From Rag Town To Rogue Town

Personal History of  George L. DeLand

This history was written by George L. DeLand in his handwriting in 1979.  It was copied and given to members of his family.

After receiving a copy, his granddaughter, Kathleen DeLand Peterson, because of her love for her grandfather, spent many long hours typing it so that it could be more easily read and enjoyed.

It has been in those two forms until now.  In an effort to get all our family histories into the computer and printed and also saved on disks, the typed copy was scanned into Microsoft Word by his daughter-in-law, Carol DeLand.  Very little editing was done, mostly, typing or spelling errors.  His grammar and sentence construction was left as he wrote it.  His handwritten copy is still in the possession of many family members.  November 4, 2005

I was born Feb.1, 1904 in a little town called Hunter in the state of Utah. It was located about seven miles west of Salt Lake City.  It was a typical town, one store that carried everything from A to Z for either man or beast.

My father Royal B. DeLand was born January 15, 1880 in Salt Lake City, Utah. My mother Ruby A.Worthen was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. November 27, 1883.

I had nine brothers and sisters:

Ruby Emelia                                                               November 11, 1900

Martha Vilate                                                              December 19, 1901

George LeRoy                                                              February 1, 1904

Nellie Lucretia                                                            July 11, 1905

Lloyd Eugene                                                             July 22, 1907

James Asher                                                               January 28, 1909

Alice May                                                                   May 22, 1911

Walter Ernest                                                              January 7, 1913

Josephine Worthen                                                      March 4, 1915

Royal Berkeley                                                           May 4, 1919

Five of us were born in Hunter and four in a company town called Rag Town.  Roy, the youngest, was born in Magna.

The home I was born in was a little red brick house. It was located on 33rd South Main west from Salt Lake. About two city blocks from ourhome was a grade school to sixth grade and a LDS church.

When I was born my father was working for a company called The Utah Copper Company. It was located about 6 miles west of ourhome.  We had 20 acres of land with ourhome, and my father was farming it as well as working at the mill.  He was buying the farm.  They were doing a lot of construction work at the plant, and my father was working as a laborer.  He was wheeling cement for a power house they were building.  They were working about 40 feet from the ground.  There where no guard rails to keep the men from falling.  My father fell onto a pile of rocks and completely shattered his ankle on his left foot.  They loaded father in a wagon and took him seven miles to a railway stop.  He was put on the train and taken to a hospital in Salt Lake City.  It was eleven hours from the time he fell until he reached the hospital.

It was hit and miss whether to amputate his foot.  He spent the next two years in and out of the hospital, but they saved his foot.  In those days when you went to work, you signed a release absolving the company of any blame in case of accident or death.  All my father got was his hospital bills paid.  My father lost his farm and every thing he owned.  I think the family would have went hungry if it had not been for family and friends.

When my father was able to walk again, the company gave him a job as an apprentice boiler maker.  He took a correspondence course in lay out work, and he advanced real fast.  He later got to be foreman of the boiler and blacksmith shops and later was made assistant to the master mechanic.  I don’t think my father had more than a sixth grade education.

When my father went back to work, we moved to a town called Ragtown.  It was a company owned town by the Utah Copper Company.  It got its name because the first houses had wood floors, wood walls of about four feet, and canvas roof.

The mill was built on the side of the hill and below was what was known as the company houses, they housed the officials and foreman.  The houses were all painted gray.  They had picket fences around and most had lawns and trees.

Down below were the workman’s houses.  They were built by the workmen themselves.  The company furnished a small lot.  The houses were about six feet apart.  There were four rows of houses – two rows with houses back to back.  There was a water line between the back to back houses, and each house had a water faucet out the back door.  No one had water in the house.  Each house had an out house or privy as some called them.  There was no electricity.  Everyone used kerosene lamps.  They used wood stoves that burned coal and wood for their cooking and heating.  There were no sidewalks, and the road had no gravel.  They were knee deep in mud in the winter and ankle deep in dust in the summer.

We had two churches – Baptist Church and LDS Mormon Church.  They were used for schools.  First to the third grade used the Baptist, and fourth to sixth used the Mormon Church.  Each church had one large room and some small ones for storage.

Also near Ragtown were three groups of foreigners.  There were Greeks and Japanese who lived in bunk houses.  They were all single men.  The company brought them in because it was cheap labor.  There were a group of Italians.  They lived in a place called little Italy with their families. They all lived apart from us or segregated as they say today.

All these people lived on Company property, but about a mile away off Company property was another group of buildings, saloons, gambling halls and painted ladies.  It was called Snaketown, and woe to any man whose wife caught him coming from Snaketown.

The Utah Copper Company consisted of the mine located at Bingham and two mills.  One called “The Magna” was in back of Ragtown.  The other mill was about two miles west and was called “The Aurther Mill.”  Both mills were on the side of the hill.  Another three miles west was a town called Garfield and the Garfield Smelter.  There was one more part to the company – the Bingham and Garfield Railroad.  It ran from the mines to the mills and on to the smelter.  It was uphill to the mine, and they had big engines called “Malleys” to pull the ore cars to the mine.  Coming down they had to keep their brakes on, and the brake shoes only lasted a few trips.

One interesting thing about the railroad was the call boys.  If you want someone today, you call them on the phone.  All the men who made up the crew on a train – engineer, fireman, brake man, and dispatcher – had to be contacted by a call boy and notified as to when he would start and stop work.  The call boys went from house to house and left each crew member a sheet of paper telling what his hours would be and where he was going.  The boy who had a job as a call boy was looked up to by all the other boys.  It was every boy’s dream to be a call boy.  As I finished this, a thought came to mind – we never hear of call boys anymore, but we hear quite a bit about call girls.

I will try to explain the operations involved in mining, milling, and smelting copper.  In Bingham in 1900, they worked around a small mountain.  They started digging below the ground.  Today that whole is three miles across and a half mile deep.  It is the largest open cut mine in the world.  The ore is hauled about twelve miles to either the Magna or Arthur Mill.  The ore came in on the upper side of the hill above the mill.  The bottoms of the cars are opened up, and the ore is dumped into big cement bins.  They slanted so the ore was always sliding down.  From the bins, it goes into what is called “coarse crushers.”  They break up the ore into pieces about the size of an egg.  From there, it goes on a conveyor belt to more bins.  From there it is fed into a “fine crusher” that reduces it to about the size of a pea.  From the “fine crusher” it goes into what is called the “ball mill.”  These were big barrel like machines made of metal, about six feet in diameter and ten feet long.  Inside were round iron balls and water.  The ore was fed into the ball mills.  They would turn round and round and water, and balls ground the ore into fine sand.  From the ball mills the ore went into big vats of water.  They used chemicals in the water.  The vats had vibrators on them so that the water moved back and forth constantly.  This action plus the chemicals caused the copper to sink to the bottom.  The light sand floated to the top and was washed out of the tanks.  After so many hours, the tanks were emptied into cement vats that were along another row of barrel like machines.  These barrels had a steel frame, but the outsides were covered with canvas.  Inside the barrels was hot air.  The bottom of the barrels sat in the vats holding the ore.  The barrels rolled real slow; and the ore, being wet and sticky, adhered to the canvas.  As the barrels rolled around, the hot air in the barrel dried out the ore so that when it reached the top and started down the other side, it was dry; and it fell on a conveyor belt that carried it out and dumped it in an ore car.

The cars were then taken to the smelter where the ore was put into big furnaces that heated the ore to a boiling point, this burned out the impurities and the finished product – copper – was poured into what is known as an ingot which is a brick of copper of any number of pounds.

Working in a mill at night can be real scary when you’re only fifteen years old.  I think it was one of the noisiest places on earth.  It began with the rumbling noise when they dumped the cars into the crushers. All through the plant were big motors running long lines of pulleys each one attached to a machine.  I think the ball mills were the worst.

But even more scary was when all the noise stopped.  The first time it happened I was alone and so scared I could hardly move.  Night after night you work in a place so noisy you can hardly think, and then all at once it is silence.  When that happens something is wrong, and the whole plant is shut down.  That is when they call for the bull gang.  That was a group of men who were always on call. The boss was a short stocky Irishman.  His last name was Barton.  I never knew his first name.  Everyone called him Bull.  His crew was the dirtiest looking, fowl mouthed bunch of men I ever knew.  I don’t think one of them ever said two words in a row that wasn’t profanity.  But they were workers when they started fixing a breakdown. Bull would be marching backand forth cussing every man as he passed them, and they would cuss him back. They were a status group.  Nearly every man at the plant hoped someday to be on the bull gang. When they started a job, they never stopped unti1it was finished.  I remember one time they worked 30 straight hours.  I know because my father would have to callout the men that were needed.

