By: James Asher DeLand
(Son of Royal and Ruby DeLand)
My mother, Ruby Emelia Worthen, was born 27 November 1883 in Salt Lake City in the Nineteenth Ward. Her parents were second generation Mormons. Her Grandfather, Henry Grow, designed and built the Great Tabernacle.
When Mother was about five years old, the family moved to a farm about six miles west of Salt Lake City. It was in the middle of a lone prairie that she spent her childhood with her brothers and sister. But she had to grow up fast because her father and mother separated when she was about ten years old. Her mother had to go to work to support the family, leaving the job of raising her younger brothers and sister to Mother. This meant the end of her schooling but not her education. Over the years she taught herself.
She was a remarkable woman in many ways. In spite of her lack of formal education, she became a wonderful public speaker. She could write beautiful letters of praise, congratulations, thank you, and/or condolences – a talent I often wished for. She wrote beautiful songs and poems. She was an expert on etiquette, a fine seamstress, a wonderful cook, a gardener, a florist and the best all around handyman in the county.
She was without personal fear. Her home was two miles from the nearest neighbor and out in the prairie. Many nights her mother couldn’t get home on account of the weather. She was alone with the younger children. One incident I’ve heard many times. She was well developed for her age when she was thirteen. In that section of Hunter and Granger, there was a gang of young toughs 17 to 20 years of age who used to tear around on their horses raising the devil. They knew Mother was alone, so they figured to gang up on her and take her by force. The house was an adobe-cement built like a fort with heavy doors and small windows. While the main gang stayed in front to hold her attention, two of them slipped around back of the house figuring to crawl in through the pantry window. Mother waited till she could hear them at the window. Then she barred the front door and went in the pantry and caught one guy half way in the window. She threw a hand full of red pepper in his eyes. She said you could hear him screaming half way across the county. The gang crabbed their friend and took off for home with Mother shooting over their heads with a rifle. Years later the victim, Frank Rushton, told me, “Your mother almost blinded me, but we sure left her alone after that.” About twenty yards out from the front there was a big cottonwood tree and any time she heard anything prowling around at night she would take the rifle and fire a couple of shots into that old tree. It had a sobering effect on a prowler especially if he happened to be behind the tree.
When she was a little older, she went to work and that is when she met Dad. They ran away and were married. They set up housekeeping at Hunter and began farming. The first child was Ruby who was born there. She was born with Black Smallpox which was the worst kind. She only lived twenty-one days. A year later my Sister Martha was born on the farm. She was followed by George, Nellie, and Lloyd.
In that time, Dad and a hired hand both came down with spinal Meningitis. The doctor had given them up; so she cured them with her standard remedy which was a mustard plaster and prayer. The effects of the disease were to draw their head back like a bow. She applied plasters to the soles of their feet. The doctor thought she was nuts till he saw them cured. Strangely enough, 35 years later, during the War, the wife remembered the story I had told her; and when Gloria and Joyce got the crippling Polio, the doctors gave them up, too. She asked them about mustard plasters and they said they wouldn’t do any good, but if it would make her feel better to go ahead. Today we have two healthy daughters instead of cripples which goes to show God and the old fashioned things still work.
The house in Hunter was right on the Lincoln Highway, the main road to the city. So there were always tramps and vagrants coming and going. Aunt Allie used to live with Mother because Dad was working nights at the Utah Copper Company. One night Aunt Allie came to Mother scared to death. She said, “Ruby, there is a man looking in the window.” Mother walked over near the window and called to Aunt Allie, “Bring me the shot gun, and I’ll get a leg or something.” There was an awful scrambling and the sound of feet wildly slapping the ground and running steps rapidly fading in the distance. Mother said the next morning they found the biggest foot prints she had ever seen.
Not long after that, the family moved to our tar paper mansion, in Ragtown, where I was born as was Alice, Walter, and Josephine in that order.
Because of Dad’s accident after they moved to Ragtown, Mother took in boarders – Uncle Orrie, Mr. Slater, who later moved to Nevada, and several others I don’t remember their names. Martha used to play the piano, and they would sit around after supper singing songs like “If You Knock The Ell Out of Kelly” and other sentimental favorites.
Even in Ragtown, Dad’s green thumb worked. We had the only trees in town – two silver maples and vines all over the front of the house.
We had rats as big as cats under the houses. Ma used to catch them in a wire cage. Then she would hold them by the tail and dip them in green paint. Then she would turn them loose under the house. Boy, how the rats would pile out form under the house. A neighbor down the street went her one better. He caught one and dipped it in kerosene. He touched a match to it. The rat ran under his house and burnt it to the ground. It was dramatic, but he got rid of the rates.
