Gathering Eggs

When we went to the farm there were always certain things that we would do every time. One of the funniest things to do was gather eggs. Grandma and Grandpa always had a bunch of chickens all over the place. They roamed freely around the yard, as far as I can remember they did not have a chicken coop. We would make a game out of seeing who could find the most eggs. The chickens would make nests in and around the hay stacks. So we would climb around on the stacks of hay searching for the hidden nests. Often we would get in trouble for getting on top of the hay stacks because it was dangerous. To us kids the adults were just being a pain, because of course we knew how to climb without falling off or knocking them over. Once we found where the nests were we would watch them every day and collect the eggs.

I remember having breakfast with Grandpa Golding where he would fry up our eggs in bacon grease. Even thought I don’t remember ever having bacon there was always a can of bacon grease sitting near the stove. Then he would take his slice of homemade bread and put it in the pan of hot bacon grease to fry up a bit. Then the egg went on the bread. Oh, that was good.

Yellow Submarine

When I was 8 there was a movie that I wanted to see more than anything. This movie was the rave everywhere. It was The Yellow Submarine by the Beetles. All of the kids in school either had seen it or were making plans to see it. My opportunity finally came when a couple of my friends and I made plans to ride our bikes across town to the movie theater for the Saturday matinee. The problem was that mom was not too comfortable with me riding my bike all that way alone…without her. We negotiated an arrangement…well actually I begged until she finally gave in, somewhat. We agreed I could ride my bike on one condition. That being that I would walk it across the road when I got to an intersection. My friends met at my house and with my money in my pocket the time came and we were off. I stopped at the first intersection and walked my bike across the street, however my friends didn’t. I almost caught up with them when we arrived at the next intersection. Again I walked across the street with my bike, and again my friends didn’t and I found myself alone trying to catch up. By the time I made it to the next street I decided that it wasn’t worth it and I followed my friends across the street while riding my bike. We were sailing along with visions of the Beetles foremost in our minds when all of a sudden there she was, mom. She had followed us too see if I would indeed walk my bike across the intersections as agreed. As soon as I saw her I knew my goose was cooked. No matter how hard I begged I had to put my bike in the back of the car and go home to spend the rest of the day in my room. I didn’t mind spending the day in my room as much as I was devastated by being embarrassed in front of my friends and I never got to see The Yellow Submarine. In fact, to this day I still have never seen the movie that at the time I would have given anything to have had the opportunity to see. It turns out that I did learn that when I made a deal with my mother that I needed to keep it not because she could find out that I didn’t keep it but because I knew that keeping agreements was the right thing to do. Lesson learned!

Super Heros

Our pink house on Center Street was a two story house. The stairs going up to the second floor was in between the living room and the kitchen. On TV one of our favorite shows was Superman. He was totally awesome. The neatest thing that Superman did was to fly. He could glide through the air with his cape flapping behind him in the wind. Our imaginations were vivid and we played all kinds of games. I recall playing on the bare wooden stairs leading up to our bedrooms. The girls and I, ok mostly me, would take a bath towel and using a safety pin would transform the drab bath towel into our very own Superman’s cape. We would climb as far up the stairs as we dared then would jump with all our might flinging ourselves as far down the stairway as we could dreaming all the while that we were leaping over tall buildings with a single bound.

Faster than a speeding bullet.
More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

Look! Up in the sky!
It's a bird. It's a plane. It's Superman!

Yes, it's Superman - strange visitor from another planet who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Superman - who can change the course of mighty rivers, bend steel with his bare hands, and who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights the never ending battle for Truth, Justice and the American Way.

Other times the stairway would become a war zone as I would setup all of my plastic Army men with the trucks and artillery pieces strategically placed. It still makes me smile as I can hear dad yelling at us because we had not picked up after ourselves and he had stepped on an Army man in his bare feet.

Learning to Ride My Bike

One day mom packed all of us kids into the car and took us over to Uncle Duane’s house which she often did. I can still see in my mind the route we’d drive taking the back roads from Spanish Fork to Springville. Back then the freeway had not arrived in our valley and the only way from town to town was State Street that wound from one town to the next then straight through and on again to the next. We loved going to Uncle Duane’s because they had a big back yard full of gardens and fruit trees. To me the backyard was a wonderland where I’d play and play. We climbed trees and threw dirt clods at anything that moved and when nothing was moving we’d have contests trying to knock over old tin cans that we would place strategically through the gardens.

