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Electronic Football game
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Uncle Boyd
Cutting potatoes
Harvest potatoes
Larry meets the Johnson’s
Harvesting potatoes
Move to Idaho
Richard’s honeymoon
JFR Notes - Some thoughts mom recorded in August 1995.

There is some funny stuff here.


Transcript of a tape we made with mom at the August 1995 reunion.

Mom’s Recorded Thoughts
Click links to jump in the text.
Dad proposes to mom
Dad goes to war
Dick is born
Mom’s first moves
Religion
Adak Alaska
Bremerton
Grandma Johnson comment to mom
What the kids look like
Leslie
Slaughter house
Run away from home
Tube pregnancy – dedicate to religion
Mom goes to church
The car wreck
Move to North Carolina
Electronic Football game
Oceanside
Who was born in Oceanside
Kids names
The farm
The house (tool shed)
Nobody get my seat
Wind rower
Tipped over tractor
Uncle Boyd
Cutting potatoes
Harvest potatoes
Larry meets the Johnson’s
Harvesting potatoes
Move to Idaho
Richard’s honeymoon
Top

Introductory note from Grant, this is a transcript of a tape we made at the Aug 1995 reunion. I think it was at Donna's house but I could be wrong. We had a prepared list of questions for mom but did not stick to them too closely. This is a good account of how mom and dad met and the early years together as well as the places they moved in the military and after. There is a lot of stuff here but it is worth a read and I hope I've indexed it fairly well so it is easy to get around the info. I got a huge laugh several times reading through this stuff.



I’ve tried to get as much as I could from the tape. There are couple things I couldn’t figure out but, the most is here for your enjoyment. The speakers name appears at the head of each paragraph. Enjoy.

The tape starts off with a bunch of giggling (who would have believed?) and then gets going. I’ve listed the persons name and then what they said for each entry.

Shelley
Mother was telling this story about when she was differentiating between Dick and little Dick. And he say’s “mind you, that’s not the name of my unit!”

Larry
Do you what know what a dickey-do is?
It’s a fat guy whose stomach sticks out further than his dickey-do.

Grant
Marlene, why don’t you go ahead and ask some of the questions.

Marlene
You haven’t done anything like meeting your spouse.

Mom Yeah, we did that with the 50th wedding anniversary.

Grant
Just kind of go down the list and we can talk about anything we want to.

Julia
And no lying!

Marlene
Have you talked about your first impressions of your spouse, any official dates, lovers spats and why?

Leslie
Tell about the night gown. I mean, not the nightgown, the clothespin.

Dad proposes to mom.

Marlene
How the special question was popped.

Mom
I don’t think he ever really did ask me to marry him. No… he did ask me to marry him, but he’d borrowed a lot of money from me, not a lot of money but, when we’d go on dates, I’d usually pay because he was making like $26.00 a month as a PFC and I was making $26.00 a week as a soda jerk. So anyway, he said I have something I want to ask you and I thought he wanted to borrow some more money. So when he asked me I said oh, oh, um, uh… so I said, why don’t you go back to Hawthorne and think about it for a couple weeks and then come back and ask me again, because he wasn’t the marring type and I certainly didn’t have marrying on my mind. I didn’t think about getting married. I hadn’t thought of him as husband material or anything, but I’d never thought of getting married. Nobody had struck me as to this is the guy I wanted to marry.

Grant
Was he just marrying you to get out of the loans?

Chris
You felt bad for him?

Mom
We did get married, but I had to make the arrangements. He was in Hawthorn and I was in Reno and it was 135 miles difference, so I lined up the justice of the peace for a Saturday night. And we went to the court house and a janitor and somebody else, I forget who it was, were our witnesses. And Judge Harry Dunseath married us on a Saturday night. My father was very anti-Mormon, so I had told him that I was going to San Francisco with some girlfriends. He worked on the railroad and the trains go over Donner Pass. They’d had a bad snow storm so Monday he asked me about how the roads were and I said they were fine, which was a dead give away of course. So our elopement was not a secret very long.

Chris
How did your dad take the news?

Mom
Very bad. He was pretty mad.

Chris
Did he have it out with dad or did he...

Mom
Dad, your dad, really was a peace maker at hart and he wanted to be at peace with my dad. My dad was a hard headed Dutchman and he wouldn’t listen to reason. He never did accept dad, he never did. And the worst thing that dad ever did was, he beat him playing cribbage one time. That was a real blow to my dad, that’s facetious, but, he never did accept him as a son-in-law.

Marlene
Was your first home in Reno? Did you live in an apartment?

Click links to jump in the text.
Dad proposes to mom
Dad goes to war
Dick is born
Mom’s first moves
Religion
Adak Alaska
Bremerton
Grandma Johnson comment to mom
What the kids look like
Leslie
Slaughter house
Run away from home
Tube pregnancy – dedicate to religion
Mom goes to church
The car wreck
Move to North Carolina
Electronic Football game
Oceanside
Who was born in Oceanside
Kids names
The farm
The house (tool shed)
Nobody get my seat
Wind rower
Tipped over tractor
Uncle Boyd
Cutting potatoes
Harvest potatoes
Larry meets the Johnson’s
Harvesting potatoes
Move to Idaho
Richard’s honeymoon
Top
Dad goes to war

Mom
No, dad had a friend called Ralph Phillips, who was a real buddy. Ralph and his girl friend from Kansas came out to Reno and they got married. So Jean and I lived in an apartment and Dick and Ralph live in Hawthorne and they came to town every two weeks on liberty. So, one week, Dick and I got the apartment and Jean and Ralph went to the hotel, and the next time, we went to the hotel and Jean and Ralph had the apartment. Then we put in for housing at Hawthorne. This was just before the beginning of WWII. We were going to get a two bedroom house and the four of us were going to move to Hawthorne and live happily ever after. Well, of course, the war happened and ... ummm... the war was on then and we’d got married in May, and the war was declared in December and we were married the following May. So, rather than get the house at Hawthorn, both Ralph and Dad were transferred to San Diego. In September of that year, I went to San Diego and we live in a rooming house in a rooming house, him and I until he went overseas in January. We never did have a home together until he came home in 1943.

Leslie
He was gone, what, two, two and a half...

Mom
Two and a half years.

Marlene
And you stayed there that time?

Mom
No, I went back to Reno. Now, I had brought my dad out to Reno because he’d worked on the railroad in Colorado and they’d had this strike way back in the early days. So, he wasn’t working for the railroad, but, I brought him out to Reno and he got a job on the railroad.  Then, after dad went overseas, we and my mother and dad moved back to Colorado and he got back on the railroad in Colorado and he worked long enough to retire. We moved back to Colorado while Dick was overseas. And little Dick was born in Grand Junction.

Grant
When was he born?

Mom
October the 6th, 1943.

Grant
And dad came home in November?

Mom
No, he came home in ‘45.

Grant
When was Leslie born?

Mom
‘46, May of ‘46, she was born in Bremerton, Washington.

Grant
Did you move about every three years?

Mom
Yes.

Dick is born

Rachel
Was grandpa here when Dick was born?

Mom
No, dad went overseas the 3rd of January of 1943. Then your dad was born in October of 1943 and they didn’t see each other until August of ‘45, 1945, and your dad was about 2 1/2 years old. They resented each other quite a bit, it was really hard for them to get used to each other. Dad, it was hard for him to realize that he had a son because he’d never seen him. Little Dick and I had been so close because we just had each other, but it was hard for him to give up some of my attention go to dad. It was kind of hard on them.

Grant
When you wrote letters back and forth, what was dads response to having a son?

Mom
What can I say...? I don’t think he realized the seriousness of it and I know that I wrote and said, “What do you want to name this boy?”, or this child, I didn’t know it was going to be a boy. I would suggest names, and he would write back and he’d say, I don’t care what you name it, just don’t call it Percival, or something like that, you know, some silly thing. He didn’t really realize that he was going to have a baby. It was out of his scope I guess.

Grant
It wasn’t reality to him.

Mom
Yes.

Grant
How long was he home for when he came home?
Mom’s first moves

Mom
He came home in August of 1945 and I moved up to Bremerton in October of that year. He was home for 30 days leave and then he was stationed in Bremerton and then I went up in October. Dick and I, little Dick and I went up on the train with two suitcases. Our first apartment was in Port Orchard which is across the sound from Bremerton. We lived there for about three months and then there was better housing across the sound so we moved to this apartment called East Park and we had about half a pick-up load of stuff. We lived there for six or eight months and we got an apartment in West Park and we had about a whole pickup load of stuff! We were a real family. We lived in West Park until we went to the Aleutian Islands.

Click links to jump in the text.
Dad proposes to mom
Dad goes to war
Dick is born
Mom’s first moves
Religion
Adak Alaska
Bremerton
Grandma Johnson comment to mom
What the kids look like
Leslie
Slaughter house
Run away from home
Tube pregnancy – dedicate to religion
Mom goes to church
The car wreck
Move to North Carolina
Electronic Football game
Oceanside
Who was born in Oceanside
Kids names
The farm
The house (tool shed)
Nobody get my seat
Wind rower
Tipped over tractor
Uncle Boyd
Cutting potatoes
Harvest potatoes
Larry meets the Johnson’s
Harvesting potatoes
Move to Idaho
Richard’s honeymoon
Top
Religion

Chris
Did dad talk a lot about religion?