It was common knowledge that Bull Barton’s wife was a prostitute he married in one of the mining camps he worked in.  She was a homely woman about a head taller than Bull.  At one time my mother belonged to a card club with Mrs. Barton, and my mother liked her very much.  Bull Barton, when he wasn’t cussing out his gang, was a different man all together.  He used to sit and tell us about his mining experiences, and he used very few cuss words.  They had two children a boy named Ferdy and a girl.  I don’t recall her name.  Ferdy later became the super at the Magna plant.

I told you about the mountain where it all started and how they hauled it down and ran it through the mills.  They had a big problem.  They had to get rid of the sand that was left after they extracted the copper.  The sand and water was run through wooden flumes down below the mill into a valley.  Down in the Valley was a park where people used to picnic with trees, green grass, and a lake nearby.  There were some tall poles also running through the valley.  As they ran more and more tailings, the park vanished.  The telephone poles were covered; and when they filled the valley, they built dikes around an area about two miles wide and five miles long.  Today it is probably between forty and fifty feet high.  It is like desert sand.  When the wind blows, the dust gets so thick it blots out the sun.  The dust is hard to keep out of the house.  It will sift in through the smallest crack or hole.

When I was young everywhere I looked the hills were covered with flowers and other vegetation.  Many times I picked wild flowers for my mother.  Below the mills were a string of lakes and a long canal both full of fish and thick with ducks and geese.  The smoke from the smelter killed all the vegetation, and the tailing from the mill polluted the lakes and killed the fish and caused the ducks to leave.  I always compared our town with the book “How Green Was My Valley.”  After I saw the movie made from the book, I used to look down and see how much we had lost.

How far back can one remember into our beginning?  Many people claim they can remember things that happened when they were two and three years old.  I am a Doubting Thomas.  I can vaguely remember things, and I can’t put a date on them.  One thing I do recall very clearly was being in bed crying.  Several people were at the house and they were singing songs.  I got to sobbing so loud that my mother came into see what the trouble was.  I was crying because they little boy they were singing about didn’t have a home, mother or father.  The words to the song were “If I only had a home, sweet home, someone to care for me like all the other boys, how happy I would be.”  I think I was about four years old.

My mother’s brother was drowned when he was ten years old.  His name was George, and I was named after him.  My mother was afraid of water, and she forbade us to go swimming.  I used to sneak off and go swimming.  When we were young, we wore either a cap or a hat.  After we had been gone, our mother would take off our caps; and if our hair was wet, she knew we had been swimming; and we would get a whipping.  She did most of the whipping in the family.  I only remember getting one from my  father.  Her whippings fit the crime – some light and some pretty hard.  I never resented a licking I got.  I always thought my mother was one of the kindest women I ever knew.

When my mother was told of her brother’s death, she never said a word but started to cry.  I was too young to have any feelings about my uncle’s death but to see my mother cry always brought tears to my eyes.

When I was about fourteen years old I sassed my mother, and she was so surprised she started to cry.  If she had given me a good whipping, I couldn’t have felt worse.

It was always hard to find a job to make money in Ragtown. We used to save rags, copper and bottles to sell the junk man.  One time he loaded my loot on the wagon and took off without paying me.  I went crying down the road and told Uncle Ben.  He ran the junk man down and made him pay me and also give me my junk back.

The single men working in the mill lived in a place called the bunkhouse.  They also got their meals there. One of the men got small pox, and they moved a little house into a field below Ragtown and put the small pox victims in it.  I got the job of taking his meals to him.  I would get the meals at the bunkhouse and take them and put them on a box at the back door.  I would knock on the door and then run.  I don’t remember whether I got 25 cents a meal or 25 cents for all day.

When I was about 10 years, old my Uncle Walter Worthen got a contract to build a two story brick building in Magna.  When you get the walls up so far, you have to rig up a pulley to pull the bricks and mortar up to the second floor.  Then run a rope through the pulley and fasten one end to the wheelbarrow or what ever they want to haul up to the second floor.  The other end is tied to the harness on a horse.  My job was to go to the livery stable and get the horse and have him on the job before the men arrived.  The rope was fastened to the horse, and I would lead the horse and pull the material up to the second floor.  They would empty it, and I would back the horse up until the wheelbarrow was on the ground.  At noon I took the horse back to the livery stable to be fed and watered.  I think I worked about three weeks, and I got one dollar a day.

When I started school, it was in a Baptist Church.  It was almost in our back yard.  I think I was an average student, but I was always getting in trouble with the teachers.  When I went to school, the teachers could give you a licking.  If I got a licking at school, I always got one at home, too. The boys wore bib overalls, and the girls wore gingham dresses.  Some of the boys from the company row wore knickers.  They were pants that buttoned just below the knee.  They were real dressy.  But any kid from Ragtown caught wearing a pair would never have lived it down.  In those days every boy either wore a cap or hat.

When I look back, it seems we had more things to do and more fun.  There were games for all seasons.

In the summer we played baseball, went swimming, fishing, built forts and played Indian and Cowboys.  We were near enough to ride our bicycles to the Great Salt Lake and go swimming.  When we went swimming, it was always skinny dipping.  I never owned a bathing suit until I moved to California.  I have seen fifty men and boys swimming and never a suit in sight.  We had lakes and canals to fish and swim in.

When we played baseball, we organized our own teams.  No grownups told us what to do.  We arranged our own games.  We would ride our bikes to Garfield, Hunter or Little Italy and arrange games at their place one week and ours the next.  We used a rock or a piece of wood or a board for a base.  Our diamond was on a slight rise.  You ran level to first base, down the hill to second, level to third and up the hill to home.  We kept score on a piece of wood.  We cut a notch for each run.  We used one edge, and the other team used the other edge.

The two mills, smelter, and mine all had ball teams in what was called the Copper League. At one time my mother and Grandmother both had ball players boarding with them.  We were able to get balls, bats, and even old gloves.  During games I was the bat boy.

In the fall the boys looked forward to Halloween.  We never had trick or treat.  The big thing was tipping over the outhouses.  Sometimes four or five boys would tip over an outhouse then carry it two or three blocks away.  There was always a chance of getting hit in the rear end with a load of rock salt fired from a shot gun.  The worst thing happened to me was running into a clothes line. It caught me just below the chin, and my neck looked like I had been burned.  My mother usually made caramel popcorn for us, and there were always plenty of red crisp apples and apple cider. Not many kids wore masks.  One Halloween, when I was about in the seventh grade, the school was a two story building.  A lot of the boys lived on farms and rode horses to school.  One Halloween they rigged up a hoist and pulley and with their horses they pulled a cow up and put it on top of the school.  Then they took a wagon apart and put it back together, put hay in it and tied it to the cow.  It took the boys part of one night to put the cow and wagon on the school.  It took the school officials three days to get them down.

That same year a man was hauling coal to the school.  Out back were two outhouses.  One marked “boys” and the other “girls.”  It was the day after Halloween, and someone had switched the names.  The coalman felt the call of nature and went into the one marked boys.  He just got settled down when two girls walked in; and when they saw the man, they ran out screaming.  The poor coalman was scared out of his wits.  It didn’t take long to find out the coalman had made an honest mistake.

In the winter we had lakes to skate on and several hills to sleigh ride on.  Of course we had snow ball fights, forts out of snow, and built snowmen.  In those days everyone burned coal  so we used it for eyes, mouth, and nose on the snowmen.  I can remember being out at night when it was so cold the snow crackled when you walked on it.  We had one hill where you could ride on your sled nearly a half a mile. It had enough slope so that the further you went the faster you traveled.  Everyone tried to see who could go the farthest after they hit the flat.

I had an Uncle Walter, and he made me what he called a schooner.  He used a plank 12 feet long and 1 foot wide and 1 1/2 inch thick.  He used 2 X 6 boards to make runners front and rear.  He put strap metal on the wood so the sled would slide easy.  The back runner was fastened solid and the front one had a bolt through the board and runner.  There was a board fastened to the front runner that extended on each side.  You put your feet on it to guide the sled.  We could get as many as twelve kids on the sled.  It was really a thrill with everyone yelling and screaming as we sped down the hill.  We had a long rope tied to the front of the sled that we all took hold of to pull the sled back up the hill.

Spring was a time for marbles and later tops.  I was the marble champ when I was in school and even after.  Maybe I shouldn’t brag, but there was only one boy in school that could give me a good game of marbles.  I must have won and gave away hundreds of marbles.  Tops were the same.  There was only one boy who could give me a good game.  It is too bad I couldn’t have been good at something I could have used later on.

My Grandmother Worthen had an old horse called Limpy.  It was called that because it was crippled in one leg.  My job was to take the horse from the barn and brush and curry it.  Then I got to ride it.  I guess I was about 8 years old at that time.  I had to stand the horse along side a fence so I could get on.  My grandmother got rid of Limpy and bought a young three year old horse.  I was in my glory.  I got it from the barn brushed and curried it. Then I got it along the fence and climbed on and that was the last I remembered for a long time.  They told me one of the neighbors found me laying there after about a half hour.  They carried me into the house and called the doctor.  I was out for about twelve hours.  I had a bad concussion; and for several years, I had severe head aches.  The new horse had been broke to pull a buggy not to ride.

