Preview

I have had many comments about my dad's book. Quite a few people want a sneak preview. Here is the rough draft of the first chapter that my dad sent me a few months ago...

The early years in Hyrum

I am told that we moved to Hyrum when I was two years old or in 1960. The first memory I ever have of myself was on one of my early birthdays living in our single story 1800 sq. ft. house in Hyrum. I recall crying a lot over some issue related to my birthday and my neighborhood friend, Bruce Miller, who was a couple of years older than me trying to comfort me. There would be plenty of more memories from this house and neighborhood I would live in until the age of 15 and my departure to Hawaii to pick pineapples.

The house was a flat roof home with a pretty large front and back yard. It had a sizeable tool shed in the backyard where we stored all sorts of junk form lawnmowers to spare furniture. The home was built as a three bedroom with one bathroom which had a single toilet, sink and tub-shower combination. The peak of the family size and demand for space would have been when I was about 9 years old and my oldest brother McKay was 18, just before he would go on his mission to the Japan north mission. You can do the math, but seven children and two parents in a three bedroom single bathroom house took a lot of creativity.

Initially mom and dad had the largest bedroom and the three boys slept in one bedroom and the four girls in another. As we all began to age, Dad exercised his neophyte carpentry skills and converted the two car garage into two bedrooms and they moved to an attached workroom that was attached, but just behind the two car garage. This left one bedroom each for Mckay and MaRee, who were in their teens and the final bedroom for Karma, Gwynn and Bonnie to share.
Living in the garage of a home in Utah is not so bad until winter comes. There was no heating vent into that garage and no insulation and I learned to waste no time in putting on my clothes in the morning and get my fanny to the breakfast table. There was no carpet initially in these converted bedrooms but they gradually improved. I remember having three metal bunk beds stacked on top of each other and I slept on the top one for a while, about 2 feet from the ceiling. One night I woke up with a thick bloody lip, having fallen off the top bunk onto the garage floor. We call these safety violations at work today.

From these converted bedrooms I recall hearing the Afghanistan and Pakistani war of the seventies. Kirk listened to the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith and many other 60s and 70s rock groups and my familiarity of rock music took off here. I even remember putting a mouse that I trapped in the house on MaRee's dresser, having cut a hole in the top to make sure it didn’t die of affixation. The girls in our family went totally crazy when they saw a mouse, largely from the signal of fear they inherited from Mom. I will continue with a further story on that. We use to like hamsters as a family. We once bought a pair of them in Ogden and got them out to the car fine. Somehow one of the little creatures got away in the red Volkswagen bug mom was driving. She went crazy, screaming and crying until we got the little sucker back into the box. That is when I first heard the phrase “Don’t ever do that again.”

Breakfast was a lot of hotcakes, cereal and other standard items. We had few pre-packaged or prepared food; everything seemed to be made from scratch. This changed a little later as making pizzas at home out of a Gino’s box was all the rave. I was also a great cookie maker and enjoyed doing that after school. I was also a cleaner and often organized Mom’s kitchen cupboards, especially the spice cabinet, which was my favorite.

Trying to get ones place in line for the bathroom was entirely a different challenge. Being younger, and a boy at that, meant I was the last all of the time. I had two very memorable experiences in that bathroom if you would indulge me in sharing them. The first one was quite embarrassing and a mischievous event on the part of McKay. I was probably somewhere around 5 or 6 years old and taking my bath. I don’t recall exactly why but for some reason got out of the tub for a moment and when I came back saw a twisted brown log in the tub. My brother was laughing and accused me of dropping a turd in the tub. Mortified and crying, I denied it, knowing that if I would have done such a dirty deed I surely would have remembered it. It turns out that he took large tootsie roll I had been chewing on and shaped the evidence to look like a log and was having a lot of fun with me. A similar gross gag was played on me a couple of years later when one of Kirk’s friends partially urinated into a coke drink and passed it off to me as a tasty drink. Can you say white trash? The neighbor Helen Brown came over and tore Claude Williams head off when she heard about that one.

Another experience in that bathroom is one that I didn’t recognize at the time but have since seen it as my first promptings of the Holy Spirit. I would bath in the tub and as I got older enjoyed music form the radio. We had a portable radio which we would plug in from room to room as we traveled about the house. I liked listening to it while taking a warm bath. The bathroom was so warm as the heat vents ran under the floor and the tub and it was heaven in the winter months. I decided to put it closer to me while in the tub, choosing the edge of the tub as the location. This did not feel good to me I was prompted to put it back on the bathroom vanity, which would require getting out of the tub to change channels or volume adjustment. I complied with the prompting. Later in life, I recognized the physics of water and electricity and saw how easily I may have been electrocuted had the radio teetered on the side of the tub and fallen into the water.

Gradually and by 1972, Dad left the family, McKay, MaRee, Gwynn all got married and left the house. Kirk went to diesel mechanic school in Denver leaving, Mom, Bonnie, Karma and I as the entire household. Change continued for the next two years as I left for Hawaii and Mom married Darwin and the remaining family ended up in North Logan.