Every fall Uncle Duane would invite us over to pick apricots and cherries stating that he had more than he could ever possibly use. He was a kind and loving man I will always remember how much mom looked up to him and truly loved her big brother. We always left with a basket full of tomatoes, cucumbers and zucchini squash. On this occasion we came home with what to me was a real treasure, a brand new, at least to me it was brand new, bike that my older cousin Steven had out grown and he handed down to me. It was perfect for a 6 year old little boy. At least that was what Uncle Duane said when he gave me the tiny bike. It was blue and had solid tires like a trike but it was not a trike it was a bike, and it was mine. Mom and dad even went to town and bought me new sparkly blue handle bar grips with white and blue streamers dangling from the end of each grip. This not only was totally cool but I really think it made the bike faster… just sayin.

One of my earliest memories that I recall fondly is dad running up and down with me as he struggled to help me to master the challenge of balancing on those tinny tires. The sidewalk in front of the Pink House had a crack in every single section. No not just a crack, but a crack that went from side to side and with one of the slabs always at a slant with one corner at least two inches lower than its mate causing quite a perilous outing until I learned the smoothest course over the path. However, it did not take long before I figured out how to sleekly traverse the rugged sidewalk. Before long mom and dad came to quickly understand that my world was gradually becoming larger and larger.

To me the thrill of my newly discovered freedom was so exciting that I yearned for more and more and I always pushed the envelope of my boundaries to the extreme. I will never forget the exhilaration I felt the first time that I rode my bike all the way around the block all by myself. I knew I was real tuff stuff and I told everyone that would listen about my conquests.

One afternoon mom had restricted my boundaries to no more than the houses on either side our hour house which stood on the corner of 4^th and Center in Spanish Fork, to us kids always referred to affectionately as the Pink House. As I rode up and down the sidewalk I decided that if I meandered into the driveways I could extend my route and get more mileage out of each leg as I navigated back and forth up and down our street. As I rounded the front of a truck parked in one of these driveways I was looking down the sidewalk instead of paying attention of where I was going, and I according to mom I was always going too fast while not paying attention, when the next thing I knew I was flat on my back writhing in pain on the grass next to the concrete staring up at the truck. When I touched my forehead my hand was covered with blood. I instantly knew I was dying. There seemed to be blood everywhere and my head was numb with pain but it is interesting that even now I recall that my greater fear was that I had strayed from the sidewalk and I was going to be in trouble! Apparently the truck in the driveway was a utility truck with doors on the side that would lower granting access to tools and providing a nice working area. Yup, I had not seen the lowered door and had ridden right into the edge driving the corner deep into my forehead.

When I got home mom calmed me down and cleaned me up then took me to Dr. Moody to get my forehead stitched up. I do not recall getting into very much trouble when dad came home. I wonder how much of that result was mom intervening on my behalf. I think she felt as if I had been in enough pain and that I’d learned my lesson. On my part I don’t know how much of a lesson I learned because growing up I remember to always have a cut, a scrape, or a broken bone and continuously sported a bruise from bumping and bouncing from one adventure to another. On time mom commented that she hoped that I didn’t go bald because of all of the scars that surely must be accumulating on my scalp.

My Tongue Will Stick If It's Cold Enough

When I was about 5 – 6 I was playing on the side of the house. It was a cold wintry day. I mean cold. My friend had told me that if a person stuck their tongue on a flag pole that it would get stuck. Well being the curious youngster that I was I decided to put it to the test, I stuck my tongue on Dad’s truck and…it stuck! I was so scared that I yanked back tearing my tongue loose. I cried and cried. When Mom and I went back out to see what happened I swear that I could actually see skin still on the side of the truck.

Tadploes, Frogs, and a Fish or Two

One day I came home with a fish. I swore up and down to Mom that I had not been playing by the river which was strictly off limits. The truth was that I had been playing in the swampy ponds that were by the river not actually in the river itself, so I was telling the truth…right? I loved those ponds. We played there hunting for huge bullfrogs, tadpoles, and yes we even caught a fish or two with our bare hands. When we were playing there the world was a whole lifetime away.

My Horse Ride

Down below Robert’s house there were not any houses. Starting at Robert’s house we could go on a trail that led to the river bottoms. At the end of the trail there was a barnyard, well in reality it was a coral with some horses in it. At the side of the coral was a lean-to that covered the hay for the horses. We wanted to ride those horses something fierce, but we couldn’t figure out how to get on them, remember that we were eight years old. I came up with the idea that Robert would be on the ground and I would climb on top of the shed. Robert would then coax the horses over by the lean-to. When they got close enough I jumped on the back of one of them. I only vaguely remember what happened, all I knew was that I was air born and landed on my butt in a mud puddle. Robert laughed and laughed. He was supposed to go next but he never had the nerve. The interesting thing was that I fully expected to be able to ride around the coral on the horse. In our minds it didn’t matter that I didn’t have reins to guide the horse we were in a coral right…what could go wrong, how naïve we were.