Another time at my grandmother Rolf’s, I got thrown from a steer and broke my left arm.  It was set crooked, but it never seemed to bother me.

I spent several summers on my Grandfather Rolf’s farm.   He had boys one a year older and one year younger than me.  They were named Horace and Newt.  We all worked together on the farm.  One job of mine was to ride the horse to pull the cultivator.  Grandpa would handle the cultivator, and I would drive the horse down between the rows of corn, potatoes or beets.  It was a machine that rooted out the weeds and at the same time it made a furrow to run the water down to irrigate.

I learned from grandpa the correct way to run water down rows so it didn’t wash the soil.  You run it slow so it will soak in and get down to the        roots.  We worked hard and ate          good.  We had hot biscuits every morning with bacon and eggs and hot cereal, fresh milk and cream and homemade butter.  Every meal was a feast.  After we got through working at night, we used to hop on a horse and ride about a mile where we could strip down and take a good swim.  Then back to a big supper.  There was always plenty of work on a farm – horses to feed, stalls to be cleaned and fresh straw to put down.  We had to do the same for the cows.  They had to be milked.  There were pigs to be fed, eggs gathered and many other tasks.

On a Sunday us boys got to play.  One day we were playing ball.  The wheat had been cut, and the cows were eating.  Our grandfather had told us to watch the cows and make sure they didn’t get into the corn.  After a while grandpa come rushing out of the house and in the barn and come out riding a horse.  By this time we could see why.  The cows were in the corn.  Grandpa got them out of the corn, put the horse away, and then broke a switch from a tree and gave each of us a whipping.  I have thought if he hadn’t included me I would have thought he didn’t love me.

A big time on the farm was when the thrashers came to thrash the grain.  Grain was stacked in pi1es about a foot apart.  The thrasher had a conveyor that bit between the two stocks.  Men with pitch forks pitched the bales of grain on the conveyer, and it would carry it into the thrasher.      The straw would be blown out a pipe, and the grain went down another pipe into sacks. When the thrasher came to our place, we had to feed them.  People used to see who could serve the best meals. We had fried chicken, mashed potatoes, hot rolls, coffee, cakes and pies of all kinds and sometimes homemade ice cream.

When I was 14 years old, the First World War was being fought.  The Utah Copper Company was working 24 hours a day. I was given a job, but my father had to sign what was called a minors release.  If I was injured or ki11ed whi1e working, the company was in no way responsible. We worked seven days a week.  After four months, the war ended and I was out of work.

I went to school until summer. Then I got a job working on a thrashing machine. The mill had shut down, and my father was out of work.  We worked hard thrashing – up before the sun and work until dark.  I made as much as thirty-five dollars a week, and it all went to my father to pay the bills.

When school started, I got a job working at the local movie house.  After school I would sweep the building and dust the seats.  Outside the building was a big bill board where I would post the signs for the coming attractions.  Also, all around the walks and lobby were glass enclosed cases that had current and coming movies.  Sitting in front on the sidewalk was a billboard that showed the comedy that was being shown.  I was there every night to take tickets at the door.  It was also my job to lock up at night.  I got $15.00 a week.  Most of what I earned went to my father to pay bills.  We were back to Utah two years ago, and the theater is still there.

I was going to school in my junior year when I went to work at the mill again.  I worked the grave

yard shift.  To work at midnight and off at 8:00 in the morning.  Then I would rush home and change clothes and go to school.  After about three weeks I couldn’t stay awake in school.  I quit school and went to work as an apprentice molder in the foundry.  In the foundry, patterns are put in the sand.  When they are removed, they leave the impression of the pattern.  It could be anything from a gear, pipe tee, or a locomotive drive wheel.  Metal is poured into the molds with ladles.  Some big ones carried by a crane or small ones carried by two men.  The small ones have a pot or ladle lined with clay in the middle.  Running out about four feet on one side is a round bar.  On the other side, a bar runs out; but it has two handles on the end.  You take your ladle to the furnace, and they fill it with boiling hot metal.  Then you carry it to your molds and pour it in the cavities.  The man with the two handles does the pouring.  It was hot and dirty and the hardest work I have ever done.  I don’t think I weighed more than one hundred and thirty five pounds, and two of us would be carrying a ladle with metal in it that weighed two hundred pounds.

After working 18 months in the foundry, I got a break.  I had a good friend who worked in the foundry office; and he told me there was going to be an opening for an apprentice in the pattern shop.  I applied.  It was one of the luckiest breaks in my life.  A foundry is dirty, hot place and there are no easy jobs.  In the pattern shop, you worked with nice clean wood in a clean shop. Pattern makers wore white shirts and ties and a white apron to keep their clothes clean.  I started sweeping floors, mixing glue, sharpening saws and shellacking patterns.  Then I got to start reading blue prints as all patterns are made from prints.  It is very important that you get all the help you can get.  I took a course in pattern making with the International Correspondence School.  I started repairing patterns, then making simple ones.  In the meantime, I was buying the tools I would need such as planes, gauges, chisels, dividers, and dozens of other tools.

Before I go any farther, I better tell about the initiation for every new apprentice.  They threw him down and pulled down his pants and painted his male organ with black shellac.

As time went on, I got to thinking I was a pretty good pattern maker, but my boss thought other wise.   It seemed like I couldn’t please him.  Every job I turned in he seemed to find something wrong with it.  It got so when I finished a pattern I checked it over and over until I was sure there was no mistakes to be found.  Then he would make me put    the part number in another place.  We had a machine that labeled out numbers on a strip of metal.  The numbers were tacked on the patterns.  Then when the pattern was cast the number was on the casting.

A few years after I left the company, I realized that by being so strict with me, he had made me a better pattern maker than the average pattern maker.  If he had let me get by with every mistake, that’s the way I would have went through life.  In later years, I told him when I worked for him I thought he was the meanest old S.O.B. that ever lived, but you sure made a good pattern maker out of me.  He took my hand and squeezed it with tears running down his cheek.

While I was at the Utah Copper Company, they had four team leagues called the Copper League. Both mills, mine, and smelter had teams.  We played ball on Wednesdays and Sundays.  We got time off from work to practice and play.  It was called Semi Pro ball because some of the players were hired just to play ball.  I was lucky to make the team.  I played short stop a couple of years, and then I played first base.

About now I met a young girl on a blind date.  Her name was Dora Simpson.  She lived in the part of Salt Lake called Sugarhouse.  She had three sisters and one brother.  Her father had passed away.  After the first date, I didn’t see her again for about three months.  She worked at a candy company.  Her job was dipping chocolates.  I was in the hospital for an appendix operation, and one of the men I worked with brought her to the hospital.  She brought me a box of candy.  After I got home, we started going steady; and January 13, 1926 we were married in Salt Lake City.  We got us a small apartment in Magna.  I had a Model T Ford car, and we spent a lot of time going to dances, movies, and family get-togethers.  After a while we got a addition to the family – a boy we named George Ronald.  He was born August 28, 1926.  Those were happy days.  Dora used to put Ronny (that’s what we called him) in his buggy and came and met me on my way home from work.  We lived near my folks, and Dora spent a lot of time with my mother.  Mother helped her with her cooking and sewing.

We later moved to Salt Lake and lived with Dora’s mother.  Dora got pregnant again; and as the time grew near for the new arrival, we had a doctor and hospital all lined up.  One weekend we decided to visit my parents in Magna.  Dora brought Ronny out on the train, and I came from work to my folk’s home.  We got up the next morning and all sat down for breakfast.  I can remember my father and Dora joking with one another.  After breakfast, my father left to go to Salt Lake on business.  Shortly after he left, Dora started having severe labor pains.  My mother sent me to get a doctor, and one of my sisters was sent to bring a nurse who lived nearby.  The doctor had no more than arrived before the baby was born.  It was boy that weighed nearly 9 pounds.  The birth caused a bad tear.  It started to bleed real bad, and the doctor couldn’t stop the bleeding.  As a last resort, he decided to take her to the hospital in Salt Lake.  She laid in the back seat of the car, and we started for the hospital.  I held her head in my lap; and after only a few miles, she showed on signs of life.  I told the doctor.  He stopped the car and checked her and she had passed away.  The last words she said to me was that she was going to meet her father. Her real father had been dead for several years.  I have often wondered if she meant her real father.  I think my whole body went numb.  I know I didn’t cry.  That came later.  When you begin to realize what has happened, you think your world has come to an end.

There were a lot of long nights and sad days ahead.  I was lucky to have a wonderful, understanding mother whose love and care helped me through one of the very darkest periods of my life.

About this time, I made a decision that I have regretted all my life.  Dora’s sister had been married several years but couldn’t have children.  The first thing she said after I told her of Dora’s passing was, “I want the baby.”  Later on the whole Simpson family went to work on me to give Maddy the baby.  I finally gave in, and let her take the baby.  It was another two years before I signed the adoption papers.  For some reason Maddy set out to turn the boy against me telling him all kinds of outlandish tales.  They named him Gail.  He was born October 22, 1927.  At one time when DeOnne visited him in California, he told her some things about me that shocked me because they were so bizarre and untrue.