Mom
Dad was not religious at all. He didn’t talk religion at all.

Chris
When you and he got married, the church never came up as an issue?

Mom
My church came up, but his didn’t, he never had asked me if I’d like to become a Mormon, and I wanted him to become Catholic.

Chris Did little Dick get baptized in the Catholic Church?

Mom
All you kids were baptized, up to and including Scott, were all baptized in the Catholic church.. So there!

Tony
So they have got their bases covered!

Mom
Yes

Chris
The rest of you... We don’t know...!

Mom
You got a foot in each kingdom!

Chris
And your dad still wasn’t happy, even after that?

Mom
He still wasn’t happy. It was funny because my sister-in-law, Betty and my brother, they didn’t get married in the Catholic Church to begin with either. Then they had one child and they, more or less, at dad’s insistence, had their Christine baptized and confirmed and made her first communion and the whole thing, in the Catholic Church to appease my father. You know, he never made a remark about, “you know, I’m glad you did,” or “isn’t that great,” or “congratulations” he just, passed it over.

Chris
Did he accept Aunt Betty?

Mom
He did accept Aunt Betty. Him and Aunt Betty got along, but aunt Betty gets along with a lot of people, she has a way with her that she can talk to people, but dad did too. Dad had a very pleasing personality. And he tried and tried to talk to dad, but dad would never listen to him.

Dick
Talk about some of the interesting places we lived.

Mom
Well... We lived in (ha, ha...) we lived in...

Chris
We lived above a slaughter house; we lived above a slaughter house!

Click links to jump in the text.
Dad proposes to mom
Dad goes to war
Dick is born
Mom’s first moves
Religion
Adak Alaska
Bremerton
Grandma Johnson comment to mom
What the kids look like
Leslie
Slaughter house
Run away from home
Tube pregnancy – dedicate to religion
Mom goes to church
The car wreck
Move to North Carolina
Electronic Football game
Oceanside
Who was born in Oceanside
Kids names
The farm
The house (tool shed)
Nobody get my seat
Wind rower
Tipped over tractor
Uncle Boyd
Cutting potatoes
Harvest potatoes
Larry meets the Johnson’s
Harvesting potatoes
Move to Idaho
Richard’s honeymoon
Top
Adak Alaska

Mom
We went to Adak and lived in a Quonset hut up there. It was very barren and there is no sustenance in the soil so, nothing grew very big. But, it was quite an experience to live up there. Across the little walk way they had four huts around each other and in the middle they had covered play yard for you to play in so you didn't have to be out, you couldn't be outside and play. You went to kindergarten there in Army town, the Marines and the Army were there so, the Marines and the Navy kids got on in their compound and they took them over to the Army school. The teacher was very consciences and when it came time to get on the busses, she said, now all you Army kids hold up your hand and get on your bus so they did. Then she said all you Navy kids hold up your hand and get on your bus. But you (Dick) were still sitting in the classroom. She says, oh, oh, what's the matter, what's the matter?! And you said well, I'm a Marine kid!

Julia
He did one cute thing in his whole life!

Chris
And you loved him for it all these years!

Leslie
Where else did we live?
Bremerton

Mom After we came back from Alaska, we lived in Bremerton again. We bought the house at 1411 13th street, remember that house? Dick and Scott looked it up a couple years ago when they were up there. It looked all different; they'd put siding on it and stuff. That was the first time when we lived there that dad talked any religion to me. We had home teachers come, which of course I didn't know what a home teacher was. We had these home teachers come visit us and that's when religion came into our lives.

Grant
That was when you were in Washington?

Mom
Umm huh, the second time. Dick was in the first grade or the second grade. Must have been the second grade.

Grant
What happened with the religion, just home teachers?

Chris
Was it gradual or did he have like a... Oh yeah, we should be going to church.

Mom
No, no, he didn't have any kind of an inspiration, or what do you call it when the light comes down and falls on you (laugh).

Chris
Did grandma and Grandpa Johnson talk to you guys about religion?

Mom
They didn't talk to me about religion. Before we went to Alaska, they used to come up and visit quite often, as a mater of fact, they came up before Donna was born and she was a late baby, and they kept staying and staying. Grandma kept worrying about getting home and the baby didn't come, and you know, it's one of those situations where just want to have the baby so bad to please everybody and yourself too. But, they used to come to visit us quite often but they never talked about religion. And I don't remember them ever going to church when they'd come to see us. You know, usually when we visit around, we go to what ever chapel is in town, but they never did do that.

Chris
They ever make you feel alienated because you weren't Mormon.

Mom No, no they didn't do that.

Chris
How did they react when you joined the church? Were they happy?

Mom
Oh yeah.

Chris
I mean, did they make you feel like; oh this is the greatest thing.

Mom
Yeah, yeah I guess they did. I think being raised as LDS and not having the outside influences that LDS people have in your life, being baptized is not such a big thing in to them, it's something that you do.

Chris
It's a big step for someone that's never been associated.

Click links to jump in the text.
Dad proposes to mom
Dad goes to war
Dick is born
Mom’s first moves
Religion
Adak Alaska
Bremerton
Grandma Johnson comment to mom
What the kids look like
Leslie
Slaughter house
Run away from home
Tube pregnancy – dedicate to religion
Mom goes to church
The car wreck
Move to North Carolina
Electronic Football game
Oceanside
Who was born in Oceanside
Kids names
The farm
The house (tool shed)
Nobody get my seat
Wind rower
Tipped over tractor
Uncle Boyd
Cutting potatoes
Harvest potatoes
Larry meets the Johnson’s
Harvesting potatoes
Move to Idaho
Richard’s honeymoon
Top
Grandma Johnson's comment to mom
Mom
I know that grandma told me latter in life that she was pretty disappointed that her son had not married an LDS girl of course, as all LDS mothers and fathers are, but she said she had really come to love me through the years. She said I've always regretted that I didn't put my arms around you and kiss (tears) you when I first met you because it was kind of a stand offish thing and it made us both felt a little strange about our relationship rather then being close, we were, we tolerated each other I guess.
What the kids look like
Chris
I remember when Barbara was born, grandma Johnson was sitting in church holding Barbara, and I don't think anyone else heard this, but she said Christine and Dick certainly have beautiful children. And Barbara was a very beautiful baby.

Barbara
And still am! Just kidding!

Mom
But we did have a bunch of good looking kids!

Chris
But I wasn't, I mean, she wasn't shy about saying I was the ugliest kid!

Mom
Dad used to, well, Leslie was not a very pretty baby. She was a wonderful baby, but she wasn't cute. But, she was really dads...

Grant
Did anybody say she looked like Uncle Boyd?

Mom
No, thank goodness! But she was really dad's first baby because he was there while I was pregnant and he was there for the birth and everything. He was so proud of her, and to him she was the cutest thing in the world and people would come to see her and they'd remark about what a nice looking baby she was, you know, she was healthy, but nobody said she was cute and dad would be so disappointed.

Larry
She got cute in her later years!

Mom
She got pretty darn good looking didn't she?! It was funny... Now Donna was a really cute baby. Chris wasn't really cute, she wasn't... I guess she was better looking than (Leslie).

Chris
I had impentigo all over my face.

**************************************************************
Click links to jump in the text.
Dad proposes to mom
Dad goes to war
Dick is born
Mom’s first moves
Religion
Adak Alaska
Bremerton
Grandma Johnson comment to mom
What the kids look like
Leslie
Slaughter house
Run away from home
Tube pregnancy – dedicate to religion
Mom goes to church
The car wreck
Move to North Carolina
Electronic Football game
Oceanside
Who was born in Oceanside
Kids names
The farm
The house (tool shed)
Nobody get my seat
Wind rower
Tipped over tractor
Uncle Boyd
Cutting potatoes
Harvest potatoes
Larry meets the Johnson’s
Harvesting potatoes
Move to Idaho
Richard’s honeymoon
Top


Slaughter house
Tony
Tell us about the rat house.

Mom
After we went from Bremerton, we lived in Bremerton at the 1411 13th street, and then in the Christmas of '50? '50, 1950, just before Christmas, dad was transferred to Detroit, so he went to Detroit and left me, and we had five children then, Scott was the baby. He went to Detroit and left me in Bremerton. Then when he found us a place to live he said I was suppose to take all you kids and drive to Salt Lake and he would meet me there and we would go on back to Michigan. So, we did, and we lived across the street from the cemetery in Saginaw and he was transferred to Michigan on recruiting duty and then we were transferred to Detroit and he was still on recruiting duty. We couldn't find an apartment but, the captain that was recruiting in Detroit was moving so we moved into his apartment and that was the one that was over the slaughter house. They butchered cows on Monday morning and they brought them in on Sunday night.

Julia
Alive?

Mom
Yeah! And...

Julia
I guess they'd butcher dead cows!

Mom
The unloading chute was by our living room window and they'd bring those cows in on Sunday and unload them...

Leslie
I thought it was pigs, was it cows?

Mom
It was cows on Monday. It was pigs on Thursday or Friday. And they made all kinds of Polish sausage all that stuff and they stewed it up and you could smell it seeping up through the floor boards. The first week or two that we were there, the kids went down to watch them butcher. They butchered a cow that had a calf, and that stopped them from going to watch them butcher.

