Courtship and Matrimony

“1938 I was 25.   I had met your grandpa and in the meantime I had been persuaded to go back east to see the relatives in Nebraska and Minnesota.  A whole month- January- and your grandpa was at the depot.  I went on the train, stopping in Iowa to see my cousin Verna.  My mom and my dad both had two sisters and a brother, four in each family.  I went to Minnesota and in Nebraska.  I stayed with a niece of my Dads, with steps that you had to climb to get into the feather bed.

Oh it was so cold that winter, colder than Twin Falls, and we went on to Minneapolis to stay with my cousin there.  When I came back there was Gene, at the train station because I had written to him.”

“My mother and dad didn’t have to pick me up, he did, with some flowers, these roses he had.  He worked for this company; his dad was the president of this mill- one of the big ones in Ogden.  He was the president of that so he got Grandpa a job in Twin Falls- they needed some body for a short period of time- and he had just graduated from BYU when he came to Twin Falls.  But he wanted to stay longer in Twin Falls so he got a job as the head of the Chamber of Commerce so he was there until he heard of a place they wanted to sell in Vale, Oregon, a feed and grain mill and he wanted to buy it.  He was there for a while and we decided to get married the first day of January.”

“He had bought the Mill and when we got married we went right to Vale, we had no honeymoon.  My honeymoon was in a hotel in Vale.  We had to stay for a whole month because our house wasn’t renovated for us.  We bought the house from the owners of the Mill- they were moving to California.”

“Since it was depression times my folks weren’t even driving.  Gene and I decided to be married in Boise.  We were married by a Methodist minister, not in the Church- I wasn’t a member.  My girlfriend and I got on the train to Boise.  Your grandpa and his best friend got a hotel room for us and we all stayed in the Boise Hotel- a fancy hotel.  We got up there and had dinner and your grandpa had left his coat on the rack with the keys in the car with the marriage license in the glove compartment.

The next day when he left he realized it wasn’t his coat and someone had taken his coat with the keys to the car with the marriage license.  Around noon a man had called in to find his coat with the keys to the car and the marriage license… in the very, very nick of time.  So we got married and stayed in the Vale hotel for a month and drive around looking at different towns.  We had the house, they were moving to California so we could fix it up, and we got the dog too…Pepper.

Six months after we were married, in July, I was baptized in Vale, in the swimming pool!  It was the Vale Swimming pool, a big building and people came from all over because it was built on a hot spring.”

Vale Grain and Feed Company

“We didn’t have a honeymoon, we went to the little town Vale, Oregon where we had bought a business there.  I spent a month honeymooning in a hotel, in a little hotel room, it was just a little hotel in a town with 1500 people so you know…It wasn’t very big.  The business was the Vale Grain and Feed Company.

Gene’s dad was in the feed business, he was head of one of the big feed companies in Ogden, UT, so he heard that this place was for sale, the man who owned wanted to retire and move to California, so that is the reason we bought that.  It was kind of the business Grandpa wanted to run.  Your great grandpa and your grandpa purchased it together and we bought it from him later.  We had just started out, we didn’t have much money together.  The farmers around bought their feed from him and their seeds and things like that…it was a farming company.

Grandpa was the owner and great grandpa had nothing to do with it…he put some money in it but we bought it.  Between the time I met him he was working for a seed company in Twin Falls where I lived and he had just graduated from BYU.  We were married in 1939 and the mill was purchased right at that time.  It was just before we were married and when we got married we just drove over to Vale and moved into the hotel for a month before the house was ready!

Grandpa would run the mill for 15 years.  Veil Grain and Feed Company was almost a must have there for the farmers who bought their feed…anything for farming they bought.  They didn’t buy equipment because that wasn’t what they sold.”

Vale in Those Days…War!

“Vale was not much different than it is now, just a wide spot in the road…1500 people, a farming town.  Grandpa, three years after we were married was the mayor I think until four years later and he ran the mill too…it was a small town and they didn’t have…it wasn’t like being a mayor of a big city.  He was in the bishopric also.

They had one movie theater, three restaurants, a hotel, and of course there were quite a few businesses: there was a mercantile company, there were several saloons- but they didn’t call it that, and one grocery store when we first moved there and a new one came in later.

There were some people that lived there before but most of the town people came later because the area was opened up to farming several years before we moved there.  There were just cattle ranches before but they opened it up to…the water came, they got a water system and most of our best friends were not of Vale but came later like we did.”

“Vale was a social town and I belonged to several clubs and we had parties where you invited almost the whole town.  We had dances, and of course there was the church.  Very few in town belonged to our church but a lot of them had to come long distances.  We had a pretty good membership.  There were only a few families who lived in town and the rest were all farmers.