Life goes on; and through my mother’s coaxing, I started going out meeting people and going to dances again. After awhile I quit my job and went to California.  My mother was taking care of Ronny.  After about a month in California, I got so homesick that I had to pack up and go home.

About this time a pattern maker I worked with at the Utah Copper decided to go to California. He was going ahead to get work and then have his family join him.  They had three children and his wife had a sister of hers come out from Kansas City to help her with the children on the train trip to California.  She had told me about her sister and wanted me to meet her when she arrived. But in the meantime, she moved into Salt Lake with friends without giving me the address.  My pattern maker friend was named Aaron Horne and his wife was named Anna.

One night while I was gone, Anna and her sister, who was named Lillian Griffith, came to our house.  They left the address, and the next day I went to Salt Lake.  I found the house and knocked on the door.  A cute little gal with bobbed hair came to the door.  I told her who I was and made a date to take her to Saltaire the next night.  We had our date, and the next morning at 7:00 AM, she left for California.  Three weeks later I went to California, and two weeks later we were married.  I have always figured that the luckiest day of my life was the day I met Lillian.

We were married in Long Beach, California July 28,1928.  We both worked.  Lillian  worked for Sears and Roebuck, and I got a job in a pattern shop.  We lived in Compton, California, and we rode what was called the red cars to work.  We would ride to 10^th Street, walk up four blocks to Sante Fe, and three blocks to my work.  Lillian would continue on 10th Street about four blocks to her work.  We both got off work at the same time.  So we could ride home together.

We had a lot of good times before and after we were married.  On weekends we would ride the red cars to Los Angeles or Long Beach.  We could go into Los Angeles and take in a show. There were many big theaters.  The Orpheum had twelve acts of Vaudeville.  The Pantages had a movie plus a floor show.  The Hillstreet had many musical   comedies.  If we went  to Long Beach we went to what was called the pike.  It was right on the ocean beach and had all the rides and games you have at a carnival.  Also there were big dance halls.  We went to Hollywood and took in the sights.  We went to Grauman’s Chinese Theater and saw one of the first talking pictures.

My mother and father came to California and brought Ronny to us.  The first night after they left Ronny got a real bad case of croup and threw a good scare into us. After we got Ronny, Lillian stopped working.

Things moved on, and Lillian was expecting.  We moved back to Magna and stayed with my parents.  After awhile we got a new member in the family, a baby boy we named Richard LeRoy born May 16, 1929.  Shortly after, I went back to California, got a job, rented a house, and sent for Lillian and the boys.

I worked steady, and we got along fine for awhile.  Then the Great Depression came along.  These were rough times.  Thousands of men were out of work.  Banks were closing every day with people losing all their money.  I don’t know how we did it, but we survived.  We didn’t eat too well at times, but we never went hungry.

 

Later Aaron Horne and I started a pattern shop in his garage   Most of our work came from Forest Lawn Cemetery.  We made grave markers and urns for the ashes of people who were cremated.  Work slowed up, and I went to work for a man named Jim Pendleton.  He had a pattern shop, but they were making plugs for cementing oil wells.      They were all   turned on a lathe out of redwood.      I spent about a year there, and then got a job at a pattern shop that made pump patterns.  It was through Kimball-Krogh Pump Company.  I worked there about 2 years and then I went to work for North American Aircraft Company.

I am getting ahead of myself. In 1934 we went to Meza, Arizona and spent some time with my sister, Martha and her family.  While there, we were blessed with a baby girl whom we named Arlene Lillian born May 26, 1934.

I worked for North American as a pattern maker for awhile.  Then they put me to work on Wind tunnel models. They are model planes with about a nine foot wing spread that they test in wind tunnels.  They get results from the wind tunnels on how the planes will perform when flown.

About this time the Japs attacked Peal Harbor, and we were at war.  They moved the wind tunnel department into the engineering department and put me in charge.  I had about fifteen men working under me.  Our work was so secret that very few men in the plant were allowed in the shop.  There was a guard at the door that checked everyone in and out.  I had full charge of the Model for the P-51 Mustang from the first bare wing to the completed model.  It was the fastest prop type plane ever built.  I also had charge of many changes on the B-25 bomber model.  This was the plane that flew off a carrier and bombed Tokyo, Japan.  Twice I was flown to Seattle where we tested the B-25 in the wind tunnel at the University of Washington.

After I left North American, I went to work for Northrup Aircraft Company.  I worked on a model for a plane called “The Flying Wing”.  From there, I went to work for Interstate Aircraft where I worked on the jet model plane.  After we finished the model, I went to work for Kaiser-Hughes Aircraft training men to work on planes to be built from plywood.  I instructed them in blue print reading and taught in a shop where they learned to use wood working machines.  I had a certificate from the Englewood High School as a high school teacher.

After finishing at Kaiser-Hughes, I went in to business for myself – part of the time on South Vermont Street in Los Angeles and the rest on Beechwood Ave. in Lynwood.  I was in business for 22 years.

To get back to the war, Ronny joined the Air Corps as a fighter pilot.  I was busy in my shop, and Mama, at times, came out and worked with me.  I remember at noon when we stopped to eat our lunch she thought it was like a picnic. The day the war ended mama and I were working in the shop.  When we got the word over the radio that the war was over, we locked the shop went home, and mama never came back.

After the war, Ronny and Dick came to work for me.  Ronny took to it like a duck in water, but Dick was more interested in going next door and watching them paint racing cars.  Ronny used to deliver patterns for me and do the same things I did when I started as an apprentice.  I remember the first time I gave Ronny a print to make a pattern.  He did a good job, and he brought a camera and took a picture of it.  I hope he still has the picture.

Work slowed up in the shop, and Ronny said he wished he could get a job in the model shop at North American.  I called the engineer who was my boss when I worked there.  He had Ronny come out, interviewed him, and put him right to work. Later they wanted a model maker at their Downey plant.  It was closer to home, so Ronny applied and got the job.  In time he got to be lead man in his department.  Later he was transferred into the engineering department.  While there, if anyone had a problem about a casting or a pattern making, they came to Ronny.

The Korean War broke out, and Dick was drafted.  He got lucky and was sent to Germany instead of the War Zone in Korea.

Now we got a new addition to the family – a baby girl named DeOnne born October 7, 1948.

When Dick got back from the army, he was home only a short time when he went to Sweden for two and a half years on a mission for the L.D.S. Church.  When he came home from his mission, he went to Provo, Utah and enrolled at B.Y.U.  While there he met and married Carol Whitaker on August 15, 1958.  They now have six children.

Dick was the first DeLand to get a college degree.  Later he got his Master’s Degree.  Dick was the world traveler in the family going to Sweden, Germany. Switzerland, France, and he spent 2 1/2 years in Samoa teaching school.

Ronny met and married Virginia Hall Aug 25, 1950.  They now have three children.

The boys were both gone, but we still had the girls with Arlene in High School and DeOnne in 1st grade.  I spent half of one night helping Arlene make a model of the Golden Gate bridge for a fair at school.  Another time Arlene and I went to a Father Daughter Waltz at school and won.

After graduating from High School, Arlene married Armand Vial, a class mate from High School, April 18, 1953.

DeOnne managed to keep me busy in my shop.  Whenever they had a project with wood in it, she would say, “My daddy will do it!” and I was stuck.  Once before Christmas, I made a large book with pages three feet by three feet.  If I had been making it for a customer it would have cost $125.00.  Another time when she had a rock collection, I made her a case with a glass face.

When ever we took a vacation, we would go to Oregon.  Usually we would leave the day DeOnne got out of school.  We used to stay at a place called the Lazy Acres Motel in Gold Hill.

In the summer of 1959 we went for a ride along Evans Creek, a stream near the Rogue River. Along the way we saw a place for sale.  It was ten acres.  Most of it covered with fir, pine and cedar trees, also oak and laurel.  We stopped and talked to the family who owned it, and they told us the real estate company who had it was near our motel.  The next day the realtor drove us back to the property.  We signed papers in the back yard and bought it.

The next year, Roy, Erma and family, Armand, Arlene and family, Ronny, Virginia and family all spent their vacations camped out in tents.  The next year we were all back, and we built a cabin 16 feet X 24 feet.  We completed the exterior, and then the next year we completed the inside.  It had a complete bath room with double sinks.  We put linoleum on the floor that looked like oak flooring.  Every body who worked on the cabin had a key to it.  In 1961 Armand and Arlene moved to Myrtle Creek, Oregon.  In 1962 Roy and Erma moved to Rogue River, and in 1963 we moved to Rogue River.