Leslie
Do you remember the floor plan? Did you walk in to the kitchen?

Mom
Yes.

Leslie
And the living room was behind it, you kept going and the living room was behind it, and there was like two bedrooms off to the right?

Chris
I remember this.

Dick
Do you girls remember?

Leslie
You went up some stairs to get to it.

Mom
Yeah, rickety stairs.

Ken And when you got there you were alive.

Barbara
But, on the next day...

Grant
That was a Sunday...

Chris
I can remember walking by and them trying to squirt us with the blood, with the hose, when they were hosing down all the blood, and they would try to get us with the blood.

Mom
And there were mice and they were... I mean, dad would sit in the living room with a 22 and, or with a BB gun, excuse me, but with a BB gun, and shoot at these mice running back and forth. The only place I could put anything that I knew would be clean when I went to get it again was in the refrigerator, because that was the only place they couldn't get in. I had to take the door off the bathroom to get the washing machine into the bathroom and then I washed and rinsed the things in the tub and dad had fixed some clothes lines in our room that I dried clothes on. But that's when we started going to church! No, no excuse me, back up. We did start, he'd started going to church in Saginaw (the slaughter house is in Detroit).

Dick
I remember a Saginaw experience I had where I was walking somewhere and I checked my pocket for change and found fifty cents, then checked the other pocket and, oh, there is sixty five cents, and then there was seventy five cents. Every time I checked my pockets for change and I thought this is great.

Mom
Well, how do you explain that!

Barbara
Deep pockets!

Dick
Saginaw is the house where I shot Leslie in the leg with the BB gun.

Tony
I was going to ask if dad ever mistook one of the kids for one of the mice?

Donna
He got the gun taken away from him for a week or a month, something...

Dick
Twenty minutes!

Leslie
Yeah, that's right!

Chris That's right, dad wanted to take it away for 25 but mom only let it be 20!

Donna
But we didn't blame Dick, we blamed Leslie.

Click links to jump in the text.
Dad proposes to mom
Dad goes to war
Dick is born
Mom’s first moves
Religion
Adak Alaska
Bremerton
Grandma Johnson comment to mom
What the kids look like
Leslie
Slaughter house
Run away from home
Tube pregnancy – dedicate to religion
Mom goes to church
The car wreck
Move to North Carolina
Electronic Football game
Oceanside
Who was born in Oceanside
Kids names
The farm
The house (tool shed)
Nobody get my seat
Wind rower
Tipped over tractor
Uncle Boyd
Cutting potatoes
Harvest potatoes
Larry meets the Johnson’s
Harvesting potatoes
Move to Idaho
Richard’s honeymoon
Top
Run away from home
Leslie
So that's why I'm so warped. And I also remember that, wasn't it in Saginaw that the three little girls decided to run away from home. Dad packed on huge suitcase and said, go. We must have been 2, 3, and 4 years old.

Mom
I think you were older than that.

Leslie
I did start school in Saginaw I think. So we were 4, 5, and 6. We got down to the corner and the darn suitcase was so dang heavy we couldn't (go any further). And dad said, I don't want to hear anything else about this. I think that cured us. (I remember) that and that he'd eat two breakfasts, two lunches, and two dinners.

Mom
He'd go over to Marion, the land ladies house and eat, he'd eat at home and then he'd go over to the land ladies house and eat...

Leslie
She lived behind us.

Click links to jump in the text.
Dad proposes to mom
Dad goes to war
Dick is born
Mom’s first moves
Religion
Adak Alaska
Bremerton
Grandma Johnson comment to mom
What the kids look like
Leslie
Slaughter house
Run away from home
Tube pregnancy – dedicate to religion
Mom goes to church
The car wreck
Move to North Carolina
Electronic Football game
Oceanside
Who was born in Oceanside
Kids names
The farm
The house (tool shed)
Nobody get my seat
Wind rower
Tipped over tractor
Uncle Boyd
Cutting potatoes
Harvest potatoes
Larry meets the Johnson’s
Harvesting potatoes
Move to Idaho
Richard’s honeymoon
Top
Tube Pregnancy - Dedicate to Religion
Mom
That was a turning point in our lives. When we lived in Saginaw, I had a tube pregnancy that ruptured and I was really sick and the doctor told dad that he didn't think I'd live through the night. Dad prayed and asked, promised the Lord that he'd do anything he'd ask if he'd save my life (tears) and He did.

Leslie
He just didn't want to take care of all those kids!

Mom
I know! And I don't blame him! I don't blame him.

Chris
You see what happened when one got shot!

Grant
Was that why you ran away from home?

Chris I think it had a lot to do with it!

Dick
Was it Saginaw that we had some connection with harness racing?

Mom
Umm huh.

Dick
What was that?
His name was Joe Burns and he ran those harness horses all over Michigan. He wasn't the, he was good with horses I guess but he wasn't a very good manager and he ran into debt and had to borrow money from dad and stuff...

Chris
Dad had no money... well, I have 7 children!

Grant
I guess he hadn't paid you back yet?

Click links to jump in the text.
Dad proposes to mom
Dad goes to war
Dick is born
Mom’s first moves
Religion
Adak Alaska
Bremerton
Grandma Johnson comment to mom
What the kids look like
Leslie
Slaughter house
Run away from home
Tube pregnancy – dedicate to religion
Mom goes to church
The car wreck
Move to North Carolina
Electronic Football game
Oceanside
Who was born in Oceanside
Kids names
The farm
The house (tool shed)
Nobody get my seat
Wind rower
Tipped over tractor
Uncle Boyd
Cutting potatoes
Harvest potatoes
Larry meets the Johnson’s
Harvesting potatoes
Move to Idaho
Richard’s honeymoon
Top
Mom goes to church
Mom
No, but you know, I think I still have one of the canceled checks that he'd written. But that's when dad started going to church. I stared more or less after. I know when I was sick that the church people really rallied around and helped us and donated blood and all this stuff, and were just so kind to us and everything and then after we moved to Detroit, we went to the Selfridge air force base branch, it was military. Since we were military it was kind of a comfortable thing for us to do and I started going to church there.

Dick
We went from Saginaw to North Carolina?
Mom North Carolina. Grant was born in North Carolina.

Grant
The Reeve's got you interested in the church, how did you get interested in the church?

Mom
Me? Or dad?

Grant
Dad.

Mom
Yeah. Perce Reeve was the one that was really influential in influencing dad back into the church. Dad said that one time he signed up this kid that had come in to enlist in the Marine Corps and his dad, the boys dad, came in the next day and he was very upset, and he said, my boys a good Mormon, what's he going to do in the Marine Corps with all those rough and though fellows? Dad says, I just stood up and said, I'm a Mormon. And the guy backed off and stuff, but that's when he realized what his religion meant to him, and like I said, he promised the Lord he would do anything for him and he did. He never reneged on his promise. After North Carolina, we went to California and then to Rupert.

Click links to jump in the text.
Dad proposes to mom
Dad goes to war
Dick is born
Mom’s first moves
Religion
Adak Alaska
Bremerton
Grandma Johnson comment to mom
What the kids look like
Leslie
Slaughter house
Run away from home
Tube pregnancy – dedicate to religion
Mom goes to church
The car wreck
Move to North Carolina
Electronic Football game
Oceanside
Who was born in Oceanside
Kids names
The farm
The house (tool shed)
Nobody get my seat
Wind rower
Tipped over tractor
Uncle Boyd
Cutting potatoes
Harvest potatoes
Larry meets the Johnson’s
Harvesting potatoes
Move to Idaho
Richard’s honeymoon
Top
The car wreck
Chris
When was the car wreck?

Mom
That was on the trip, the Christmas trip, the day after Christmas, I left Bremerton Washington to go to Salt Lake and that's when the trip was, 1950.

Chris
I was only two years old and I remember that wreck, I remember being in the car.

Mom
We didn't get away from Bremerton until nearly dark. I had the five kids and we got to the Umatilla River in Oregon. At that time they didn't have a bridge but you got on a raft and it chug, chug, chugged, across the river. All the kids were asleep until we started to cross the river and of course, they all woke up. And the girls woke up and looked down and there was this water all around and it scared them to death and the three girls were sitting in the front seat with me. We got across the river and started down the road by Bend Oregon, and it was kind of mountainous. They started with all this, oh, you're touching me! Don't touch me! She's sitting on me!

Julia
This is the line!

Mom
Yeah, so I glanced down to separate them and drove off the road and the car rolled this way a time and a half and it hit a tree right at the door post and stopped it. Leslie had to go to the bathroom.

Chris
And we were all touching each other and we were all mad! I remember this wreck, it was green, dark green car right?

Mom
It was navy blue. It was a new Dodge. Anyway, I climbed up to the road and flagged a car down. It was no fun, and it was dark and they took us into Bend. When I was packing to get ready to leave, we had a stove with a little wood and coal burner on the side of it, and I threw a bunch of stuff in there to burn and get rid of it. I must have thrown one of Scott's shoes in there because he only had one shoe. So, here it was winter time, just after Christmas, and I was chasing around this hotel room with Scott and no shoes on and these kids, Scott was sick and Dick had an ear ache. I was afraid to call the doctor in town because I thought it was mumps and they would make me stay home. It was a mastoid infection and when we got to Lehi, Dr. Eldredge wouldn't let us leave until he got better. I kept shoving aspirins at him and hoping it would go away but I know that he was sure a sick boy.