Our church had quite a few dances and we had callings…MIA mostly…mutual.  I call it MIA because that’s what we called it then.  In those days we used to have traveling road shows and we traveled…everyone didn’t come to one building and we only had so many minutes to do it in…and it was a big area so we had to travel miles.  It was a real road show…and we won several times!  You had to really hurry but the traffic there wasn’t like it is nowadays…it was country- we could move faster!  And then you only had a short time to put up your props and get ready for it and then you had 15 minutes to do your show.  There were seven wards in the stake and then one was changed so only six.

Weiser was the stake, or we called it Weiser anyway.  It covered a big area.  When we had conference there were quite a few people in Weiser stake.”

“For the War, of course we had our things that we had to have stamps for, like shoes…we couldn’t buy silk stockings…there was a shortage of silk and certain foods…rubber and of course gasoline was very hard to get.  You had to have a card with an A,B or C and with high priority you could get more gas.  Your grandpa’s business made him high priority and he had to travel sometimes to the farmer’s places…it was a big area and that was the reason he couldn’t get in the War, he went to sign up and they didn’t want him…he was in charge…he was the owner of a business that needed to be there due to the priority of what he sold.

We knew what was going on and we felt it more than it seems like they do now…I think it is because we were rationed.  We probably may not have felt it so much.  A lot of boys from our town were going to war and we knew them.  Of course a close-knit small time town is different from an area like we live in now…big cities.”

Lynn and Leslie

“We moved into the house in ’39, Lynn was born in February of 1940.  There was a place where instead of going to the hospital they all went there to have babies- a baby hospital.  It was in Ontario about eighteen miles away.  It was called Brittingham Hospital.  It was great…of course it was during war time and they had to have a separate place where you could go and have babies born.  This lady was a nurse who owned the place…it was a great big house and she turned that into a nursing home and that is where she was born and also Leslie and Gene were born there.  She had closed the place before Stephanie was born and she was born in a hospital…a hospital in Vale.

I think the doctors wanted it this way, there were a lot of babies born at that time and I think the hospital was not that large…that was the only reason…they wanted extra room.”

“I got to name the girls we had and grandpa got to name the boys, we knew that before that came…but we didn’t know back then what the gender was going to be, that wasn’t even thought of in those days.  I didn’t care…each time we didn’t care whether it was a boy or a girl.  Leslie was born in ’43.   Gene was born in ’46 and Stef was born in ’51.”

“It was kind of lonesome but we had friends in town but when you have little ones almost the same age, you are busy, busy with them.  I was busy all the time.  I went with Grandpa when he would go to conventions, I would visit my mother in Twin Falls, and to Utah to visit Grandpa’s family.

I think once a week we went to a restaurant called the Top Hat…I was on the set of that show when it was made…but that was before we were married.”

“At one point the girls had measles…that was just Lynn and Leslie, Leslie was just a baby, Lynn was about four.  The quarantined me, they put a sign on the front door – “Quarantined.”  So grandpa had to stay with some friends of ours and he would bring the groceries over and we wouldn’t let him in- measles are harder on men than they are on women.

That lasted almost two weeks and grandpa couldn’t go home at all- put groceries in a box and left them on the front porch.  That was a hardship.  It was a hardship when he was gone hunting or fishing…he and his buddies loved to hunt and fish.  When he was gone I couldn’t go because of the babies, but, that was hard.  They wouldn’t leave for a long time but close to a week.

We used to go camping and grandpa did all of the cooking.  We would go up on Strawberry Lake; there were several places we went.  Grandpa was a fisherman, a fly fisherman, it had to be a moving stream, it wasn’t fishing in a pond.  He was very good and he was a great archer too.  His dad wasn’t but he and his cousins used to do a lot of hunting and fishing when he was growing up.  He was an outdoors-man…he liked to camp but he wasn’t particularly liking to go on a vacation to a town or some place.”

“Lynn was the first one and she was my little helper, she was so great about helping me out with the other kids and she was very…not a rebel…she did what you wanted her to do and she helped you out so much, like she is now…a steady person.  Now Leslie was different, she was a rebel as a little girl…like her “Mama!”

Lynn was a good student…a darn good person…and Leslie was too.  Leslie was a little different.  They fought quite a bit but not more than other kids.  They shared a room and Lynn was neater than Leslie, Leslie was a little…she made Lynn mad not hanging her clothes up.

Lynn had a good friend right in the area and they helped take care of Stephanie when she was born…those two girls really lugged her around and played with her when she was a little baby.