We were going to live in the cabin while we built a 2 bedroom house, but our closest neighbor put his place up for sale.  We bought it and sold our cabin site.  We had a big two story house

with a two car carport, a block shop in back, and another house.  Buying this property was the wisest move we ever made.  Every year we grew a large garden, fruit from our own fruit trees and we cut wood on our place for the fireplace.

We moved in Sept 1 1963, and Arlene’s family, Roy’s family, and Dan Worthen a cousin arrived that day with his family.  We had a regular feast that day.  There has been many a family reunion since we moved here.  I think half the people we knew in California showed up.  We ate high on the hog.  We had fresh corn, tomatoes and all the other goodies form the garden and the fruit trees, then steel-head from the river and salmon from the ocean.  We had our own chickens and eggs.  We raised our own beef.  We could walk out our back door stand in the patio and pick big black cherries.

DeOnne finished High School and went to Brigham Young University for three years.  Then she married Louis Grimmer a boy from Grants Pass.  They live in Salem Oregon and have four boys, boys to be proud of.

The one thing that speeded up our moving to Oregon was Lillian’s bout with pneumonia.  She was real sick, and we called our doctor.  He came to the house that night.  After looking at her, he called an ambulance.  As they were putting Lillian in the ambulance, she said, “I’ll never see Oregon, again.”  She was in the hospital for eight days.  On the evening of the 1ast day, the doctor met me in the hall and told me he wanted to talk to me before we went into to see Lillian. He told me that one lobe of her lung had collapsed, and it would have to be removed. We then went into Lillian’s room, and he explained what was going to happen.  It was a matter of operating the next day or letting Lillian go home for awhile and build up some strength.  The next morning, I took her home; and four days later the lung specialist nurse called and told me to bring Lillian in.  He put her in front of the fluoroscope and low and behold the collapsed lobe had started working again.  After she got home, the smog bothered her breathing to a point where we decided it was time to move.  About Lillian saying she would never see Oregon again, DeOnne and I had talked it over, and we decided if Mama died we would take her body to the Rogue River and bury her there.

Richard, Arlene’s oldest, married a very fine girl named Paula Wright.  They gave us our first Great-grand child named Nicholas.  Later they gave us a beautiful baby Great-grand daughter.

We are completing the sixteenth year since we moved here, and we couldn’t ever imagine living any where else. To us this is really home.

Last July 28th our children got together and planned a celebration for our 50th Wedding Anniversary.  Everyone took part, and they had several surprises for us.  We had a big dinner, then a program.  We moved the organ on to the patio and padded chairs set up on the lawn.  I think the high 1ight was DeOnne’ s three boys singing “Happy Anniversary”.  The next morning we all went to a park near by and had breakfast.  I might mention that I have been sick and was under sedation most of the time, and some things that happened I don’t remember.  The next week I was in the hospital.

So much for our 16 years in Oregon.  Now I will fill in a few things that I missed as I went along.

The main street through Magna was called Main Street, and all the businesses were on either side.  There were five pool halls in town, some with as many as ten tables.  The biggest  was Tom Burkes.  He was a big good natured Irishman.  Most of the workman cashed their checks in Burkes.  When he cashed your check, he took the odd pennies.  If it was 21 cents, he took the one; or if it was 29 cents, he took the nine.  He never got rich from the pennies, but everyone who cashed a check usually bought something or played a punch board.  There were always a half dozen boards with prizes of all sorts, guns, knives and the most popular boxes of chocolates. Some boards had ten pound boxes of candy.

Three of the pool halls had a basement and a hotel on the second floor.  On pay day and for a few nights after, there was always gambling in the basements.  Dice and Poker.  There were always prostitutes in the hotels around payday.  In those days it was prohibition.  There was a federal law against selling whiskey, but every pool hall in town would sell it if they knew you well enough.  There were two cafes – one run by a Greek and the other by a Chinese.  At one time, some of the Greeks working at the mill married local girls, and the Klu klux Klan burned crosses in their front yards.

My folks never owned a car or had a telephone.  I bought the first car in the family which was a model-T Ford that cost $525.00.  It had a high and low gear.  When you started the car and after you started it, you had to crank it.  After you started the motor, there was a pedal (lever) on the floor.  You pushed the lever down, and the car started in low gear.  After you got going fairly fast, you took your foot off the lever; and the car went into high gear.

When I worked at the Utah Copper, the high light of the year was Utah Copper Day.  On that day the company took over an Amusement Park for the whole day, and everything was free.  Lagoon was such a place and was about five miles north of Salt Lake.  The morning of the big day they would have a train with a string of pssenger cars.  They would start at the mines and pick up people at both mills and the smelter.  There was a track along side Lagoon where they could park the train.  People brought there own food, but the company furnished all kinds of soft drinks, coffee, beer, ice cream and pop corn.

There were all kinds of carnival rides and games and everything was free.  During the day they had all kinds of games and races for all ages with cash prizes for the winners.  The high light was a baseball game between two of the Copper League teams with the winner getting $150.00.  At night, they always had a big dance; and the people with children could take them on the train and make a bed for them on a seat. When they finally left for home, they were a pretty tired bunch.

In my day, every barber shop had one magazine called the Police Gazette.  It was on pink paper. It was the Playboy of my day.  The high light was a sexy picture of a girl in tights.  When you sat down in the barber chair, the barber used to put a drop of Murine in each eye.  The medical profession had a law proposed to stop it, 0ther place in town was the candy store.  They made every kind of candy you could imagine.  I can shut my eyes and still see the machine pulling the taffy.  Oh, for some of their hand dipped chocolates.

I have always read books as far back as I can remember.  I’ve often wondered if I could read when I was born.  I’ve read all types of books – history, western, you name it and I’ve read it. When I read a book, I become part of the book.  If I start reading a book and I can’t become part of it, I close it and throw it aside.  One of the most interesting books I’ve read was the Treasure of Siera Madre.  Another good one was Gone with the Wind.  Grapes of Wrath leaves a lasting impression.  I also liked Trail of the Lonesome Pine and most of Zane Grey’s books.  I’ve read them all.  Today you can hardly find a good book to read that doesn’t deal with sex.

One time I was looking at a very complicated drawing for a pattern, and it dawned on me that making a pattern could be like building a house.  When you build a house you take a step at a time.  You put down a foundation, sub floor and so on.  Taking each easy step.  When I applied that to the pattern making, it made it a lot less complicated.

I learned another thing that made work easier.  I often had as many as a dozen drawings for jobs to be made.  I used to pick out the easy ones and make them first.  All the time I would be worrying about the complicated ones . I found out if I made the hard ones first, I could sing while dong the easy ones.

In my day I have worked with dozens of teen aged boys.  We have an irrigation ditch that runs through our place.  It is incorporated and belongs to all the people along the ditch.  Each year we hire boys to cut the weeds along the sides and clean it.  I have found out if you treat boys like equals, they will go all out to do a good job.  Cleaning a ditch is hard dirty work.  You get all scratched up with black berries thorns, stung by bees and once in awhile run on to a rattle snake. When I work with boys, I always tell them doing this kind of dirty work should make them want to go to school and get a good education.  Another thing I tell them is that no matter what kind of work they are doing when they get through, they should be able to look back and be proud of the fact that they have done a good job.

When Arlene was about three years old, I got my first upper denture.  While I was at the dentist’s, she cracked me a bowl of walnuts.

Another time when we lived in Los Angeles, I had a long row of Shasta Daises out in full bloom. I walked out of the house and something didn’t look right.  Then I noticed no daisies.  Arlene about three years old had a pile of daisies nearly as high as she was.  I gave her a spat on the butt, and she started to cry.  Then she started towards what was left of my daisies and found one more that she had missed.

One time we sat down to eat dinner and Arlene started swearing.  You could have knocked us all over with a feather.  It seems she spent the day with a new friend and picked up some pretty salty language.

One time we went to San Leardre to Roy and Erma’s and then from there we took Don with us and headed for Salt Lake.  As we went along we used to play games.  Sometimes you tried to see the first horse or cow or bird.  The winner got a life saver.  On this trip Don won about three times in a row.  DeOnne got mad.  Then she got real ornery.  Lillian said, “Stop the car.  I’ll get a branch off a tree and give her switching.”  Lillian got out and walked over to the tree, and DeOnne said, “Hurry start the car and let’s leave her.”

Our family took many vacations together – several times to Idaho to my sister’s home, to Missouri to Mama’s home, trips to Arizona, Utah, and many other places.  In later years we spent most of our vacations in Oregon.

On one of our trips to Idaho, we went to Yellowstone Park with my sister Nellie and her family. We fished and caught all the trout we could eat.  We had one of our best visits.  Two days after we got home we got a phone call that my sister had passed away.  That was in 1950, and she was 45 years old.  All my sisters have passed away.  Next was Martha in Arizona.  Then Josephine died in Las Vegas and Alice last year in Salt Lake.  All four of my brothers are still living.