Every spring the sheep men moved there flocking from the winter range on the desert to the summer range in the Wasatch Mountains and with them would come a group of Skull Valley Indians. While the young boys and bucks were moving the sheep, the older folks and squaws would go from town to town begging and trading. There was one squaw with them named Maggie. She literally worshipped Ma because one year she came to the house with her face swelled up, suffering with an ulcerated tooth. Mother took her to our dentist and had the tooth pulled. Each year they would camp in our yard over night. Then the next day move on to Uncle Jim Asher’s farm in Granger. When Josephine was born, Mother was still in bed when the Indians arrived. Maggie came to the door of the bedroom and said, “You sick?” Ma held up Josephine and said, “Me got new Papoose.” Maggie said, pointing to her back, “You got new baby, me got papoose.” She had one strapped to her back.
For many years, Mother was the registrar for Magna Precinct, and she got to know practically everybody in the west end of the county.
One year she took the part of Santa Claus for Ragtown Ward’s Christmas party. She had everybody fooled but my brother George. He followed her out the back door and as she ran down the back alley to get away from him, she ran into a low hanging clothes line and almost tore her head off.
During World War I the Utah Copper Company imported a lot of foreign laborers – Greek, Italian, Japanese, Bulgarian, and Macedonians. Our Aunt Ethel Mason lived about a block up the street, and one night she sent her son, Leo, down the alley to tell us there were three strange men hanging around her front door. Dad was working overtime, so Ma took off up the street with a half of brick in her hand. She asked them what they wanted, and they just jabbered at her in a foreign tongue. There were three Macedonians with huge black fierce looking mustaches. They couldn’t speak any English, so when she told them to shove off, one of them made the mistake of shoving her. She calmly knocked him cold with the brick, kicked the second one in the belly, and as the third one started to run she picked up an old flattened steel gauge water bucket by the handle, whirled it around her head, let go, and dropped him at ten paces. Next day, Barlow, the company sheriff came around to see why she was beating up on their workers. Seems they were at the wrong house.
Whenever anyone took to molesting girls at night on the road between Magna and Ragtown, she would be her own decoy and woe to the poor sucker that bothered her. He probably thought he had fallen in to a cement mixer. Her specialty was mashers in the theaters. Dad said that more than once they would be watching a movie, and he would hear an agonizing sob or cry. He knew some poor dope had made the mistake of patting Mother on the knee or pinching her leg. She would take out her hat pin and bury about three inches of it in his leg. One guy left so fast she didn’t even get her hat pin out of his leg.
When any of us children got out of line, she never said,”Wait till your Father gets home.” She took care of it while it was still fresh in our minds. Mother was a child psychologist before anybody heard of such things. When we needed a licking, she would just point up the hill and say “Get me a switch.” About a quarter of a mile from the house was some tamarack willows; and for the benefit of those who have never come in contact with them, they are the nearest thing nature has to buckskin buggy whips. We had time to reflect on our sins for a quarter mile up the hill. It was worse coming back with the switch. She didn’t disappoint when we got there. But contrary to what the Headshrinkers might say, it didn’t leave scars on my body or my soul. It didn’t give me a complex, so that I hated my mother or father. She gave me my last licking with a broom handle when I was nineteen, but don’t get the idea Mother was built like a wrestler. She was a beautiful woman with black hair, brown eyes and a peaches and cream complexion.
In 1918 we moved to our new home in Magna and the last boy was born there, Roy. Aunt Emmeline Tanner came in from Grantsville to take care of her, and Grandma Rolfe came to take care of us kids. It was a big event whenever Aunt Emmaline came around cause she could tell fortunes with tea leaves and cards.
Now that Mother was in a new modern home, she really began to come into her own. There was plenty of room in the house, new furniture, a big basement, plenty of room for flowers and vegetables, some chickens, pigs, and a cow. Each spring we managed to get a couple of bummer lambs, so we would have mutton for the winter. When Mother and Dad started to get ready for winter, it was like stocking a super market. We would start about the time school was out and the fruit started to ripen. In most cases we would go pick our own fruit because it was cheaper that way.
It seemed like Mother was canning fruits and vegetables all summer and into the fall. For her own family, her and Dad canned 200 quarts of tomatoes, 60 quarts of fresh peaches, 60 quarts of cherries, 20 quarts of plums, 20 quarts apricots, gallons of chili sauce and catsup, tomato juice for soups and cooking, jars of piccalilli relish, chow-chow, mustard pickles, 150 gallons of cucumbers in salt brine to be made into dill pickles as they were needed, 25 gallons of sweet pickles, 25 gallons of sauerkraut, 25 quarts of pears, jams and preserves by the quarts, peach preserves, apricot, plum jam, apple butter, ripe tomato preserves, green tomato preserves, watermelon rind preserves, gooseberries for pies, raspberries and strawberry jam.
Dad would put 1 ½ tons of potatoes in the cellar, sacks of carrots and turnips in a pit, sacks of onions, dozens of heads of cabbage, Hubbard squash and pumpkins and about ten ton of coal. We would kill about five pigs in the fall to salt down and cure. Then during the winter, we would kill one as needed for fresh meat. A thousand pounds of flour and two hundred of sugar would be added to the storage. By spring it would all be cleaned out.
About a month before Thanksgiving, she would start making her fruit cake, big black ones. Then she would wrap them, sprinkle with brandy, and put them away for the holidays. She would do the same with mince meat pies. On Thanksgiving, she would make a plum pudding and serve it with brandy sauce. We used to raise a few capons for the big days. One thing, Roy and Ruby DeLand can say for sure is nobody ever had to go hungry.
