You come into the office any
time you want to and sit down and unburden yourself, and I will go out and help
you straighten up this job." I'm
telling you this to show you what kind of friends I have made. I think that I have been fortunate in accumulating
the friends I have.
I
won't dwell on the details any more on what went on out there only to say when
we got the gate house number three finished, it was the last of my work
there. I have never gone through the
steel plant. I have had several chances,
but I have never gone through and I'm sorry.
There is a friend of mine here that is off because of heart
surgery. He says he is going to get a
pass for both he and I , and we will take an afternoon and go over there and
look through and see the whole works of it.
He says, "I have worked over there ever since it was built, and there
is a lot I haven't seen yet." I
hope that will be accomplished.
Well,
I went to work around town. The first
thing I knew, I had a quite a bunch of carpenters working for me down in
town. I remodeled several buildings
down on Main Street and designed the soft water building, designed where the
cleaning establishment west of the bank was.
I didn't build that one, but I did build the soft water. I remodeled quite a number of other buildings
along Main Street that Summer. I would
go home after work and sit and draw plans for people until I couldn't hold my
eyes open any longer.
By
this time, LaRhea had gotten married, she said,
"Dad, I have nobody but you to give me a reception, so I think I
would like to have one in the Hotel
Utah. So, we just invited the two
families and her very close friends.
After they came out of the Temple, we had dinner there at the Hotel
Utah, and then she and Wendell moved down into California.
Oran
was the only one left here with me. That
house was mighty empty. Six of us used
to live in it. There were only two of us
there. Oran kept begging me to let him
go in the service, and I kept putting him off.
Finally, he got old enough so that he could volunteer. He was so light due to his eating habits that
he couldn't make the weight. So, he got
him a bunch of silver dollars and drank a quart of milk. He did everything he could to get more weight
on him, and he passed. Well, he was in
the navy. It wasn't long until I got
word that he was going overseas. They
went down through the Panama Canal and across the seas. He got over to Guam, I think it was. But, I'm not going to try to tell his life
in the navy because I don't know much about it.
When he came back, in fact when all three boys came back out of the
service, they weren't the boys I sent into the service. They had changed so much. I don't know
They have developed and I am proud of the boys and of my daughter.
I was mighty lonesome during this
time. I would go home and work, as I
said before, until I just almost dropped to sleep. I allowed myself one night a week to go to a
show. I would go down and take in the
show. The rest of the time I was
home. During this time is when Grandma
would call up from Palmyra and say,
"I'm coming up to cook you dinner." I sure enjoyed that sweet old lady. She slept about two thirds of the time when
she came up. When I would get her in the
house, she would lie down and take a nap.
Then when she would wake up, she would cook me a dinner and get the biggest
kick out of it. It happened quite often
on Sundays. I sure appreciated it.
One
evening after your mother had been gone almost three years, Sadie and Bert came
down to spend the evening with me. I sat
there and talked to them, of course, and tried to treat them civil. But, all the time they were there, I was
wishing to hell they would leave. When
they left, I got to thinking the way I felt towards everybody. I wanted to be alone. I decided that I had to get out and associate
with people. About this time, they
organized the Lions Club, and I was invited to join, so I joined them. I stayed in that club for a good many
years. You know, I believe that was my
salvation at that period of time. I
started going out and enjoying people.
Then we got to having parties where you had to have a partner, so I took
one lady, and I guess I was kind of lonesome.
Anyway, we got kind of friendly.
Marcellus, he thought he was doing something by getting me a
girlfriend. He called me up one night
and wanted me to take her out, and I told him I didn't want him monkeying
around with it. Anyway, they wanted us
to go to the show, and we went to the show.
When we got home, she got out, and I had to take her home. I took her out several times. Her oldest boy, Carl, and her oldest girl,
Margaret, came over to the house and visited me one evening. They both told me that they didn't think we
could get along, that their mother was too hard to get along with. I thought,
"What kind of kids are those?"
But, still I went with her, and finally we got married. We weren't meant for one another. That's all I'm going to say about it. We stayed married two years, the got a
divorce. I got to mingling with people
and enjoying myself very much. When I
lost your mother, I made up my mind that I was going to quit smoking, so I
started working on myself to hating cigarettes.