My mother had a hard life.  She bore ten children.  We lived for years in a home where part of us had to sleep on the floor.  There was no water in the house and no electricity.  All washing was done on a scrub board.          Meals were cooked on a wood stove.  All the water for bathing and washing had to be carried into the house from the back yard.  My mother worked at all kinds of things to help increase our income.  She used to bake bread and hot cross buns and sell them to the neighbors.  Also she sewed and took in boarders.  She was the registrar for the voters.  Then she had to be at the polls on Election Day to check off the names of voters.  My dad was a good shot, and we ate many ducks and geese.  We also raised rabbits and our own hogs.  When we killed a hog, the big thrill for the kids was to get the bladder.  You could blow it up like a balloon.

My mother suffered for years with Rheumatic Fever.  If anyone had a problem, they brought it to my mother.  I’m sure my mother’s hard life caused her early death. When I think of my mother now, it is usually about the time after Dora’s death when she was taking care of Ronny and me.

My father was the only child of my grandfather and grandmother DeLand.  They divorced when father was about three years old.  Later my grandma married Ben Rolfe, and he raised my father as his own child.  My father was a temperate man.  He never smoked or drank and was strictly a family man, spending all his evenings at home.  He worked hard all his life like my mother.  If someone had a problem, they brought it to him.  Father always grew beautiful flowers.  He always had a big vegetable garden.  I think working night and day in all kinds of weather contributed to his death at a very early age, 53 years old.

I have wished many times my mother and father could have lived long enough to have spent some time with us here in Oregon.  I think they would have been in second heaven.  My father would have been outside working in garden, and my mother would have been in the house with Lillian discussing quilting, cooking, dressmaking and all the things women talk about.

I don’t think there is a more happy, loving family than we have and that includes all the eighteen grandchildren and their mothers and fathers.  Also the great-grandchildren and their mothers and

fathers.  We have been getting together for sixteen years here in Oregon for holidays, birthdays, and Christmas tree cuttings.  Never in the sixteen years has there ever been anything to upset or cause an unpleasant situation.

When Richard brought Paula into the family, she fit right in with us and then brought two more of her own into the family.

I remember another job I had. I used to be a janitor for The Woodman of the World Lodge.  I used to sweep out the place and arrange and dust all the chairs once a week.  I was paid five dollars a week.  I was about 9 years old.

How could I have waited so long to write about dancing?  When I first started going to dances, I couldn’t dance.  But I enjoyed listening to the music.  Once, a friend brought a girl over to dance with me.  When we got out on the floor and she found out I couldn’t dance, she walked off the floor.  I made up my mind I was going to learn to dance.  I sent away for a mail order dance course.  It was from the Arthur Murray Dance School.  They sent full directions for all dances that were popular at the time.  Also they sent a dozen foot prints.  They had diagrams showing where to place each foot print.  Then you put a record on the phonograph, and you stepped on each foot print according to the directions.  I used to practice by the hour.  It paid off.   I got to be such a good dancer I could get a dance with most any girl on the floor.

The first time I took Lillian out was to Saltair and an evening of dancing.  The big dances of the year were the Junior Proms.  One year I went to three, one in American Fork, one in Grantsville, and the other at our own high school.  You had to get an invitation from a girl at the school to able to go.  For a prom, the halls were always decorated to a certain theme.  The halls at American Fork were decorated to look like a cave nearby called Timpanogos.  It was a big night. The girls were all dressed in their best and boys with suits and white shirts and ties.  When you bought your ticket, you were given a dance card with a little pencil about two inches long tied to the card.  The card had room for twenty names, and it was up to a boy to get his girl’s card filled. When a boy asked a girl for a dance, she wrote her name on his card on a certain number; and he wrote his name on the same number on her card.  A girl’s popularity was determined by how fast she got her card filled.

I think through my teens and long after I married there was nothing I liked better than dancing. Some times I would go to three dances in one week.  We usually went to at least one dance a week at Saltaire and the Pleasant Green Ward house.  The Pleasant Green Ward house had a dance every Thursday, and there was always a big crowd. They had a spring floor; and when everyone was dancing, the whole floor would move up and down.  There were four or five big dance halls in Salt Lake, and they were all crowded on Saturday nights.  You seldom found a Mormon girl who wasn’t a good dancer.  Most small towns around Salt Lake all had dances at least once a week.

I liked dancing so well I decided to hire a hall and give a dance.  I had a good friend named Don Clinger.  He joined with me, and we went into the dance business.  There was an all girl orchestra that played 6 nights a week at the New House Hotel in Salt Lake.  On their night off, they played for dances.  We hired them for $35.00.  The hall cost us $20.00.  I think our all girl band was the first to play in Magna.  Our dance was a sellout.  I danced with each of the girls in the band.  After we paid all our bills, we had a profit of $90.00.

Another time we decided to have a foundry baseball team.  We decided to give a dance to raise money for our uniforms and the other equipment.  We called our dance “The Merry Makers First Annual Ball.”  It was a big success.  We made more than enough money for our needs.  The next year we had the “Second Annual Merry Makers Ball”.   It also was a big success.

When I first went to California, they were doing a dance with taps on their shoes.  After I came back to Salt Lake, I tried to buy some taps but no one had any.  I made a pattern for a tap and took it to a foundry, and they made me taps for 5 cents each.  I sold several pair to a dancing school in Salt Lake for 75 cents a pair.  I went to a dance in Salt Lake, and several people wanted to know where they could get taps.  I told them to go to the shoe repair shops.  Then I went to the shops and made a deal.  I would furnish them with taps on consignment which meant they didn’t pay me until they sold them.  I sold them for 40 cents a pair, and they charged 90 cents to put them on the shoes.  I had every repair shop selling taps.  I think more than one shoe repair shop owed me money when I left.

I have to tell about my dollar rocking chair.  I went to the dump in Grants Pass; and after I dumped my load, I walked over to pay the fee.  There was a rocking chair sitting there.  It looked brand new, but the back was broken and some of the rungs were missing.  I asked him what he was going to do with the rocker.  He said, “Sell it.”  I asked how much.  He said, “One dollar.” So I bought it.  I took it home, got dowel pins, and turned them in my lathe to replace the missing rungs.  After I repaired it, Mama and I antiqued it; and we had a $50.00 rocking chair.  When Richard got married, we gave it to them for a wedding present.

Dick was a good marble player, and every spring I had to play him marbles.  I usually won.  I never believed in letting someone win a game that was given them.  I don’t believe that winning is everything, but I believe you should always try to win.  I don’t think someone who wins all the time knows the joy of one who loses and then wins.  I played cards with a small girl one time and let her win a couple of games.  Then when I won, she got mad and cried.  Another time, I played checkers with a boy.  He won a couple of games; and when I won, he knocked the checkers and board flying and ran out of the room.  Children have to be taught to lose as well as win.

I think the most important things in marriage are faith and trust.  I think one of the worst things is for one or the other to be a jealous person.

I have thought about writing this many times.  I think it belongs in here.  It is about a mental breakdown that I nearly had.  I was working long hours under lots of pressure.  At one stretch I worked twelve hours a day for twenty six days.  I got to a point where I would wake up at two or three o’clock in the morning and lay and worry about my work.  I would go to work stay an hour and then come home.  I lost all confidence in myself.  I didn’t think I could do my work anymore. I worried about supporting my family.  I got to where I would cry when anyone tried to talk to me.  I finally went to a doctor, and he gave me a complete physical exam.  He found I had lost some weight and that my blood pressure was a little low.  He also asked me questions about my finances, my marriage, and about many other things.  His conclusion was that it was overwork. He told me to stop working altogether.  I took his advice.  It took me three months before I felt like going back to work.  Twice a week I used to go to the doctor and the nurse would give me vitamin shots.  I put this in here because many breakdowns are caused by overwork.  The body and brain both get tired.

Another thing the doctor told me to do was take a vacation every year.  That led to an annual trip Armand and I made every fall for eight years.  About the end of September, we would go to Gold Hill, Oregon and spend a week fishing on the Rogue River.  Roy, Dick, Don Worthen, Arlene, and Richard all made the trip at one time or another.  Sometimes I took nearly a month vacation in the summer.

I nearly forgot about the tree house.  The year we started to build the cabin, Ronny built a floor for the tree house in between four big laurel           trees.  He nailed steps to the tree and the floor had a

square hole in the bottom that you went through to get into the tree house.  Then you put a board in the hole.  When Armand came, he built a railing around the tree house.  Richard and David spent lot of time there.  They had a box with a rope on it.  At noon they would let the box down for lunch.  Whenever we had company with children, the first place they headed was to the tree house.

(This is about our home in Lynwood.) I nearly forgot the boys’ room.  After we had been in our new home for awhile, we needed more room.  We had two bedrooms and three children.  So the boys and us built a room on the back of the garage.  We did practically all the work ourselves. About the only work we didn’t do was the plaster on the inside and the stucco on the outside.  The room was 12 feet by 18         feet.  It was finished inside just like our home.  It was always called the boys’ room.