Dick
But I wasn't complaining about who was touching me!

Mom
No, you had the whole back seat to yourself!

Leslie
Sure, shove us three little girls in the front and give him the whole back seat to himself.

Chris
She always liked him best!

Leslie
She always did!

Mom
But anyway, the car was not out of line, fortunately, and all the windows except the windshield and the back window were broken, and we could only use one side of the car to get in and out.

Grant
So you had to touch each other when you were getting in and out?

Mom
So, when I drove up to grandma and grandpa Johnson's house, I guess the poor souls almost had a fit. But, none of us were hurt, we had some bruises, but I didn't think there were any cuts or anything. We got Dick better and we took off and drove the rest of the... Oh, that was the winter - trip that we - the blizzard in Kansas and it was a blizzard, I'll tell you, and the ice stuff would get up into the fenders and dad would have to get out and hack that stuff off because it was so thick the tires wouldn't turn. It was terrible, it was a... And we finally got to Garden City Kansas, I thought we'd never... And I'll never forget that Garden City, we got a motel, but it was, oh boy was it cold! We finally got to Michigan.

Click links to jump in the text.
Dad proposes to mom
Dad goes to war
Dick is born
Mom’s first moves
Religion
Adak Alaska
Bremerton
Grandma Johnson comment to mom
What the kids look like
Leslie
Slaughter house
Run away from home
Tube pregnancy – dedicate to religion
Mom goes to church
The car wreck
Move to North Carolina
Electronic Football game
Oceanside
Who was born in Oceanside
Kids names
The farm
The house (tool shed)
Nobody get my seat
Wind rower
Tipped over tractor
Uncle Boyd
Cutting potatoes
Harvest potatoes
Larry meets the Johnson’s
Harvesting potatoes
Move to Idaho
Richard’s honeymoon
Top
Move to North Carolina
Dick
What do you remember of North Carolina?

Mom
I know that after we lived in the apartment with the mice, we moved to North Carolina and we had a brand new place to move into. They had just finished these houses and we had this nice three bedroom place! With outside clothes lines and stuff. It was really nice. I don't know if you guys remember Kenny and Rhoda France? Some of you girls do, I don't know if you (Dick?) do or not, but Kenny and dad were friends long time in the Marine Corp, but as we were transferred around, if we were at a place they would put us up and if we were at a place we would put them up. When we first went to North Carolina, we stayed with Kenny and Rhoda, then we got into the Bougainville house. That's where you (Dick) broke your hand fighting the kid that Leslie said, "my brother can beat up your brother"!

Barbara
Did you?

Dick
I don't know?!

Leslie
No, he got his hand broken! He said he'd never defend me again.

Grant was born in North Carolina.

Leslie
Sara too?

Mom
No, Sara was born in Detroit.

Leslie
How long did we live in Lehi on our way from North Carolina to California?

Mom
We were just there for a couple weeks, we weren't there for very long. But we left Dick there, Dick stayed to finish school.

Leslie
Didn't you put us all in school?

Mom
You were all in school weren't you?

Leslie
I was wondering if it was just a couple weeks why we went to????

Mom
I don't think it was then. I don't remember that Leslie.

Leslie
Because I remember I had dad's same third grade teacher.

Mom
I know Chris always tells about how she would get lost coming home from school and how mad grandpa would get at her.

Barbara
Is that true Chris?

Chris
What would happen is, Scott and I were in charge of walking home from school. We would get to this certain corner and I would have this mental block about it, and we'd turn the wrong way every time. Scott would always say, no, we're going this way, and we always got lost! And grandpa would have to come get us and he'd be so mad.

Ken
You were a poor choice to be in charge of getting (home???)

Chris
I couldn't drive even back then!

Leslie
I remember - who were the people who owned the feed store mom?

Mom
Giles, Leona Giles

Leslie
Aunt Leona. We used to walk up to aunt Leona's, for some reason I liked the smell of the feed store and she was always real nice to us. They'd given us some money, us three oldest ones I think, maybe Gail was involved in this too, and we went to the little store next door and I remember we bought (something) they were ice cream cones that had chocolate on the outside and the ice cream on the inside, we got about half way home and they weren't all gone yet, we knew you'd be mad because we were eating before dinner. So, we buried them in the snow thinking we'd go back later and get them! We couldn't find them later when we went back to get them!

I remember doing that. We saw 20,000 leagues under the sea at the theater there and it scared me to death. Dick would get so mad because we were getting so scared. He'd say, it's nothing, it's nothing! It's just a show, it's just a show! He really got kind of mad at us.

Chris
He was so impatient with us. He knew mom would be mad at us.

Leslie
I had a constant bruise right here.

Chris
He was mean!

He couldn't walk past you without hitting you right here in your arm. That's the truth. Us girls used to be all packed in one bedroom and he had his room. We were not allowed to go in or touch anything in his room!

Click links to jump in the text.
Dad proposes to mom
Dad goes to war
Dick is born
Mom’s first moves
Religion
Adak Alaska
Bremerton
Grandma Johnson comment to mom
What the kids look like
Leslie
Slaughter house
Run away from home
Tube pregnancy – dedicate to religion
Mom goes to church
The car wreck
Move to North Carolina
Electronic Football game
Oceanside
Who was born in Oceanside
Kids names
The farm
The house (tool shed)
Nobody get my seat
Wind rower
Tipped over tractor
Uncle Boyd
Cutting potatoes
Harvest potatoes
Larry meets the Johnson’s
Harvesting potatoes
Move to Idaho
Richard’s honeymoon
Top
Electronic Football game
Chris
One Christmas he got the electric football game, I'll never forget this. And mother, I couldn't believe how much money mom and dad spent on him for Christmas. We girls got a pair of socks! To share! Remember that football game mom?

Mom
Oh yes.

Julia
We all remember the football game.

Grant
Everybody remembers the football game, do we still have it?

Mom
Probably, probably.

Grant
I remember we'd go down and we'd try to figure out how to get those guys to go straight.

Dick
You'd bend those plastic things.

Grant
Yeah, we'd adjust them and the game would brrrrrr.

Tont They gave me that football game for Christmas too. I got the same used football game for Christmas.

Grant
A hand me down.

Tony
And I spent hours with that thing, trying to get the guys to go straight!

Leslie
You'd be adjusting the little plastic things.

Barbara
It was really invented by the Nazis.

More laughing and giggling...

Click links to jump in the text.
Dad proposes to mom
Dad goes to war
Dick is born
Mom’s first moves
Religion
Adak Alaska
Bremerton
Grandma Johnson comment to mom
What the kids look like
Leslie
Slaughter house
Run away from home
Tube pregnancy – dedicate to religion
Mom goes to church
The car wreck
Move to North Carolina
Electronic Football game
Oceanside
Who was born in Oceanside
Kids names
The farm
The house (tool shed)
Nobody get my seat
Wind rower
Tipped over tractor
Uncle Boyd
Cutting potatoes
Harvest potatoes
Larry meets the Johnson’s
Harvesting potatoes
Move to Idaho
Richard’s honeymoon
Top
Oceanside
Leslie
OK, we're to Oceanside now, living in Camp Pendleton.

Mom
OK, first we lived in Laura Mountain, then we bought a house at 310 Barnwell street, and two bedrooms upstairs and put the girls down stairs (hilarious laughter from all).

Leslie
No, we slept in the garage at first.

Mom
That's right.

Chris
I think Donna and I slept together our entire lives. We slept in the same bed our entire lives.

Leslie
For the four girls, there were two sets of bunk beds. One set on one wall and one set on the other wall. We had this cue, we didn't want to get out of bed to say our prayers, so we'd say, 'start', everybody had to shut up until we said, 'done'. We were saying our prayers between 'start' and 'done'. The four of us slept in the garage. We had a tin garage door.

Donna
And Leslie wouldn't let you swallow.

Leslie
Is that right? You couldn't swallow?

Donna
I can hear you swallowing!

Chris
Remember I thought the curtain was a man in a ten gallon hat and I was scared every night, because it looked like a man in a ten gallon hat.

Leslie
Then you made the garage into a living room, and the living room became a dining room and there were so many of us that dad made the table out of a door, and he put legs on it. I can remember walking from the new living room across the wooden floor. There was wall-to-wall carpet between the new living room across the wooden floor to the back bedroom - (whispering) that was such a long walk.

Grant
Compared to the old place you mean?

Leslie
No, compared to not have any living room. Mother always wanted a living room with grey carpet and red furniture. I think you just about got it there didn't you?

Mom
Yes.

Leslie
The girls used to play out on the front porch; it must have faced the shade most of the day. But the windows rolled out, like Donnas (do now), and we used to stand up and crack our heads on those, we would stand up and crack our heads on those all the time. We had hours and hours of fun on that front porch.

Chris
And Shelley fell off the flight of stairs and really cracked her head open.

Leslie
I can still hear that, Shelley.

Barbara
Do you remember it?

Shelley
I do not at all.