Thirteen years later, after I lost her, I was put in a hospital. Oran came over and wanted to know where my
ash tray was. I told him I didn't have one. He said,
"What have you done quit?"
I said, "I don't know." He said,
"I'll tell you, Dad, I'll quit smoking if you will." I said,
"Put your cigarettes away because I have quit." He quit for two weeks, then started
again. I have never had a cigarette
since that day. That was in 1953. Am I glad that I don't smoke cigarettes
today. I can see fellows my age that
still smoke and I can see how much more unhealthy they are than I. I am so thankful that I do not smoke those
cigarettes.
After
our divorce, six or eight months later, I started taking a lady out. I went with her for almost three years. I was just a little bit afraid of her
daughter. We didn't get married. She was a very fine lady. We split up after about three years. Then I chased around alone for a little
while. I ran into Rose, Rose Curtis, one
night at a dance. I danced with
her. I've known her ever since I came
here from Colorado. I knew her
husband. I knew her children. I knew she was a very fine lady. I figured the next Tuesday night I would pick
her up and ask her for a date, but she wasn't out. So, the next Monday, that would be two weeks
after I met her, I called her up and asked her if she would go to the dance
with me on Tuesday. I thought she was
going to choke taking her breath.
Finally she said, "Yes, I'll
go." Well, we started going
together, and when we got home after the dance, we decided that neither one of
us wanted to ever have a partner again, so we were going to keep company. In about six months we got married. I think you children are pretty well
acquainted with the life that Rose and I have had together. It has been very pleasant. We took many trips together as long as her
health would last. She had one eye
operated on for a cataract and was just about ready to have the other one
operated on when we discovered she had a lump in her breast. I insisted that we have that taken. I lost your mother with cancer. We went over and had that taken, and it was
malignant. They went all over her body
hunting the fibers and one thing and another with that cancer. And it looks like they got it 100%. It's over five years now, and they claim that
if she's free from it for five years, they got it all. But, her vitality has not been very good
since then, and she can't take trips.
Oh, we go to Salt Lake or Park City.
Last Summer we went out to Meeker, Colorado. We took two days to go out there which is
only sixty miles. But, we came back in
one day. I got her to getting out of the
car when she began getting tired and feeling under the weather. She would walk down the road a ways then
motion for me to come and pick her up when she walked far enough. But, we made it clear home in one day. That is the longest trip that Rose has had
since her cancer operation.
She
has a fine family of six children. The
oldest is Elmo Curtis, Sylvia King, Carl Curtis, Merl Brown, Velma Coltron,
Vernon Curtis, and Kenneth Curtis.
Kenneth is the youngest in the family.
And I believe I have the respect of all those children. I know I respect every one of them. I think a lot of them. My experience in this family has been very
good. The Curtis family is very closely
knit together. They have parties for
everybody that has a birthday. They're
together several times a year for a little lunch and get-together of one kind
or another. At the present time, Elmo is
engaged with the gas company. He is the
field man in this area. Carl is the
streets and walks man in Springville.
Kenneth works over in Geneva.
Vernon has a very good job down in California with an ink company. Sylvia has lost her first husband, Mr.
Allen. She has remarried, we call him
Bill King. She's living in American
Fork. She is a very competent
woman. Merl has a heart as big as a cow,
one of the best cooks in this county.
Velma is employed at the Utah Valley Hospital. She is doing a very fine job over there and
is a wonderful girl. I could go on and
talk about the Curtis Family for quite some time, but I believe I've said
enough.
I this period of time Grant and I
bought in on a lumber yard with Ross Bradford.
It is located up here on fourth east and fourth south. After operating that for some years, Grant and
I bought Ross out. We each had a third
of the stock. Ross was trying to make
trouble between Grant and I. He would go
to Grant and talk about me, then he'd come to me and tell about Grant, what
Grant was doing wrong. Finally, I talked
Grant into the notion of us buying Ross out and us owning it alone. One decoration day Grant and I were together,
and I was talking pretty hard to have us buy it out. He said,
"The bank won't go along with us." I said,
"Let's go down and see."