On the other end of the garage, we put up a basketball hoop.  That drew boys like flies to honey. Anytime of the day, you could hear the ball hitting either the back board or the stucco on the garage.  The poor garage sure took a beating.  Dick and Ronny used to stand out there by the hour taking long shots.  When it got dark, the boys used to congregate in the boys’ room where they played records and chewed the fat.  We had a beautiful back yard with a nice green lawn with flowers around the edge.  We had a white picket fence around the yard.  In front of the boys’ door was a great big olive tree.  When it was warm in the summer, that was a favorite place to be.  We had many a picnic under that tree.

I have to include some of our fishing trips.  When I was in business for my self, I would rent a fishing boat and take my costumers deep sea fishing.  There were usually about seven of us, but one time we had eleven.  We went out of different cities – Long Beach, San Pedro, and New Port Beach.  I would buy breakfast for the gang.  Then we would head for the boat.  We would head out to open sea at 4 o’clock in the morning.  On the way out, we would stop at a boat and get live bait, anchovies, and Sardines.  The fish everyone wanted to catch was called a yellow tail.  They used to weigh up to twenty-five pounds.  Yellow tail is canned as top grade tuna.  There were also barracuda and Spanish Mackerel.  These fish all run in schools; and if you hit a school, everyone caught fish.  If there were no schools around, you could always fish for bottom fish. One time we hit a school of sharks.  They were all around the boat, and the water was so clear you could see fish forty feet into the water.  The guys would catch a shark pull him close to the boat, cut his throat, and then cut the line.  The other sharks would be after the bleeding fish and in nothing flat they would have it tore all apart.  The boat usually had a Captain and a deck hand. After you stopped fishing and headed back for the dock, the deck hand would clean all the fish. He would throw the entrails over board and sea gulls by the hundreds would follow the boat eating anything thrown over board.  The last trip we took was the best we ever had.  We hit one school of yellow tail and caught one right after another.  Our arms got so tired we had to stop. Ronny and Armand went on these trips at one time or another.

When Ronny was about ten years old, I took him to Catalina Island on a live bait boat.  On the way over the ocean was so smooth that some of the men sat on the deck and played poker. Before we started back, a wind came up; and the ocean started to get real rough.  It was called ground swells.  The water rises up and down and at times the boat was sitting in a hole with high waves all around.  The next minute you would be sitting up on the top of a wave.  We were supposed to have been back to Long Beach at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, but we didn’t get back unti1 eight o’clock that night.  You can bet we were all scared.  We must have had a real good skipper.  The boat was tossed around like a cork, and there was no place on the boat that you weren’t soaked every time a wave came over the side.  The storm caused millions of dollars worth of damage.  It cut rocks loose that weighted tons from under the Long Beach Rainbow Pier.  Big boats that where anchored four or five miles off shore were washed all the way up the beach.   I talk about Ronny fishing but not Dick.  I could never get Dick to go ocean fishing.

When Armand and I used to go fishing in the fall in Oregon, we used to get up early and fish. Then in the middle of the day we would go sight seeing.  One trip was through a plywood mill all the way from peeling the logs to finished plywood being shipped out.  Another time we went through a lumber mill.  We watched this process from the time the logs came out of the mill pond until the finished lumber was loaded on cars.  They showed us through kilns where they dry the lumber.  The thickness of the lumber depends on how long it takes to dry it.  They told us four inch sugar pine some times takes thirty days.  The last man to handle the lumber is the grader.  He is at the end of a conveyor and marks each board as it comes along.  All different lengths and thicknesses come along.  Another interesting trip was visiting an old cemetery in Jacksonville.

After sight seeing, we would come back and do our evening fishing.  When I was about nine years old, my mother had a brother named Ben to us Uncle Ben.  He was living with his mother near us.  She went away for a few days, and he slept in and didn’t get any breakfast or put up a lunch to take to work.  This was winter time,        and Uncle Ben stopped by our house and told me that when the noon whistle blew to be outside the gate with your sled.  I was there.  Uncle Ben came out.  He 1aid down on the sled, and I gave the sled a push.  Then I kneeled between his legs with my arms around his waist.  We started down the hill, and it was so steep in no time we were nearly flying.  About half way down was a bridge over a little stream.  When we came off that bridge, we must have flown thirty feet before we hit the snow again.  Then we crossed two railroad tracks and the main road in town.  When my mother found out Uncle Ben got a good chewing out.  She said if there had been a train on the tracks or a car on the road, we could both have been killed.  There was no way we could have stopped.  Uncle Ben used to baby sit Arlene when she was a baby.  He was a favorite of DeOnne.  One time he killed a rooster because it jumped on DeOnne.

The year Dick and Carol went to Samoa was the last time the family was altogether.  We all met

Dick and family at the Roseburg Airport.  We then took them to the Old Nugget School house in Myrtle Creek.  That was Armand and Arlene’s home.  I don’t remember how many days Dick was there, but I know something was going on all the time.  Armand had about nine acres, and the kids could scatter out in all directions.  While we were there, Armand went and got a wagon a neighbor gave him.  The kids got a ride; and after he got it home, there was always some of the children on the wagon.  We have a picture of all the gang, either on the wagon or around it.  We played games of all kinds; and Ronny, Dick Armand, and I had a horse shoe tournament.  I   think

Dick won.  Armand brought a cherry picker home from work and gave all the children a ride up and down on the ladder.  I remember we sat up tables next to the house and were continually eating.  Kathy fell down the stairs.  Luckily she wasn’t hurt.  Arlene jumped out of a tree into a pile of hay and hurt herself real bad, but never told a soul.  We took Dick and Ronny over to our cabin to spend a night, and Arlene called Roy and told him to tell us it was lonesome with everyone gone.  So Ronny and family went back to Arlene’s.  We had a ball.

I have been thinking of all the changes in the world since I was born.  There have been so many changes that changed our whole way of life.  Without electric power, we would sti1l be back in the horse and buggy days.   Just think of all the things we do with electric power.  One big thing is refrigeration.  Without it today we could never feed our large population.  Radio, television, airplanes, automobiles, plastics, synthetic materials of all kinds and computers are just a few.  I could go on and name hundreds of things.  They sell us a crock pot to slow cook, and then they come along with a microwave oven that cooks in minutes.  We have atomic power.  We wonder now whether it will be our salvation or our down fall.  I think the greatest thing to happen in my life time was putting a man on the moon.  It got so common place that I doubt very few people can name the first man to step on the moon.  Now we are wasting our resources to a point where someday we will be back to what it was like when I was born.

One thing to be thankful for is the progress made in medicine.  Years ago small pox killed thousands.  Today it is wiped out completely.  Polio, the crippler, has been wiped out, also many other diseases.  One day soon I am sure cancer and MS will be conquered.

I think I should tell more about my Grandma and Grandpa Rolfe because we spent a lot of time together.  They lived in a big red brick house.  It had a long porch that ran the full length of the house.  There were five bedrooms, a kitchen that was about eighteen feet wide and twenty feet long.  There was a big living room which they called a parlor.  It was nearly as large as the kitchen.  The parlor was only used on special occasions.  The house sat back about a hundred feet from the road, and the front of the house was all in grass.  Along the road and in front of the house and down one side was a row of Lombardy poplar trees.  Grandpa had sixty acres.

I remember the first time I got to go with my uncles to get a Christmas tree.  In the winter they took the wagon bed of the wagon and put it on runners.  They put straw in the bottom and blankets over that.  We went about five miles to a little canyon to get a tree.  Grandma’s living room had a ten foot ceiling, and the tree we got nearly touched the ceiling.  One Christmas when the mill was shut down the whole family spent four days at Grandma’s.  At Christmas time the nuts and candy used to come from Sears and Roebuck.  The nuts came in small burlap bags, and the candy came in little wooden barrels.

Grandma always made her own hominy.  They killed a couple of hogs.  Grandpa had honey from his own bees, took wheat to the mill and had it ground into flour, also corn ground into meal for cornbread.  They had their own chickens and eggs.

We played all kinds of games.  The children would be in the kitchen and the grownups in the parlor.  The grown-ups played a game called High Five, and my father and grandma were always partners.  Another popular game was called Flinch.

In the summer, Grandma used to go Salt Lake every Saturday.  She used to make butter and gather eggs to take.  She would go in a horse and buggy.  It was about five miles to the outskirts of Salt Lake to a little store.  When she got to the little store, the storekeeper would put Grandma’s horse in his barn and feed it.  Grandma would trade her eggs and butter for groceries.  There was a street car that went into the main business district.  Sometimes Grandma would ride it into town and buy things the little store didn’t have.

The last years of her life Grandma used to come to California and spend the winter with us.  She had a daughter named Doll that lived near us, and Grandma spent part of her time with her.  She was a small woman not more than five feet tall.  But she had so much vitality she could wear most women down.

Grandma used to play solitaire all the time, and Arlene used to watch her and show her when she missed plays.  The last year she came down we could tell she was failing, and she passed away with very little suffering.