Barbara
How old were you, do you know?

Mom
Must have been about 3.

Click links to jump in the text.
Dad proposes to mom
Dad goes to war
Dick is born
Mom’s first moves
Religion
Adak Alaska
Bremerton
Grandma Johnson comment to mom
What the kids look like
Leslie
Slaughter house
Run away from home
Tube pregnancy – dedicate to religion
Mom goes to church
The car wreck
Move to North Carolina
Electronic Football game
Oceanside
Who was born in Oceanside
Kids names
The farm
The house (tool shed)
Nobody get my seat
Wind rower
Tipped over tractor
Uncle Boyd
Cutting potatoes
Harvest potatoes
Larry meets the Johnson’s
Harvesting potatoes
Move to Idaho
Richard’s honeymoon
Top
Who was born in Oceanside
Dick
Who was born in Oceanside?

Mom
Tony and Julia...

Shelley
I was.

Mom
Yeah, these three girls. Shelley, and Julie, and Tony were.

Tony
I beg to differ with you on that last one.

Mom
Well, I beg your pardon on it! Because I know you're not a girl!

Leslie
And Mike McCullough lived across the street.

Mom
And he used to play with Sara all the time and he was a regular Dennis the Menace. They got along really good, except, one day they were playing in the living room I heard her say, Sara said, Mike, I like you but I just can't stand you!

Leslie
We had one bike. The first thing, was it Gail? It was a big bike.

Chris
Dick had a bike. (Much laughter because we all know Dick got everything as witnessed by the football game! (Ed)) Of course, Dick had a bike!

Dick
And everyone could use it.

Chris
I went down a hill, I was going to show dad I could ride a bike, and of course, I didn't know how to stop it, I just knew it could go down a hill.

Leslie
Ran into a whole set of mail boxes or something didn't you?

Chris
Gravel... and boxes... and I thought, man, I'm going to get a lot of sympathy out of this. I have blood and everything. And dad, 'you knot head, you idiot, you dummy, what the heck are you doing?' He beat me all the way back up the hill.

Leslie
And the McColugh's had a grandfather that lived in a small trailer out behind their house and he had dogs, and he was dirty, I don't know what the attraction was, but we used to go over to that trailer quite often and visit with him.

Donna
Dick was in love with Marie McColugh.

Chris
Dick was in love with Marie McColugh.

Group
Ohhhhhhhh!

Dick
But they had horses.

Grant
How old were you by then?

Mom
He was a junior, sophomore, or junior.

Donna
Marie McColugh taught us all how to smoke.

Tony
She did?!

Mom
You were a junior when we moved to Idaho. Then Grandpa Johnson got sick and dad came home on emergency leave, then grandpa passed away and dad stayed in the states and that's when we moved out to Barnwell street.

Tony
This may be a lot to ask, but can you give us a quick impression of each of your children?

Dick
Without any help from Chris.

Grant
Without mentioning that Dick was the favorite?

Chris
We've heard enough about Dick tonight! You can skip him!

Mom
I was just going to say that your first born is always...

Grant
Your favorite.

Mom
... kind of special. Yeah, I guess, no, he's not your favorite.

Chris
HE, is not your favorite?

Donna
He used to be.

Mom
I don't know if the rest of you mothers agree with me or not, but, I think your first born is something, there is something different about, I mean, there is something about being a first born...

Chris
Yeah, you have time for them.

Donna
...that ruins the rest of your life.

Marlene
There may be something too, about the first born and the father being away to war. Chris was about four months when Dick came back. It's not two and a half, but you spend so much time you really get a different bond then you do, I think, with a normal first baby.

Mom
I think so too. Then Leslie, like I said, she was a real pleasant baby. This friend of our who's still living, his wife has passed away, named Woody Woodward. We didn't have a car when she was born so; he came and took us to the hospital (laugh). He always refers to as his daughter because he stayed with dad until she was born that day. When Dick was born, I was in the hospital for ten days. When Leslie was born, I was in the hospital for seven days. You had to stay on your back for six days, on the seventh day, they let you put your feet over the edge of the bed and dangle (laughs)! You can see how childbirth has changed in the last 20 years, or 40 years, or whatever, 50 years!

Chris
I'll be 20, that's right!

Click links to jump in the text.
Dad proposes to mom
Dad goes to war
Dick is born
Mom’s first moves
Religion
Adak Alaska
Bremerton
Grandma Johnson comment to mom
What the kids look like
Leslie
Slaughter house
Run away from home
Tube pregnancy – dedicate to religion
Mom goes to church
The car wreck
Move to North Carolina
Electronic Football game
Oceanside
Who was born in Oceanside
Kids names
The farm
The house (tool shed)
Nobody get my seat
Wind rower
Tipped over tractor
Uncle Boyd
Cutting potatoes
Harvest potatoes
Larry meets the Johnson’s
Harvesting potatoes
Move to Idaho
Richard’s honeymoon
Top
Kids names
Leslie
Say something about our names, how our names are chosen.

Chris
Percival, you can start with Percival!

Mom
I named Richard although it was a custom in the Johnson family to give the first born the mothers maiden name as their middle name. Like dads name was Richard Wanlass, and Wanlass was his mothers maiden name. But, I didn't know that, so I just named him Richard for his dad, and William for my dad, which seemed plausible.

And then Leslie, my mothers name was Francis. Dad had this friend that he thought a lot of when he was growing up through high school, named Leslie Hansen, he was an older fellow. When dad came home from overseas, was the first time I met Leslie, they called him Les, he was married had children, that were quite a bit older than dad, but he was a real good friend of dads, and for some reason, dad wanted to name Leslie, Leslie, after Leslie, so we decided that, boy or girl, we would call her Leslie and Francis.

Donna was born about the time that uncle Don Johnson, dads brother, was killed.

Donna
I thought I was named after Donna Lindsay?

Mom
You were kind of, it was a combination of Donna Lindsay and uncle Don.

Then when Gail was born, or Christine, I didn't plan on a girl.

Chris
Actually, what you got is not anything that you planned!

Mom
No, I hadn't thought about it particularly, but I wanted the first one be a boy, the next two, I thought, gee, it would be nice to have two girls in a row, which I had, so the third one, I didn't think too much about it being a boy or a girl. Dad named her, he named her Christine Gail. I think he named her Gail because of the Gail's that blew threw Adak, she was born on Adak.

Grant
She was born outside of the U.S.?

Chris
Before it was a state.

Mom
It was a territory then.

Grant
That's how old she is!

Chris
When they ask me on my job application, what state I was born in, I put N/A.

Tony
North Alabama. You got such a package of unexpected things out of Christine Gail, all these repressive genes and stuff...

Chris
See if I'd have been a boy, look, see, I'd be bald now, and...

Mom
Then Scott was born and we both liked the name Scott. In the Catholic Church, you are supposed to give your children a saint's name, that's why there are so many Mary's, like Mary Christine, etc. etc. We both liked the name Scott so we decided we'd name him Scott Urban, which was after Dick's dad. Urban is a saint's name.

Chris
It's just one you never hear about.

Mom
No, you don't hear too much about saint Urban.

Tony
What is he the saint of.

Barbara
Suburbs.

Tony
Patron saint of...

Mom
...Of suburbs!

Like I say, Donna was a really cute baby, Chris was not all that cute but she was not too bad, and then Scott was terrible. Scott was premature and he had a hard time getting started in life and he wasn't very cute baby or anything, and his head was always big. Even now his head looks bigger than normal, but I can remember taking him to the doctors when he was little and they'd always whip out their tape measure and measure his head.

Dick
Get the calipers!

Mom
But he was being born breach and the nurse actually physically turned him around so that he was born right. Because of that his head, I guess, didn't go through the birth channel the way it normally would have and his head has always looked bigger than it should. But, it's really pretty normal, but he wasn't a very cute baby or anything and he had all these allergies and stuff, so rather than give him a sweet or something between meals to satisfy him, like I could give you kids a cookie or a cracker, I'd have to feed him some fruit or something and he got kind of heavy, not overly obese or anything but, he was heavier than you other kids were.

Then Sara was named for, if you will believe this, a lady Marine that was in the Detroit office! She worked with dad and her name was Sara. Then of course, Jean is a family name, so we named her Sara Jean. She was a cute baby, she was a really cute baby.

Then, who's after Sara??

Grant (ha, ha)


Chris
Grant was a cute baby too.

Mom
Grant was a cute baby.

Donna
But he was a puky baby.

Mom
Boy, was he puky, oh dear!

Grant
But I had to offset the cuteness.

Tony
Do you still puke a lot?

Grant
I've kind of given up on it.

Megan
Just diarrhea, huh?

Mom
We both liked the name Grant, so we named him Grant and then Paul was a family name too, so we named him Grant Paul.

Then we had Shelley. Now, Shelley is not a family name or neither is Ray, but we liked the name Shelley Ray, so we named her Shelley Ray.

Tony
You're running out of names after you get up there.

Mom
Then Julia, Shelley was not a really cute baby either...

Grant
Especially when compared with me! But she didn't puke.

Mom
No, not as much as you did. But Dick was a puky baby, I used to have to sour his milk...

Leslie
A fault? Dick had a fault?

Tony
It wasn't his fault though!