So, we went down and talked to the bankers at their home, and they told
us that if we would buy Ross out, they would go farther with us than they would
with the three of us. So, we traded Ross
out of his share. We had property
scattered out here, there, and other places, so we picked out a bunch of that
stuff, and we traded him property for his stock. Monday we went into the bank, and the bank
congratulated us for being the first men that ever out-traded Ross
Bradford. Well we got rid of Ross. We had a very satisfactory operation from
then on until we decided that I should retire, and he wanted to go into the
building game alone. I believe this is
about the finish of my work at this time.
I
would like to make a few comparisons of prices of around 1914 and the price
today. We will take the Model T
Ford. I bought my first one in 1920, the
first day in 1920. The wages then for
carpenter work was $3.50 a day. To buy
that Model T Ford, I had to work 176 days,
which was quite a bit of work.
Now we'll take the Fairlane, the one I drive today. It is $2400.
Carpenter wages are $36 per day less some estimated taxes, $8, leaving
$28 per day. 85 days' pay buys the
Fairlane car. I would say that there is
four times, maybe five times, as much car in the fairlane as there was in the
Model T. I am very well satisfied with
my present-day automobile. Now, let's
take a pair of shoes. They cost from $5
to $7. At wages of $3.50 per day, to buy
a pair of shoes for $7 would take two days' work. Twenty eight dollars a day for carpenter work
means, 80/100 of one day's pay for a pair of shoes. That's quite a difference in time to buy a
pair of shoes by labor, but not by dollar.
I will only mention the prices of a few items, and you folks know what
the prices is today. Take a work
shirt. We used to pay 70 cents for
them. A pair of Levi overalls, we would
pay around 90 cents. A pair of socks, 15
cents. A hat, $1.50. A loaf of bread, 5 cents.
A quart of Milk, 5 cents. Sugar,
$10 per 100. Silent picture shows, 15
cents.
Now,
while I'm talking about these things, I might mention the first trip we took
with the Model T. Earl was a baby. Grandpa and Grandma Peterson went with
us. We took a camp outfit, sleeping
Quarters, sleeping apparel, and we got as far as the West Portal the first
night. It cost me $17 to buy gasoline to
go out to Uncle Chris Jenson's. That is
twelve miles north of Roosevelt. It took
us a day and a half to go out, and a day and a half to come back. The last time I took your mother out, we had
a Dictator, Studebaker, quite a big car with a small motor. It held 20 gallons of gas. We left quite early in the morning. Instead of taking a day and a half to go out,
we got there and ate breakfast with Uncle Chris and Aunt Teeny, and I didn't
buy any more gas till we got back to Springville. We had no mileage gauge on the Model T, so we
don't know how many mile we drove or how many miles per gallon. All we did was pull the ear down (that's what
we call the hand lever for the gas that was on top of the steering wheel) and
try to get all the mileage we could.
I was
quite a big boy when I saw my first telephone.
They ran it into Sanford. Of
course, not many people put them in the home.
There were only about two telephones in town and that was in the two
stores. Finally, people began putting
them in quite sometime later. I remember
the first time that I talked over the telephone. I hollered like I was talking to somebody a
couple of hundred yards away. It was to
Sadie. She was working on a ranch that
had a telephone. She said, "You don't have to holler like that. Talk natural." To get a long distance call through was quite
a job. When I was in Denver in 1910,
Mother wouldn't talk over the telephone, and I thought by me writing and telling
her to be over to the store where the telephone was, that I could get her to come
to the phone by me calling her. You
know, it took me three hours and a half or four hours to get that line through
from Denver down to the valley. Mother
wouldn't come to the phone. She just
stood across the outside of the counter and told Sadie what to say. The telephone was hanging on the wall back of
the counter. I don't believe Mother
started talking on the telephone until after they came to Utah. I'm not right positive of that, but they put
a telephone in and I remember calling and talking to her after they moved
here.
The
first electric light that I had any experience with was in Alamosa. I was playing basketball for the San Luis
Stake Academy. I remember so well. We had a fellow sleeping in the room that I
was sleeping in by the name of Melvin Morgan.