At Christmas, we would have a couple of dishpans full of popcorn balls made with molasses candy. Nothing better!! She made taffy, peanut brittle, fudge, and fondant. Out of this world!
She had a fruit salad she used to serve at her parties for light refreshment that was food for the angels. After I came to the Island, I added papaya to the recipe and called it my Royal Hawaiian Salad. People really flipped over it.
After Dad got his flower gardens really blooming, Mother had another gesture that endeared people to her. If she heard of somebody being sick in town – even strangers – she would send a big bouquet of flowers with a verse or two that she had written. For a death, she would make up a big spray. She would take willows and bend them and tie them. Then she would stuff it with moss for filler and stick flowers all over and have a beautiful funeral piece. It wasn’t long until people were coming to her for their sprays instead of sending to Salt Lake City. I’ve seen funerals at home that would have as many as six to eight sprays that she had made.
I’ve an original poem she wrote as a condolence to one of my school teachers. My teacher had lost her niece. It could have well been Mother’s own.
She has just passed on, mourn not for her as dead;
Her spirit lives, yet bitter tears we shed.
If we could only see her rest and reconcile our
Hearts that God knows best.
She has passed out, but the door is left ajar;
Tis but a step though the distance seems so far.
It will be so short a time o’er we shall see her face;
And we have God’s own promise of his sustaining grace.
She has passed out, perhaps God needed her;
To fill His ranks and she has entered in.
She will fill the place assigned her with a spirit
Brave and bold, a helper in God’s army
Who are now within the fold.
There were many grateful people in our town because she was thoughtful enough to send them a few lines to lighten their heavy hearts.
She was Utah State Grand Mistress of the Pythian Sisters; and when she made her yearly visit throughout the state, she made many friends by breaking the racial barrier. Previous state officers, when they went down in the coal districts and mining towns, refused to stay in the homes of so called “Dagoes” and other foreigners. Mother stayed and visited in all their homes and found them to be wonderful, warm-hearted people. In fact, one later became a lady judge and a U.S. Congresswoman.
Mother went to Milwaukee in 1928 as Utah State Representative to the National Committee of the Pythian Sisters. She would have gone again in 1930, but the Lord had a greater need and sent for her.
As each August rolls around, I think of going to Liberty Park or Lagoon for Utah Copper Day. The picnic lunches Mother made were out of this world. She would make a big baking pan of fried chicken, about 25 pounds of potato salad, a large pot of baked beans, stacks of sandwiches of all kinds, pickles and relishes, a baked ham, a big freezer of homemade ice cream, cantaloupes and watermelons on ice, plenty of tomatoes, lettuce and green onions right from the garden, a chocolate cake, and applesauce cake. Grandma Rolfe always brought a coconut cream cake. Dad was always on the committee and had to be there early. So he was able to save a couple of tables for us. All the relatives that could make it would be there. In those days, we didn’t stop to think whether Ma was having a good time. We just thought about her having plenty for us to eat.
Early in life, she hammered any racial prejudices out of us. She was loved and respected by people of all walks of life and was always the first there in sickness or sorrow. She had a medicine called “Oleum.” I think she first learned about it from her own mother. We used to call it her Snake Oil. It was wonderful stuff, and she cured a lot of infections with it. Let her hear of some child with a bad earache or somebody with blood poisoning and away she would go with her Snake Oil. I wish it was still on the market.
As I write this, I wonder where she found enough hours of the day to do all the things she did. How does any mother find the time? The good ones do somehow.
Mother did all her own sewing on an old treadle Singer machine until her legs gave out. Then she converted it to an electric herself. She used to even make winter coats and jackets for the family. Every fall she would have a quilting bee and throw together three or four patchwork quilts for winter. She even found time to do dressmaking on the side for some of the women in town. If she did get any time to sit down, she always had some crocheting in her hands. She crocheted beautiful bedspreads, table cloths, piano scarves, doilies, runners. You name it. She made it. She used to make bright gingham sunbonnets and aprons as gifts for her friends. She did all this without the benefit of a push button kitchen or house. She cooked on a coal stove, washed in a hand powered washing machine. Any mixing or whipping was done by hand. She made all her own salad dressings and mayonnaise.
Mother and Dad had a home that was like a “poor house blanket” – always room for one more. It was a home with all the meaning that is implied when you say “Home.” There were many times that it was bulging at the seams, but it always held together.
Mother died 16 July 1930 at the young age of 46 of cancer. Dad died three years later 23 July 1933 of grief and a broken heart. He died with a smile on his face and her name on his lips. He was happy at last. He had found his sweetheart again never to be parted, of that I am sure. They lived their lives as our Lord and Savior would have us all live – love God and thy neighbor as thyself.
I pray God lets me leave my mark for good on the community that my mother and father did. What a wonderful heritage they left us.
By James Asher DeLand (George LeRoy DeLand’s brother)
Peterson Family Weblog 