Lynn rode her bicycle a lot but Leslie didn’t want to learn to ride a bicycle and she didn’t want to learn to drive a car as early as Lynn and you would think it would be just the opposite.

Leslie played by herself a lot, she made little dolls out of hollyhock…she played with those for the longest time but she always came to the door to see if I was still there.  She had this thing where she was Mrs Mcgillacuty, I don’t remember what she called me, but she was Mrs Mcgillacuty.  She would come to the door and knock and I would say “Come in Mrs Mcgillacuty,” and then we would have a little treat.  She played by herself quite a bit, Lynn needed to have a friend but Leslie…she played by herself quite a bit.”

Poppie and Stephanie

“Your dad, now there was a guy!  We had bought Leslie a pair of cowboy boots because she wanted cowboy boots, when she out grew them your dad took them over…you couldn’t get them off of him.  His grandma, your grandpa’s mother, made him a little suit of short pants and a little jacket, and he would not wear it!  He just fought like a tiger and would not wear it.

When we would go camping he always took his little cars with him, little tiny cars, and he would run these cars around the campfire and his hands were just black with ashes…I couldn’t scrub it out of his hands!  But I can just see him on his hands and knees with those cars around that campfire.  I think he was about twelve when he started hunting with grandpa.

He almost burned our hay barn down.  He and his little friend were out in the hay barn and they had matches out there, which was a big no no, but they had them.  And all of a sudden he came in “Mama, there’s a fire out in the hay barn,” so I ran out there and of course I had to call grandpa and the firemen came and put it out before it cost too much damage.  I’ll never know for sure who the actual culprit was.  It could have been really bad, but anyway, it wasn’t.”

“Stephanie, until she got to be twelve years old was really tiny.  She always had a pencil and a writing book in her hand.  She was drawing all of the time.  I can’t remember her ever not having a pencil in her hand and drawing.  She did that constantly.”

“The kids didn’t have really bad accidents or anything like that but Lynn fell off the horse, named Toby…she didn’t like to ride, but grandpa put her up on the horse and she immediately fell off and broke her collar bone.

That was one thing.  Another was when Stephie was about two years old just before the move to California, we, grandpa and I, took the other three kids, Lynn and Leslie and Gene, over to a movie, in Ontario, California, that was eighteen miles away.  In the middle of the movie they turned it off and put the loud speaker on and wanted Gene Clark to go to the telephone-important call.  When he came back he said we had to leave…Stephanie got hurt…her eye was involved and all the way home on those 18 miles…those were the longest miles I ever went…I knew she was blind!  But it didn’t get into her eye…the girl next door who was 16 years old- she was our babysitter and she was taking care of Stephanie and took her to the grocery store.  They used to have wire things to advertise something and she climbed up on this wire thing- just like a little monkey- and slipped and one of the ends pointed right by her eye.  But, the doctor said it did not affect her eye…very close he said.”

“A Lot of Dogs in Vale”

“Pepper had died.  Pepper was an old dog when we got it.  He belonged to the Clevelands that owned the house and the business that we bought and they asked if we would take Pepper, he was an older dog and of course we did, but we had a little fox terrier that someone gave us for a wedding present…Spike.  Spike was killed not much more than a pup.  Of course fox terriers aren’t very big and a big dog got to him…in those days you didn’t leash a dog, or, you didn’t have to keep them in your yard…dogs got to run around so he went over to the mill where grandpa was and a dog jumped on him and they had a fight and he was killed.  I felt so bad.  Before the kids were born he and I would sit on the davenport and eat an apple, I would give him a bite and I would take one and eat it and take another bite and give it to him.

A lot of dogs in Vale…we had a chow…somebody…we seemed to have a lot of people who wanted to leave their dogs with us!  This was a chow and they always say that chows are mean but this dog…her…she was happy…we called her Happy and she was so sweet! Oh that was a great dog, she was pretty- she had long red fir. Your dad liked Boy the best, Boy was a lab.

“I Didn’t Want to Move But it Was Time For Us to Move.”

“Grandpa had retired from the mill and he had a little office in downtown Los Angeles and they wanted grandpa to come work and we were kind of tired of the little town anyway…it is hard to live in a little town when your children are growing up…you need more.  That was the reason that we moved.

It was 1954.  Grandpa and Gene went to Los Angeles to find a house for us so they found a house right on the edge of Glendale but it was still in Los Angeles…that’s where we moved to.  We drove and a moving van went on ahead of us…they practically had all of the furniture in by the time we got Los Angeles.