We all hurried and got in bed and asked him to blow the light out. You should have seen the maneuvers he
made. We finally turned it out for
him. No electric switch, just a drop
from the middle of the ceiling. That's
all the electricity that was in that room.
No wash basin or running water.
They fetched us a pitcher of water, and we had a wash bowl. No inside toilets. They usually had one outside or what we
called a thunder mug under the bed.
Living
conditions have sure changed for the better, very much for the better. I can remember when they were coming out in
the paper, telling about Mr. Bell talking over the telephone for quite some
ways. After awhile, it got spreading
out, and they made fast developments, and it got to be nation wide before I was
too of a boy.
The
first Automobile that I can remember seeing was a very small automobile. It had a one-
cylinder motor that sat under the seat. You cranked it from the side. It had a counter shaft with an idler on the
belt. there was some kind of a dog in
the middle of this counter shaft, so when they turned, it would slip. There was a sprocket on each end of the
counter shaft and a chain that ran from this sprocket on each end of the
counter shaft and a chain that ran from this sprocket to the hind wheels of the
automobile. And it rattled to beat the
band. You could here a car coming for
miles. Whenever we would meet
horses, we would have to get out and
hold them or take them to a fence and tie them up. They were scared to death of that rig. Dr. Skenk owned this car. He was a doctor in La Jara. He did quite a bit of practicing in Sanford. He's the man that got that automobile. The first time he fetched it to Sanford, the
folks were having a party. We heard him
coming, us children. We got on the shed
and saw it coming down the country. We
went and told them. All of those people
came out to see that automobile go by.
We were right on the main thoroughfare for Sanford's main street. The farmers worried quite a bit about the
coming of the automobile. They were
afraid that it would take the horses away and they wouldn't be able to sell
there crops. Most of our feed that we
raised on the farm in those days went to feed the animals. They were quite worried about that. It worked out entirely different than what
they had figured as.
I can
remember when the Wrights made their first flight. It was only a few feet. People made quite a fuss over it. They didn't
think they would make a success of it.
But, they kept fooling with it, and then more money or bigger factories
took a hold of it. They finally got to
making an airplane that was made out of pipe.
The pilot sat right behind the propeller. The wind just about blew his skin off
him. When I was in Denver, a plane, such
as I described, flew across the country.
It happened to come over pretty close to the place I was staying
in. We understood that it was coming by
that way, so we got up and waited for it.
When it flew over, that was quite a sight for us. To see that man sitting up there. He must have had some pretty good clothes to
have ridden that plane clear into Salt Lake.
They developed them. After a
while, they began carrying the mail. I
was here in Utah when this happened, but a small plane carried a bag across the
United States. He made quite a
record. It was quite a feat. Now they cross the whole United States in
about three and a half hours. But it
used to take a couple of days. I haven't
ridden on very many large planes. But, I
rode from St. Paul Minnesota to Salt Lake in what we call a turbo-jet. We flew over 20,000 feet high. When we got over Fort Bridger, Wyoming, he
announced that we were over Fort Bridger and that we were starting to descend to make the landing
in Salt Lake in 10 or 12 minutes. Then I
went back to Chicago on a jet. It took
longer to go from Springville, to get our reservations straightened out, to get
prepared to go that it did to fly from Salt Lake to Chicago, and of course, it
made a round about trip. It took us
nearly as long to go from the airport to Chicago as it did to go from Salt Lake
to Chicago. We learned that if there
were three of us, we could do it just a little bit cheaper than on the bus by
getting a taxi to take us out. It didn't
take us so long this time. Early in the
morning the freeway we were on was quite empty.
All the cars were coming into town.
I never saw so many cars in 30 miles in al my life. I don't remember how many lanes there were,
but all those lanes were filled up with automobiles.
Now,
of course, we have radio and television which we never heard of. I remember my father reading some of the
scriptures. Someplace it said that the
gospel would be preached from the housetops.
We didn't have any idea how it was going to be done other than a man
getting up on a housetop and preaching it.
But, you see, the antennas on the houses now, and we know just what the
prophet meant when he said that the gospel would be preached from the housetops.