My work responsibilities at home consisted of mowing the lawn, tending the garden and shoveling snow. The yard took about a solid hour or 90 minutes to complete. We had a heavy motorized mower, but required pushing to mow the lawn. I was only about 98 lbs by the time I hit the 9th grade so mowing the lawn took a lot out of me in the early years. There was no edger or other implements so the goal was to cut the grass and dump it into the garden as mulch. The good thing about this is it was only about a 6 month job from May to October, with the winter snow and spring rains giving me a seasonal break. The garden tending was actually more fun in my mind. I would rent or borrow a garden tiller (we never did own one) from the neighbor and would then plant rows of peas, carrots beans, corn, potatoes and other vegetables. One of my favorite dishes growing up was carrots cut into rounds, steamed and with butter. I called them wagon wheels.

Shoveling snow was a task that was hard but sporadic. When the big storms came I would go out after school and clear the driveway. The drive and parking area was approximately the size of seven parked cars. The snow was heavy and wet and it would usually take some time. It was here that I would keep shoveling, subconsciously awaiting my Dad to come home and praise me for the efforts. He liked a well mowed lawn and shoveled walks, but was not too interested in gardening. I was often disappointed because my work was not often verbally recognized since he was out gallivanting around, as I later learned.

Probably the most memorable piece of the Hyrum home was “The Hut” behind the large tool shed was a 20 x 10 foot space where my friends, Todd Williams, Greg Smith, Ted Miller and I decided to build a hideout. We weren’t really sure how to do it but gathered a lot of wood from everyone’s backyard and starting nailing it together. My brother Kirk educated us on how to build a floor and studded walls and before long we had ten foot by ten foot hideout. It had an escape trap door, 5 bunked beds, a ceiling made of egg cartons, pictures clipped from magazines on the wall and lots of empty liquor bottles. We had a fascination to collect empty bottles of from the Hyrum junkyard. They were appealing cause of their colorful and fascinating labels, and we were looking for that kind decorative collateral. We even went so far as to add color water to some of them to make them seem real. We were trying to be tough guys.

Through my seventh and eight grade the whole neighborhood and gradually the entire junior high school was aware of the Hut and I enjoyed the popular notoriety that came with it. We would have sleepovers during the summer months and boys from other communities that attended the same school would show up. There were even some makeout sessions for some hot couples that were going out during their fourteen and fifteen years of age; I was not part of any love nesting at this age and wouldn’t even go on my first date until North Logan at the age of 16, but this was an interesting experience none the less.

I was in the Hyrum 3rd Ward during my entire 13 years in Hyrum. The membership rose from three wards to now about 3 stakes I believe.The meeting house was memorable and fascinating to me to this day. None of the earlier church houses were the same. They were all architected uniquely and very large. This church had three stories and a host of large classrooms ornate decorations and hidden closets. To this day, I can walk through that entire church house in my mind and recall all of the experiences I had in church from primary to court of honor dinners, my baptism, Sunday school classes, Sacrament meetings, etc. When I was growing up, there was not yet a three hour block. Church started at 9 or 10 in the morning. This consisted of priesthood meeting and Sunday school. Following that we made a trip to Dave’s drive in and bought candy or an ice cream. I know… but we did it. We would then return home for lunch and would return for sacrament meeting again at 7pm. Sacrament meeting alone was 90 minutes and would often go two hours if the Dry Council spoke or a missionary reunion.

There was plenty to do in Hyrum. I loved to fish each spring and summer. We would catch trout at the dam or in the spillway which was a large concrete bowl that collected water that was released out of the dam. This spillway was also a fun place to slide down in a mock demonstration of surfing. The dam also provided fun in the winter as we walked across the solid frozen ice that came with freezing Cache Valley winters. I remember one year that it was 20 below zero for two weeks straight. The uptown area included a movie theatre, diner, Lincoln Elementary where I went to school, gas stations and a doctor’s office. I use to peddle myself around on my bikes and we rarely got a ride anywhere within the city.

I was a pretty safe kid, having never experienced a broken bone or a hospital stay until I was 47 years old. I did have a couple of minor experiences with the doctor in Hyrum I was knocked down a coal chute and had to get stitches in my head. I fell off the handle bars of my friend’s bike. We use to carry or “pump” each other around on a bike. In this accident, apparently I was unconscious for a few hours before coming to again. I got the name “Goofs” after this incident since I apparently would go looney every now and again following this accident. I was almost hit by a car once by mindlessly meandering around the road on my bike.

The total Hyrum experience was not unlike many other kid’s youthful ventures.
I learned how to work, play, be creative, and grow up amongst friends and family. It laid a strong basis of my religion and need to care for others and build relationships. Small communities have a lot of merit to share in building these experiences Up till the age of fifteen; I had never yet been on an airplane. I had only been to three states, Utah, Idaho and Wyoming. I hadn’t experienced seafood other than the fish I had caught in Hyrum Dam. Little did I know how dramatic of a global view of the world I would begin experiencing in four short years.