We lived a rental for a year and a half but the owner wanted to sell it…somebody wanted to buy it…we had to find a place so we moved into the house in Glendale, up on the hill…I liked that house very much…but they weren’t ready to sell it so we started looking for a place to buy and live and the schools were very good in South Pasadena…uncle Kent and his family lived in Pasadena so we thought that would be great.  Uncle Kent was the head of the English department at Cal Tech.”

“1956 we bought the house in South Pasadena.  1316, that was the address.  Lynn was sixteen, Leslie was thirteen, Gene was 8 and Stef was three.”

The New Family on the Block

“Lynn had been going to a Glendale school and Leslie had been going to a Los Angeles school because she was still in grade school.  She entered the sixth grade and she was elected class president.  So she got to go to the show “Kids Say the Funniest Things” with Art Linkletter and Red Skelton came on the show, anyway, he interviewed Leslie and she was so cute.

Leslie and Gene had started grade school in Los Angeles and they got to stay there but Lynn went to junior high close by so they let her go to school in Glendale but they all changed when we moved to South Pas and went to South Pas schools.

Lynn was through Junior High and started high school in South Pasadena.  Leslie was in junior high and Gene and Stephanie were in grade school.  Lynn was a very good student, she really was…well…all the kids were, they weren’t A+ students, but they were good students.”

“Lynn was very much like she is now, she was very steady, very “with it” and she did everything you wanted her to do, she wasn’t a rebellious person.  Leslie was more rebellious.  Like me.  And your dad was great, he was so funny, he was always teasing his sisters…well…not Lynn much but Oh!  He teased Stephanie and Leslie till they were furious with him.

Of course he was in the middle of everything.  He couldn’t spell, he had bad dyslexia and of course we didn’t know anything about that at the time and I would drill him every morning before he went to school and I couldn’t understand why he couldn’t get the spelling…the girls did but he just couldn’t.  Of course we found out when he was in college what that was and what was wrong, but he was a good student anyway.  He got through very well.”

“To All Intents and Purposes”

“We lived thirty-one years on Meridian.  We had the best seats in the whole football field because all of our friends came and we would be lined up in the back yard so everybody could sit and watch the football.  We were right next door.

It was very lively.  We had great times there.  The kids, their friends still remember those days, they loved our house and we had stuff going on all of the time.  Kids would stop in after the football games and then they would go off some place, off to a dance.

Lynn graduated in ’58 and Leslie in ’61, Gene ’64 and Stef ’69.”

“Lynn and Leslie didn’t get along very well growing up.  They had a bedroom together, downstairs in the South Pasadena house and they shared a bedroom in Vale where they were in the same bed.  They couldn’t get along because Lynn was neat and Leslie was not.  Stuff was all over the floor.  But they are such great friends now, all four of them just love each other to pieces so I’m not complaining!

When Gene got together with his friends…he is telling me things now I didn’t know happened…I probably would have been scared to death!  Stephanie was the little fairy, a little skinny…beautiful hair…she swam a lot…her hair was just shiny…she was a lot of fun, she really was.  She found a notebook that she wanted me to buy her and just as a little girl, maybe four years old, and that notebook never left her and she was always drawing.

Lynn has a good eye for color, Leslie didn’t try to be an artist but did she ever sew!  She sewed her clothes all the time.

Lynn was the homemaker as she is now.  She didn’t cook, but I am sure if I would have insisted she would have.  Leslie was a beautiful dancer…of course grandpa and I danced a lot too.  We were ball room dancers at the ward.  They had a lot of dances in those days.

Stephanie and I were ice skaters.  When we moved to South Pasadena she wanted to try herself on the ice and I hadn’t been on ice skates since I was a little girl.  So I took her to the Pasadena ice rink and joined a little club there and the mothers kept wanting me to join them…I was waiting for Stephanie…I might have as well been skating so we both had fun doing that.”

“We were in the South Pasadena First Ward and the San Marino was meeting in the same building so they were the Second Ward.  It was quite a big ward…there were quite a few members.

In Vale grandpa was in the bishopric and in South Pasadena he was Sunday School superintendent and a member of the Quorum of the Seventies and he and I were the MIA, he and I were the dance directors for a while…he always had a job.  I was mostly in MIA.  I was music director in the Sunday school for a while but they put me back in mutual because they needed somebody, I was the president of MIA.”

I remember, when Lynn went off to college, and of course she was the first one, I would say “Oh gosh, I’ll be glad when Lynn comes home for the summer,” but your grandpa said to me “To all intents and purposes, Lynn is gone.”  I felt like somebody had pulled my kid out and killed her.  I wanted everything to be the same but it would never be like it was before…of course it wouldn’t be…they have their life to live.”