Mom
I'd have to sour his milk before he drank it because he couldn't digest it whole, I'd have to break it down for him before he took it.

Barbara
Do you like butter milk?

Mom
Then Julia was a really cute baby. We called her after aunt Julia.

Julia
Fay?

Mom
Julia Fay.

Leslie
Who is that?

Mom
I can't remember their last name can you?

Julia
it's not Fay?

Mom
Emerson, Emers, Emerys.

Julia
Oh, Emery, that's right, oh no, it was uncle Emery, their last name was Fay, I swear!

Grant
But they weren't really related.

Mom
OK. And Kay went together with that. She was a really cute baby, she has blond curly hair. Sara had dark curly hair. Donna had dark curly hair.

Then we had Tony, my brother's name was Anthony, and Dick's brother's name was Boyd. I wanted to call him Anthony Curt, but dad kind of balked at that.

Julia
We call him Tony, but his real name is Agony!

Barbara
Who said that, was it you?

Tony
She told that story to some friends of mine last night. It was awfully nice of her.

Barbara
And now it will live in infamy.

Ken
It's Agony, the grate. G-R-A-T-E.

Julia
What do you grate, cheese!?

Mom
Tony wasn't a particularly cute baby either.

Chris
And what color was Tony's hair!?

Dick
Such a dim memory!

Mom
Same color it is now!

Ken
Still waiting for it to come in!
(Some wild cackling by Barbara at this point.)

Mom
Barbara was a cute baby, but you know we had a terrible time naming her.

Chris
Ester Hanna, that's really her real name, she just didn't get christened that.

Mom
I remember Dick's mother says, surely he's not going to name this sweet little baby Ester Hanna. But you know Ester Hanna is not such a bad name when you come to get used to it.

Donna
Isn't aunt Jean's name Ester?

Mom
Aunt Jean Boyd's name is Ester. Aunt Jean that was here tonight's name is Mary, and uncle Paul's name is Shirley Jean, so none of the Jean's go by their first name.

Tony
Wasn't Barbara's name changed at the very last minute? Didn't dad decide at the last minute...

Mom
He just decided at the last minute what it was going to be. We were sitting in sacrament meeting, waiting for the meeting to start, or fast and testimony meeting, and he came with this book with the names in it... (Laughing)

Leslie
That's getting down to the wire!

Grant
He didn't buy it Sunday morning did he!!!

Mom
Saturday night probably!

Chris
Well, by the eleventh kid you run out of names, everything has been used!

Mom
Yes, so she isn't named after anybody.

Barbara
I heard I was named after Greer Garson.

Mom
Oh, Greer Garson - scharmson!

Barbara
OK, so it was a lie...

Julia
Didn't B. G. stand for Baby Girl?

Mom
Baby Girl. BG came from Baby Girl.

Julia
What, did he just show you a name in the book and you said...

Mom
He just showed me this name and I said OK. And the whole ward was sitting there with baited breath waiting for us to name her because, like I say, even I didn't know before the meeting what it was going to be.

Tony
When dad wanted to call somebody's name, of course, he'd always start at the top and work his way down, did he have trouble...

Mom
Very much, he always had trouble with the names.

Chris
When he blessed Danna, he said the wrong name.

Barbara
What did he say?

Chris
He called her Dana.

Mom
When he married Ivel Well, he called Evelyn the wrong name too!

Barbara

What did he call her?

Chris
He wasn't much for details.

Mom
I don't know what he called her, I wasn't there but... I remember one time he was reading some records in and that was when Sean, S E A N. was pretty popular and he came to this name on the record, and he just butchered it. I don't think he knew until the day he died that you pronounce it Sean.

Julia
Who would?

Mom
Who would? True.

Leslie
What were your plans when you decide to get out of the Marine corp? I mean, I know what you ended up doing, but before that came up did you have other plans?

Mom
He always wanted to go to the North West. He wanted to go back up to the Salmon country go live up there. Now, when we first moved up there, I was so depressed, because it rained so much, but I got used to it and I got so I kind of like it up there. I wouldn't have minded moving back up there. I think he'd have probably have gone into an administrative job, government type or something, if it hadn't been for the farming although he was pretty fed up with administration. But he did check into computers. He was the first fellow at Oceanside that got into computers. He'd have probably have done something with that because he was quite fascinated with them.

Donna
Didn't he have a picture in Life magazine?

Mom
No, that was when he first got in the Marine Corps, but he did have a picture in the Oceanside thing about him, I still have that at home.

Click links to jump in the text.
Dad proposes to mom
Dad goes to war
Dick is born
Mom’s first moves
Religion
Adak Alaska
Bremerton
Grandma Johnson comment to mom
What the kids look like
Leslie
Slaughter house
Run away from home
Tube pregnancy – dedicate to religion
Mom goes to church
The car wreck
Move to North Carolina
Electronic Football game
Oceanside
Who was born in Oceanside
Kids names
The farm
The house (tool shed)
Nobody get my seat
Wind rower
Tipped over tractor
Uncle Boyd
Cutting potatoes
Harvest potatoes
Larry meets the Johnson’s
Harvesting potatoes
Move to Idaho
Richard’s honeymoon
Top
The Farm

Leslie
How did the farm thing come up?

Mom
Uncle Boyd was instrumental in that.

Leslie And you were for that?

Mom
I didn't really care one way or the other. It wasn't a big important thing to me, because, I think if I'd known how strapped for money we were going to be, that I may have had some objections to it, but I never thought dad would never be able to provide for us because it said in his patriarchal blessing that as long as he lived the commandments, that he'd be able to provide for his family.

Dick
What did you think the day you drove into the yard (in Rupert)?

Mom
I'll tell you Dick, I just, I can't remember what I thought. It was so devastating, I mean all that water, and the mover was there with the truck, and we couldn't get anything into the house because you couldn't navigate through the mud. That mover had to be entertained, he had to be entertained, he wanted somebody to talk to him all the time. I don't know, I really don't remember, we must have had some food in the house because, it was getting dark when we got to Rupert that day. We all had to cuddle in there, and the mover, and Satan (the dog) and sleep in that house that night. Then dad went over to Gailbrouth's and borrowed a flat bed trailer and a tractor and come and hauled... And it was raining that day, and it was...

Dick
Was this February?

Mom
March, the 6th of March, 1960. I don't know, I really don't know how we got all that furniture in there and put away and survived. But we finally got rid of the mover!

Marlene
He spent the night there?

Mom
He spent the night with us! But he just wanted somebody to talk to him, or sit down and entertain him, he didn't want to pitch in and do anything and there were so many things to be done, and he was just a pain in the neck!

Tony was not a month old yet. He would have been a month old on the 9th of March, he was born on February the 9th.

Dick
Do you kids remember this scene?

Grant
I remember it, I was five years old, the water was about knee high, of course, in those days it was about that high! I remember the flat bed trailer.

Chris
I remember kids hopping on straw bails to get to the road. We had to jump on the bails to get to dry land.

Julia
What was all the water from?

Mom
Rain. The spring thaw. It had started to thaw and it had rained a lot.

Tony
That must have been really depressing to have all those kids and be moving to someplace really hot.

Click links to jump in the text.
Dad proposes to mom
Dad goes to war
Dick is born
Mom’s first moves
Religion
Adak Alaska
Bremerton
Grandma Johnson comment to mom
What the kids look like
Leslie
Slaughter house
Run away from home
Tube pregnancy – dedicate to religion
Mom goes to church
The car wreck
Move to North Carolina
Electronic Football game
Oceanside
Who was born in Oceanside
Kids names
The farm
The house (tool shed)
Nobody get my seat
Wind rower
Tipped over tractor
Uncle Boyd
Cutting potatoes
Harvest potatoes
Larry meets the Johnson’s
Harvesting potatoes
Move to Idaho
Richard’s honeymoon
Top
The House (Tool Shed)
Leslie
We were moving into a tool shed.

Tony
You mean the house wasn't there?

Grant
That was the house.

Leslie
The house was there, it was the tool shed, they converted the tool shed into the house.

Mom
That's what we lived in the whole while we were there was the little tool shed.

Marlene
Was the plan build something else?

Mom
Yes, but you know Marlene, the cellar came first, the cows came first, everything, the new tractor came first, everything came before the house.

Chris
Siphon tubes!

Leslie
Oh, what do you know about siphon tubes!?

Dick
Yeah, let's get on Chris for a minute! The one who never did a lick of work!

Chris
I cleaned the house ...?????

Leslie
Please do!

Tony
I can't imagine ten kids and one van.

Grant
We had four bedrooms.

Mom
Yeah, we had four bedrooms.

Chris
Oh yeah, you bet.

Mom
Two of them you couldn't stand up in! But you could lay down in them.

Grant
I remember that, the angle, we'd sleep under the angle.

Mom
Hot in the summer and cold in the winter.

Leslie
Did we have any insulation up there?

Mom
There wasn't any insulation up there.

Chris
When it rained it just echoed.

Mom
It was a tin roof.

Grant
I remember the TV was by the heater. At the base of the furnace was a little crack at the floor and everybody used to fight for that spot because warm air would come out. You could sit there and be warm and watch TV.