At different times after my parents passed away, Walt and Roy both came and lived with us in California.  I think Walt was about 18 years old and Roy was 13 years old.  Walt said something about those visits that always stuck in my mind.  He said, “They never at anytime made me feel like I wasn’t welcome.”  Now when we go to Salt Lake and visit Walt and Wilma, I always feel like I’m coming home.

During the Second World War, our home in Lynwood was a haven for service men and their wives and families.  It seems like there was hardly a week that went by that we didn’t have somebody with us.  Walt, Wilma and family, at least three of Wilma’s sisters and their families, Roy and Naomi Harris and Julie. Bud Chapman just to name a few who stayed with us.  One time there were twelve of us, and we had people sleeping all over the house.  Bud Chapman was training with the Marines, and every Saturday he used to bring a buddy named Frank.  They would spend the week end.  After the war, Frank brought his family to seeus and took Mama in his arms and gave her a big kiss.

The last vacation we all took together was the year after the war ended.  Ronny, Dick, Arlene, Mama, and I left Lynwood and drove to Mesa Arizona.  There we visited Roy and Naomi.  From there we drove across the states of New Mexico and Texas to Mama’s sister Pat’s home in Oklahoma.  After we left Pat’s, we drove to Grandma Griffith’s home in Jane, Missouri in the Ozark Mountains.  We spent a week there.  Then we drove to Kansas City and spent some time with Lillian’s sister Mary.  From there we drove across Kansas to Boulder, Colorado to Lillian’s brother Tom’s home.  Then we drove across the state of Wyoming and went to Rigby, Idaho to my sister Nellie’s home.  We spent a week there visiting between Nellie’s family and Walt’s who was living in Idaho Falls.  We left there and visited some more relatives in Salt Lake.  Then after a six week vacation, we headed for home.  We had one of the best vacations we ever had, but it sure was good to get home.

The last vacation Arlene took with us was when DeOnne was eighteen months old.  We came to Oregon for the first time.  We thought on that trip the drive along the Rogue River between Gold Hill and Grants Pass was the most beautiful place we had seen.  This trip took us to Nellie’s in Idaho and into Yellowstone Park.

In the spring of 1964, we got a surprise.  Gail paid us a visit and with him was his wife named Eliza, a pretty dark haired girl.  They had come to Oregon for Gail to appear in the Oregon Shakespearean Festival.  Gail had major roles in two of them.  In “The Twelfth Night,” he played the part of Mandolin and in “The Tragedy of King Lear,” he played the Earl of Gloucester.  We went over and watched some of the rehearsals and then saw all the plays at least once.  Arlene came over from Myrtle Creek, and I took her to see “Twelfth Night.”  In his role as Mandolin, I would say from the amount of applause he got, he was the hit of the play.  We all liked Eliza very much; and after listening to Gail talk about her, he could say it was his lucky day when he met her.

Our children have talents that we don’t know about until we hear from outsiders. I was in Arizona visiting a niece; and her husband asked me if I knew a Richard DeLand.  I said, “That’s my son.”  He got out a book that had the copies of a Symposium held at BYU.  In it there was a section that dealt with Dick’s thesis he wrote when he graduated.  It was a great honor to have his paper discussed by professors from all over the country.

Dick also wrote the words and music for two songs that are in an album put out by the LDS church.  One song is “If You Truly Love Me” and the other is “Canandaigua Road”.

With Ronny, we didn’t know that he was a singer of renown.  When DeOnne called him in California to see if he was coming to her wedding, he said, “Yes, and I am going to sing at it.”  He sang at her wedding, and Virginia played the organ.  Then at the reception they sang a Hawaiian Wedding Song together.  Ronny and Dick both have done a lot of painting, but I guess Ronny gave it up.  Now Dick illustrates a lot of the stories he writes.

Arlene and DeOnne are making a career out of being house wives and doing a good job of it. They both have produced some mighty fine boys.  They are both involved in Church work where they use their skills to help others.

I was just wondering how many hundreds of dollars Lillian has saved us at Christmas, birthdays, Mother’s and Father’s Days.  If we could list all the shirts, stuffed animals, dolls, dresses, blouses, suits, quilts, homemade birthday cards, and many other things she has made, I think we would be in for a big surprise.  Hundreds might not be enough.  It could be up in the thousands.

I’ve often wondered how I have lived so long.  I have had many close calls where I could have been killed or badly injured.  I told you about my being thrown from a horse.  Another time I was in Salt Lake on a date with Dora when I headed home.  It was about midnight, and it was snowing.  After you leave State Street and head out 33rd South, you go about two miles and come to two sets of rail road tracks.  As I neared the tracks, I could hear a train and see a train coming from the North.  It looked about one half mile away.  I had plenty of time to cross the tracks, but as I nearly got to the tracks, a car passed me and then stopped causing me to stop.  Just then another train went roaring by from the South.  If that car hadn’t passed me and stopped, I would have been right on the tracks when the train went by.

Another time I was out looking for bird eggs.  There was a bridge that crossed a road to the power house.  I was under the bridge crawling along on the timbers when I heard some yelling to me.  They were actually screaming, “Don’t move. Don’t move.”  I stopped, and they told me to crawl back.  There were high tension electric wires running under the bridge, and they told me if I had touched them it would have burnt me up.

Another time I was working as a carpenter.  I was working about fifty feet up in the air putting some forms around beams.  They were going to pour cement around them.  I lost my footing and

Fell.  I got my arm around a steel beam.  I was yelling for help, and one of the men working ran over and got a hold of me.  Then he yelled to another man who helped pull me up.  If I had fallen 50 feet to a cement floor, I would not be writing this story.  Once when I was working at the Utah Copper Company on the conveyor belt running from the course crusher to the fine crusher, there was a loose connection.  The belt hooked my overalls and started dragging me along.  I couldn’t tear myself loose when a Jap worker farther along came running and pulled me loose.  If I had kept going, I would have been dumped into an ore bin and smothered with ore.  I tried to thank the Japanese man who helped me, but he couldn’t understand English.  I am sure he knew I was thanking him.

Another thing that should have ended my life before now was me smoking for over forty years.  I have enjoyed nearly perfect health.  I’ve been under the weather the last year, but I’m not complaining.

This was a big day for all the family – Mother’s Day, May 13, 1979.  We had all the families at our house for dinner – Armand, Arlene, and the boys, Louie, DeOnne. and her boys, Richard, Paula and a boy and girl.  After dinner we all went to sacrament meeting where Richard Vial, my grandson, ordained me an Elder.  Then we went into the Bishop’s office; and Richard, Louie and I gave Arlene a blessing.  I anointed her with the olive oil.  That night I had a dream that I saw Arlene and Armand sitting in a grandstand.  I thought John or Jeff were playing in some kind of sport; but when I got to them, they were at Michael’s High School Graduation.

We are planning to go to the Oakland Temple on the 15th and 16th of June.  DeOnne and Louie are going with us, and Dick and Carol are flying down from Salt Lake.  As far as we know now, Ronny and Virginia are coming up to Oakland.  There is going to be a big group going from our ward.

I am trying to do all the things that President Kimball says we should be doing.  I have written my life story.  I am growing a big garden, paying my tithing, keeping the word of Wisdom.  I am a home teacher.  I attend Priesthood meetings and sacrament meetings.  These are all thing I have neglected to do for over 50 years.  I am enjoying all these things very much.

Since I last wrote in my ledger, we have been to the Oakland Temple.  Dick and Carol came down by plane from Salt Lake.  Ronny and Virginia came from Yorba Linda.  Louie and DeOnne came down from Salem and drove us to the Temple.  I was also sealed to Dora.  Dick and DeOnne were sealed to Lillian and I, and Ronny was sealed to Dora and I.

Then ten days ago we went to Salt Lake and went through the Salt Lake temple with Dick and Carol.  I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the wood work in the temple.  I shut my eyes and imagined I could see my great-grandfather Henry Grow walking around telling his workmen how he wanted the work done.  He was the superintendent of the work on the Temple.

It was a thrill after all the years to go through the two temples.  It’s hard to explain the beauty and the feeling of contentment while in the temple.  Another thing that stays with me is the cleanliness of the two temples.

I think it is about time my story comes to an end.  Now I want to tell how I want my funeral conducted.  I want it to be a family affair.  I want Richard Vial and Richard DeLand to both speak.  I want Ronny to give the account of my life.  I want the older boys to sing.  Paula and Virginia can both play the organ.  Louie can give the opening prayer.  I don’t want it to be a sad affair.  I don’t want the songs to be sad, but happy.  This will be the first time you will all be together in a long time.  After the funeral and you all get together for dinner, make it a happy affair talking about all the good times we used to have together.  I love every one of you with all my heart.  No man ever had a better wife and family.  When you think of me, see me out in the garden hoeing or watering the garden, with my saw cutting firewood, or leading everyone down the hill with our Christmas trees.  Until we meet again.

George L. DeLand

Ruby Worthen DeLand

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)