Radio
came in first. I can remember when we
first got a radio here in town. A fellow
by the name of Bill Grooms fetched it out to Kiwanis one night. I was a member at that time. He tried to give us a program, but the
reception was terrible. We just couldn't
get any reception. It wasn't long until
everybody had radios. Then television
came in, the scientists have fixed it learn how to take a picture in England or
Germany or Japan, anyplace in the world and send it right into our television
set here at home.
The
progress that has been made in my life time is tremendous, and I have wondered
for quite some time what I did to be chosen or be allowed to be on this earth
at this period of history. I'm sure I
didn't help the scientists any. Maybe I
did something that made it so that they could do what they did. Of course, our tax money has made it
possible. I sometimes wonder if we
aren't going to far. That we don't know
yet.
I
would like to say something to my posterity, but I just don't know how to do
it. I am going to say love Christ. Be faithful to his commandments. Attend his church. Do what your Bishop tells you to do or the
party that's in charge of the branch that your in. If you revolt and stop going to church, you
will regret it as long as you live. You
will see the effect of it , not only in yourself but in other people. It's one of the hardest things in the world
to get started in. You go for awhile,
and it's so easy, so awfully easy, to back out and stay home. I will say this to all my posterity, please
love your church and pay attention to the authorities and abide by their
teachings. You shall be blessed for
doing it and be much wiser than the ones that don't heed to those teachings.
I had
a little experience with my grandsons today.
Grant sent two of his boys over to help me get some stumps out. They sure treated me swell. They sure did a fine job, and I am so awfully
proud of them. The I went over to
Spanish Fork where Earl was working.
When I went to leave. I had a
flat tire. Mike looked up and saw that I
was getting ready to change the tire. He
didn't walk over to me. He just came
running over as fast as he could. He said, "Get out of the road, Grandpa, I want to
change this tire for you." He just
took over, and he changed the tire for me.
I don't know. Those are the
things that I don't think that I'll ever forget. Those good things that my grandchildren do
for me. They may seen little to them,
but they're great to me. It is the
spirit that they do them in. I want to
say something about Jan. She has typed
this whole thing for me. I don't know
whether she has any idea how much I appreciate this. It has been the greatest pleasure for me to
put this on tape and for her to work so hard to type it and correct it. Then she's going to retype it for me. We want to have it as good as we can because
I don't know whether you'll appreciate it as much as I have putting it out, but
I hope that you do.
Now,
remember, Satan is turned loose. One of
the prophets told us that he would be turned loose for a spell. And I am sure he is loosed today with all his
aids. If he gets hold of you and gets
the influence on you, you're a goner. Be
on your guard. Fight against him. Pray to the lord not to let him get hold of
you. Keep it in mind in every walk of
your day. This is my prayer this
thirtieth day of June, 1969, your grandfather and father, J.C. Nielson.
I
want to say a few things about your Mother and Grandmother that will give you
an inkling of what kind of a character she was and what a great help mate she
was to me all through our married life.
One thing I can well remember. I
had a my drawing table down in the basement.
I would work all day and the work on my drawings at night for
buildings. I had a sheet already for
tracing on a linen cloth with ink, and it was quite a slow process of work, and
it was pretty easy to smear this ink that we used. We used Indian Ink. Everything was there. I had the tracing over the drawings. She stopped and looked at it and studied
awhile and thought, "Well, I'm
going to see if I can't do that."
When I got home that night, she had that whole sheet traced. It was beautiful work. It was the first work she had done, and it
was just beautiful. She did a lot of
tracing from then on and even learned enough so that she would give me a lot of
advice, and her ideas proved to be very good on the designing of a home.
When
I worked for wages, I always turned my earnings over to her, and she paid the
bills, and she could always make the money go farther than I could.
I believe the economical training that she had at home because of the
conditions that her father was in made
it very useful during our life together.
One
summer, I had quite a few men working for me, and I was working really to
hard. I was on the job all day, drawing
plans and keeping the books at night. I
asked Elda if she wouldn't like to help me out and keep the books. I would fetch the things home, label them,
and she would know where they would go and also the payroll. I would keep the time on the job, fetch the
payroll, and turn it over to her Friday evening. Saturday morning she would make out the
checks, pay the men up until Friday night, and when I would come in for lunch,
I would take the checks and deliver them that afternoon.