(I believe this picture is from 1975, GJ)
Rupet House
Click links to jump in the text.
Dad proposes to mom
Dad goes to war
Dick is born
Mom’s first moves
Religion
Adak Alaska
Bremerton
Grandma Johnson comment to mom
What the kids look like
Leslie
Slaughter house
Run away from home
Tube pregnancy – dedicate to religion
Mom goes to church
The car wreck
Move to North Carolina
Electronic Football game
Oceanside
Who was born in Oceanside
Kids names
The farm
The house (tool shed)
Nobody get my seat
Wind rower
Tipped over tractor
Uncle Boyd
Cutting potatoes
Harvest potatoes
Larry meets the Johnson’s
Harvesting potatoes
Move to Idaho
Richard’s honeymoon
Top
Nobody get my seat
Leslie
But you used to always have to say, Nobody get my seat or anything!

Tony
Nurge nuthin'!

Leslie
Because there were twelve people and six places to sit. Nobody get my seat while I get up!

Grant
And if you didn't say it, somebody would take your seat. You didn't say, nobody get my seat!

Tony
If you made a move like you were going to stand up, everybody in the whole room...

Chris
And it was only a 13 inch TV!

Leslie
And we had a party line phone.

Mom
And at three minutes you got cut off. If you got a telephone call, three minutes and it cut you off. You could always call back but people usually didn't unless it was something really important, but after three minuets the line went dead.

Tony
It was a long drive to church and school from there.

Mom
Well I'd say, 15 miles!

Chris
We had a two hour bus ride in the morning by the time we stopped and picked everybody up and made the stop at the grade school, and the stop at the junior high, and then went on to the high school it was two hours on the bus.

Tony
I remember one time Julia and Grant and I were going to the Phillips, Grant was in boy scouts, we got over the rise where you could see Phillips house, Grant had learned this flag thing (semaphore) he sent messages to them, Julia and I were saying, ooh, this is cool! He was up there sending messages. But, what's he saying?

Donna
You didn't know he couldn't spell!

Leslie
We used to go out and hoe the potatoes. That was when Kent would come up and help in the summer time. Dick would say, you girls do the top part and us boys will go down here where they are really big and we'll work down here. They were going down there and sleeping. The weeds were so high that we couldn't see them. So we've been working all morning long on the top part trying to get the potatoes hoed and they'd been down there sleeping all morning in the red roots.

Dick
I surely don't remember that!

Leslie
We used to try to name the different kinds of trains. They went by, the different trains, the B&O, Union Pacific...

Click links to jump in the text.
Dad proposes to mom
Dad goes to war
Dick is born
Mom’s first moves
Religion
Adak Alaska
Bremerton
Grandma Johnson comment to mom
What the kids look like
Leslie
Slaughter house
Run away from home
Tube pregnancy – dedicate to religion
Mom goes to church
The car wreck
Move to North Carolina
Electronic Football game
Oceanside
Who was born in Oceanside
Kids names
The farm
The house (tool shed)
Nobody get my seat
Wind rower
Tipped over tractor
Uncle Boyd
Cutting potatoes
Harvest potatoes
Larry meets the Johnson’s
Harvesting potatoes
Move to Idaho
Richard’s honeymoon
Top
Wind Rower
Dick
I do remember driving wind rower - that was kind of my job. To get a little shade on it dad had welded some links from a conveyor belt, digger links. So there was this square thing built over the seat and we'd put some canvas over it. I remember wind rowing one night there was a thunder storm coming in and dad said how beautiful the sun was and there was lightening all over the place, crash, crash. There I am sitting in this metal cage!

Chris
But you didn't know, I mean, now that you look back on it, it is scary.

Dick
Yes, we didn't worry about those things. Safety? I never thought once about safety on the farm. I mean, you'd stick your hand in these things while they're running, you can't be stopping to fix them!

Leslie
Do you (Dick) remember an old tractor that he bought, oh it was, I think you'd been to school and come home for the summer and I was sitting on the top of it and you got going too fast. It had a pipe on the front, do you remember? We went over a bump and I grabbed that pipe and just about fell off the tractor. I was sitting on the, where you shouldn't have been sitting, and we were going too fast. I think how close I came to being killed that day. It was either that or fall off and get run over by the big wheels of the tractor.

Tipped Over Tractor
Mom
You know, Scott tipped a tractor over once when he was bailing, was it morning or night, I think he must have gone out in the morning to bail and Uncle Boyd was there. Scott walked back to the house, he wasn't hurt, seriously, and he walked from way out in the south 40, and he walked back to the house and told us what happened, and Uncle Boyd jumped right on him says, you didn't leave it turned over, all the oil could run out of it! I was so mad, I mean, that made me pretty mad, and Uncle Boyd did apologize after that, for taking that tact, but, how was Scott going to tip the tractor back up!

Grant
Just push on it!

Tony Really hard!

Click links to jump in the text.
Dad proposes to mom
Dad goes to war
Dick is born
Mom’s first moves
Religion
Adak Alaska
Bremerton
Grandma Johnson comment to mom
What the kids look like
Leslie
Slaughter house
Run away from home
Tube pregnancy – dedicate to religion
Mom goes to church
The car wreck
Move to North Carolina
Electronic Football game
Oceanside
Who was born in Oceanside
Kids names
The farm
The house (tool shed)
Nobody get my seat
Wind rower
Tipped over tractor
Uncle Boyd
Cutting potatoes
Harvest potatoes
Larry meets the Johnson’s
Harvesting potatoes
Move to Idaho
Richard’s honeymoon
Top
Uncle Boyd
Shelley
Uncle Boyd thought we could do anything.

Ken
He had a big melon...!

Leslie
Do you know though, to this day, if you'll stop and visit with Uncle Boyd, he'll always say how proud he is of us kids. Yeah he is. I think he's very proud of us.

Mom
I think he is too, but he was pretty critical when we were raising you!

Leslie
He didn't like all the cold cereal we ate.

Barbara
I still like cold cereal.

Grant
I remember when Uncle Boyd came to visit, he would put more sugar on his cold cereal that we could. We always had everything rationed out. One slice of bacon was only half a slice of bacon. We got one teaspoon of sugar. When he put more sugar on his cereal, oh, Uncle Boyd, you can't do that. (He'd say,) Wait a minute; I'm an old man...

Chris
He called everybody a bugger!

Tony
He probably still does!

Chris
You little buggers!

Dick
I remember one summer we got behind or something, it don't remember where it was in the sequence of things, we started getting up when dad did at 4:30 in the morning. Every morning he'd come in and say, Dick, get up, it's almost noon! And it was 4:30 in the morning. I got so tired of hearing that. It's not almost noon, it's 4:30 in the morning, give me a break!

Mom
One of his favorite expressions is, you're burning daylight. If you're not out of bed before the crack of dawn, you're burning day light.

Donna
He'd say, you better get up, half the day is gone.

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Dad proposes to mom
Dad goes to war
Dick is born
Mom’s first moves
Religion
Adak Alaska
Bremerton
Grandma Johnson comment to mom
What the kids look like
Leslie
Slaughter house
Run away from home
Tube pregnancy – dedicate to religion
Mom goes to church
The car wreck
Move to North Carolina
Electronic Football game
Oceanside
Who was born in Oceanside
Kids names
The farm
The house (tool shed)
Nobody get my seat
Wind rower
Tipped over tractor
Uncle Boyd
Cutting potatoes
Harvest potatoes
Larry meets the Johnson’s
Harvesting potatoes
Move to Idaho
Richard’s honeymoon
Top
Cutting Potatoes
Leslie
Do you remember cutting seed potatoes, Donna? Was it just you and I?

Grant
I remember cutting seed potatoes.

Chris
I remember we had these bags...

Donna
We'd run them through the knife.

Leslie
And we couldn't go to bed that night until we had cut enough seed potato for dad to plant the next day. And it could be 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, but we had to cut seed potatoes until dad had enough to plant the next day.

Tony
I don't remember cutting those, but I can smell the cellar, now.

Chris
Remember we had this pitch fork and we had to take the potatoes and load them into the thing.

Grant
We had to throw them up on the back of the...

Chris It would load them up to the knives, and oh, it was horrible.

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Dad proposes to mom
Dad goes to war
Dick is born
Mom’s first moves
Religion
Adak Alaska
Bremerton
Grandma Johnson comment to mom
What the kids look like
Leslie
Slaughter house
Run away from home
Tube pregnancy – dedicate to religion
Mom goes to church
The car wreck
Move to North Carolina
Electronic Football game
Oceanside
Who was born in Oceanside
Kids names
The farm
The house (tool shed)
Nobody get my seat
Wind rower
Tipped over tractor
Uncle Boyd
Cutting potatoes
Harvest potatoes
Larry meets the Johnson’s
Harvesting potatoes
Move to Idaho
Richard’s honeymoon
Top
Harvest Potatoes
Leslie
That first year we harvested potatoes, what a nightmare that was.

Mom
I wish I could find that picture, you know, we picked potatoes by hand that first year. Dug them out by hand, and picked them up and put them in sacks.

Leslie
No, they came across a little thing and in the middle, you took the potatoes out of the middle and put them onto a little thing and then they'd drop into a gunny sack. Then Dick would take the gunny sack off and put it in the field. Then we'd come along in the evening and we'd put all the gunny sacks onto this old truck. Then we had to haul them to, were we using Tanner's cellar or did we haul them into town?