One
particular time I had a painter. He was
contracting, and I thought he deserved some money, so I told her to make Max
Kless a check for a certain amount.
Well, when I handed him the check, he looked at me funny and he
said, "Are you preparing to take
out bankruptcy?" I said what's
wrong? What is the idea?" Well, he said, "You have got your wife sighting these
checks, and it looks to me like you turned your accounts over to
her." I said, "Max look at that check. It has both our names on it." It was joint account. That didn't make any difference to him. He razzed me nearly all that week. He never got any more checks signed by
her. I saw that I paid him from then
on. I didn't want any story going out
that we were going broke or taking out bankruptcy.
I
never found a time but what she had an encouraging word for me if I was down at
the mouth, blue, thinking I was a failure.
When
George Anderson and I had our difficulties, that was quite a financial reverse
to us, and I was as blue as anybody could be.
I felt like I was a failure, had no business trying to support a
family. It went until after dinner was
over. She came down and sat to the side
of me and put her arms around me, started encouraging me, telling me that I was
not a failure, that I could do this. I
don't know just what she said. I don't
remember, but anyhow, when we went to bed, I felt like I could go out and like
the world. The next morning I left home
in the car and by 10 o'clock, I was back and announced that I had a job to take
the outfit on. I don't think I would
have had enough nerve to have tried that if she hadn't given me that
encouragement. It is a saying a woman can
make a man or break a him. Your mother
and Grandmother was the type that would make a man instead of breaking
him.
Elda
and I had 27 years and three months together, and she passed away. I went for several years as a widower. On night over at a dance (I started going to
dances) I saw Rose. I just saw her face
sticking between two women. I went over
and asked her for a dance. If you
remember, I came to Utah in 1911. Well,
she was one of the first girls that I met after I came here, but she was
engaged to Jim Curtis who she married and raised a very fine family. During the week, it was on my mind, why
shouldn't I take Rose out. I
thought, "Well, I'll go to the
dance Tuesday night, and I'll try to make a date with her." But when I went to the dance Tuesday night,
she wasn't there. It went on 'till the
next Monday. I called her up. I believe I mentioned this somewhere else,
but, I'm going to tell it again here.
When I asked her if she would go to the dance with me, I thought she
would choke taking her breath. Anyway we
went to the dance. We decided we didn't
want to get married, but anyway we went together for about six months. Then we got married. Rose and I , as far as I'm concerned, have
had a very lovely life together. Rose
has been a wonderful help-mate. We have
had lots of good times together. I am
much better off by having her as my companion for the rest of this life. I know each one of my children thinks the
world of Rose because they never neglect her.
It is one thing that is awfully dear in my mind to think that they have
accepted her and she has accepted them as true, good friends and children.
Rose Curtis
Nielson said, "Yes, J.C. and I have
had 17 years together and have made several wonderful trips, had nice family
parties, associated with all of our families.
We have eleven families to visit and associate with, so it keeps us
really busy. In all these families there
is love and appreciation for each other and love for their families, and we
appreciate that. It is hard to mention
all these thinks, but I have written a sort of a history of my life, and J.C.
is writing his, and I think that it will be very interesting to hear what he
has said. Due to my health problem, we
have not been doing much traveling the last few years, but I sure miss those
nice trips we used to take.
J.C.
also married and later divorced Mary Margaret Poltroon. J. C. died in Payson Hospital June 6, 1978
and was buried in t he Evergreen Cemetery in Springville. He was 88 years old.
Hi, ok this is totally out of the blue. But I was researching my grandmother's grandfather and landed on one of your older interesting posts. Anyway he seems to be a dead end as all sites are just evil. But I wonder if you would be able to help?
ReplyDeleteHe came to Eureka in 1906/7, might have worked in a mine there then. Honestly just throwing this out there as all genealogy sites drives me insane. If there is any possibility then I can give some more info and I can be found through my profile
J.C. would have been a boy of 16/17 years old at the time. I only have some of his stories he wrote and other family stories. Nothing about Eureka. Sorry
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