Mom
It was across this Norland thing there.

Leslie
Anyway, we had to dump all the potatoes out of the gunny sacks and then we'd start over the next day.

Chris
And, when we built the potato cellar, we went and cut the trees and pulled the bark off ourselves, I'll never forget that.

Grant
I remember, my sisters used to be pretty tough and they could beat me up. That's from all the hay hauling, and potato hauling...

Chris
Well, some of your sisters!

Grant
Yeah, I don't think Chris ever could but I remember Donna could! And when she didn't beat me up, she would tickle me in church. And I of course, had to be quiet. But she would tickle me to make me scream out loud.

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Dad proposes to mom
Dad goes to war
Dick is born
Mom’s first moves
Religion
Adak Alaska
Bremerton
Grandma Johnson comment to mom
What the kids look like
Leslie
Slaughter house
Run away from home
Tube pregnancy – dedicate to religion
Mom goes to church
The car wreck
Move to North Carolina
Electronic Football game
Oceanside
Who was born in Oceanside
Kids names
The farm
The house (tool shed)
Nobody get my seat
Wind rower
Tipped over tractor
Uncle Boyd
Cutting potatoes
Harvest potatoes
Larry meets the Johnson’s
Harvesting potatoes
Move to Idaho
Richard’s honeymoon
Top
Larry meets the Johnson's
Leslie
(To Larry) Tell us about the first time you saw the Johnson's.

Tony
Oh, this is a good story!

Larry
I remember word got around in the ward that there was a family from California that there was a family of all girls. All the boys were real excited about this family of all girls. We went to sacrament meeting, and I remember sitting in about the middle and I was looking around not really doing anything, you guys come in and you know how there's the front and then there's an open space and the second section, you guys were all sitting there, I turned around and looked all saw was suntan and legs. It looked like a line of chorus girls!

Donna
I can remember harvesting mustard seed with Larry. Do you remember that?

Larry
Yeah, it was fun.

Donna
We did it all night one night.

Larry
I was running John Hansen's combine.

Barbara
Didn't you get out of school to harvest something?

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Dad proposes to mom
Dad goes to war
Dick is born
Mom’s first moves
Religion
Adak Alaska
Bremerton
Grandma Johnson comment to mom
What the kids look like
Leslie
Slaughter house
Run away from home
Tube pregnancy – dedicate to religion
Mom goes to church
The car wreck
Move to North Carolina
Electronic Football game
Oceanside
Who was born in Oceanside
Kids names
The farm
The house (tool shed)
Nobody get my seat
Wind rower
Tipped over tractor
Uncle Boyd
Cutting potatoes
Harvest potatoes
Larry meets the Johnson’s
Harvesting potatoes
Move to Idaho
Richard’s honeymoon
Top
Harvesting Potatoes
Leslie
Potatoes. During potato harvest, they'd let you out for a couple weeks. Let me tell you it was darn hard work. It was cold, the wind would blow, and we just knew that dad had a better situation than we had because he wore glasses! It had to be better for him then us because we didn't have these glasses to protect our face and we couldn't see, and oh, we'd stand there all day long, just ride that thing up and down and up and down the rows, it was freezing cold, mother would have the baby in the truck with the heater on and dad would be loading the truck.

Tony
That was me!

Leslie
Yeah, you and Barbara.

Chris
Uncle Boyd would be going around saying, you bugger, you bugger!

Tony
Dad would be saying, you knot-head.

Chris
You pot licker, you pot licker!

Leslie
I do think dad tried to be patient with us. I look back now and I see people with children that age and it is almost more work for the parent to keep the child going then it is for the child to actually do the work. I do think dad did learn a little patience with that, because it was hard work for us and we weren't used to it, and I think he tried not to get too mad at us, you know, keep us going but not get too mad at us.

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Dad proposes to mom
Dad goes to war
Dick is born
Mom’s first moves
Religion
Adak Alaska
Bremerton
Grandma Johnson comment to mom
What the kids look like
Leslie
Slaughter house
Run away from home
Tube pregnancy – dedicate to religion
Mom goes to church
The car wreck
Move to North Carolina
Electronic Football game
Oceanside
Who was born in Oceanside
Kids names
The farm
The house (tool shed)
Nobody get my seat
Wind rower
Tipped over tractor
Uncle Boyd
Cutting potatoes
Harvest potatoes
Larry meets the Johnson’s
Harvesting potatoes
Move to Idaho
Richard’s honeymoon
Top
Move to Idaho
Marlene
What did you girls think about moving from California up to a situation like that? It was totally different than being near the beach and what you were used to?

Leslie
We didn't have a choice!

Chris
I adjusted really quick!

Marlene
Did you get really depressed and think, oh, this is really awful?

Donna
We were pretty excited at first, I mean, we pictured ourselves riding tractors (on a ranch) and riding horses around, which we never did yet. We always wore our bathing suits to haul hay with the chaps.

Tony
Bathing suits and chaps?

Donna
Bathing suit on with chaps.

Grant
Hay hauling chaps, you know, the big canvas things.

Leslie
We'd thin beets with our bathing suits and dad used to always say he had the sexiest beet thinning crew in the county.

Chris
And we had this permanent dirt line here from thinning the beets, you couldn't get the dirt off.

Leslie
He even hired us out. We thinned beets for bishop Eemes.

Chris
Like we ever got paid for it!

Marlene
Did you go in your bathing suits?

Leslie
No, he wouldn't let us go to others with our bathing suits.

Donna
Gordon thought I was Negro when we first met.

Julia
You had curly hair and black skin.

Donna
I was pretty dark.

Leslie It was quiet and adventure.

Tony
(To the kids) You see how easy you guys have it!

Leslie

We didn't you guys to Mountain Home though, that's where your memories are all from, I don't have any of that.

Tony
My farming memories are mostly from working for other guys, I remember being really dark, just black almost. Dirt and tan.

Leslie
What happened at Mt. Home that the farm didn't go? No water?

Mom
He didn't get any water and just didn't work out. He had that banker in Rupert that let him have anything he wanted and he just over spent. He had a new Massey Ferguson, he bought that well rig and all the stuff it takes to drill wells with and all this equipment he was going to farm with and he just, the potato sales didn't go as good as he... As a matter of fact he left me in Rupert to sell potatoes and those brokers don't like to talk to women and I wasn't forceful enough. I didn't make any mistakes trying to sell potatoes or anything but they, the prices were down and we didn't get what we needed for our potatoes and it just fell apart. He had his well rig that Ralph Smith let him buy so he started drilling wells.

Leslie
Was dad a poor money manager?

Mom
No, he was a good money manager, as a matter of fact I; I don't know how we worked out the money thing. I know that he always let me manage the money but, I really don't, we never were in debit or anything and I always tired to save a little bit, even if it was a five dollar bill or something. He was a good business man, he just over estimated himself on that one deal.

Click links to jump in the text.
Dad proposes to mom
Dad goes to war
Dick is born
Mom’s first moves
Religion
Adak Alaska
Bremerton
Grandma Johnson comment to mom
What the kids look like
Leslie
Slaughter house
Run away from home
Tube pregnancy – dedicate to religion
Mom goes to church
The car wreck
Move to North Carolina
Electronic Football game
Oceanside
Who was born in Oceanside
Kids names
The farm
The house (tool shed)
Nobody get my seat
Wind rower
Tipped over tractor
Uncle Boyd
Cutting potatoes
Harvest potatoes
Larry meets the Johnson’s
Harvesting potatoes
Move to Idaho
Richard’s honeymoon
Top
Richard's Honeymoon
Dick
Marlene might tell you, if she wants to, about her honeymoon in the trailer.

Chris
Oh, would you, that is so funny.

Marlene
You tell it, you set it up.

Dick
I don't remember it.

Barbara
That was the wrong thing to say!

Dick
I don't remember much of it.

Mom
I was sure surprised that you stayed there, I'll tell you!

Barbara
I don't know the story.

Marlene
We just stayed in the trailer.

Mom
Uncle Boyd and Aunt Jean had moved a trailer up to stay in on weekends when they came up to Rupert.

Chris
A pretty bad looking thing.

Dick
It was this big.

Mom
It was just an old rickety trailer.

Chris
I think it was pink and silver.

Barbara
Was it rounded? I know what kind you're talking about.

Leslie
Airstream.

Dick
Do you (Rachel) remember any of this?

Marlene
I remember something like the morning after, grandma and someone else was sitting on the couch and they asked you if you needed help or anything, and I just...

Leslie
She was so stunned that she probably couldn't think!

Marlene
I just remember that it was like 1:00 in the afternoon and we walked into the house and we were sitting there (Grandma Johnson) and they said, well, good morning.

Mom
Was it clean?

Marlene
Yeah, it was.

Mom
I can't remember if we cleaned it or not, it seems to me that we did clean the trailer and had decent sheets and stuff on the bed.

Barbara
That was your honeymoon?

Chris
Dick was a romantic devil, Barbara.

Dick
Then we skipped town and headed for Mexico.
THE END

After this, we talked a little about Donna and Leslie's honeymoons, after which, Ben Johnson did a demo of knives so sharp that it would have made easy work even for O.J.