22 Shells

My best friend in the whole world was Robert Waters. One day I found some .22 shells in my Dad’s truck. Of course I took them, but I was “smart” I only took a few so that Dad would not notice that any were missing. (Do you really think that I got away with that one?) At Robert’s house we took the shells and were playing with them. We often would take caps and hit them with a hammer they would pop. If we hit a whole roll of the caps instead of just one at a time it would really make a nice bang. So with this in mind our thoughts naturally went to our 22 shells. After spending a little time experimenting we found that if we laid the shell on it’s side on the sidewalk and lightly hit with a hammer that it would go off making a much bigger bang than caps would. I had no concept that it was as dangerous as it actually was. We thought that as long as we “aimed” the shell away from us nothing bad would happen. And as long as I was there nothing did happen. The problem was that later that day Robert got into his Dad’s shells and took some so that they could continue to play. They were hitting the shells with a hammer and the bullet bounced off of a rock and hit his brother in the shin. It did not hurt him badly but…. Later that night my Dad had a sever talk with me. In retrospect I am surprised that we lived to see the sun come up the next morning.

The Tire Swing

After selling the pink house and while waiting for Dad to build our new home in Provo we lived in a rental house was on the other side of town and was located on about 500 South and 50 East. This

house was not a great house, in fact it was kind of run down as I look back at it, but all in all it served it’s purpose and gave us a place to live.
To us kids one of the coolest things about the house was a big old tree on the backyard. It was a scraggly sad looking excuse of a tree. But, it had a big branch that Dad decided to hang a swing on. One day Dad came home with an old tire that he decided to make a tire swing out of. He took a razor knife and a hack saw and after cutting it and then turning it inside out he made a swing seat out of it. He then took a rope and hung it from the branch.
We played on our new swing from sun up to sun dawn. We soon became the coolest kids in the neighborhood. We could really get high as we flew back and forth. We would take turns jumping out and seeing how high and how far we could jump. We would use our imaginations envisioning us sailing through the air like an Olympic athlete. Then one day I was pushing one of he kids in the swing and without any warning all of the sudden the rope snapped sending the one in the swing bouncing like a ball across the backyard. Once it broke we never put it back up again.

Grandpa Golding and Dad's Shoes

One thing that I regret is that Grandpa Golding was older when I knew him and that I did not get a chance to get to know him very well. The grandpa that I knew was an old man who was struggling with Alzheimer’s and dementia. On one occasion grandpa came to stay with us for a while. He woke up one morning and was disorientated. He did not understand what he was doing. He noticed that Dad had a pair of shoes by the back door and thought that he had gone off to work without his shoes. So grandpa decided that he had to go take them to Dad. With shoes in hand and only partially dressed, off grandpa went up the street to

find Dad and to help him out. I remember following him up the street trying to convince him that it was alright and that he should come back home with me and let mom help him. Finally Mom caught up with us and together we were able to get him back home. From what I have heard Grandpa Golding was quite a good man. I do regret not being able to get to know him better.

Getting My Tonsils Out

When I was in first grade I had a hard time with my health. I missed a great deal of school during first grade year. I don’t remember missing much school though. But I do remember being told that I needed to have my tonsils out and going to the hospital. I am not sure if it really was a hospital or not. It was in Spanish Fork at about 500 North 150 West. It did not seem like a hospital. The thing that I do remember the most about the whole thing was that after it was all over and I was home recuperating Grandpa Leifson came by and brought me a my very own pineapple milkshake. This was something that was very unique. First to have grandpa pay that much attention to me was really nice and then to have my very own milkshake was totally cool. I don’t think that I had ever heard of a pineapple shake and to have my own was tremendous. I also recall that mom made me some homemade popsicles, cool aid in an ice cube tray with a toothpick in it. A six year olds dream comes true.

Riding Tractor With Dad From Birds Eye

Some of my fondest memories revolve around helping my dad. One time we rode up Spanish Fork canyon to a small town of Birds Eye. In reality Birds Eye was five or so houses and a few farms up in the mountains. Dad’s friends, Earnest Roach and his son in law Hyrum Otterson had a dairy farm in Palmyra. Dad worked for the Roach’s when he was a teenager. They would thin beets, haul hay, and do just about anything that needed to be done. In many ways Earnest had a strong influence on Dad growing up. Besides their farm in Palmyra the Roaches had a farm up in Birds Eye where they grew alfalfa and grazed some cows. Dad had volunteered to go up the canyon and bring back a tractor that they had used up there for the summer. Winter was coming and they needed the tractor back in the valley before it snowed and it became trapped for the winter. The cool

thing was that I was able to go with him. I sat on the wheel cover and we drove it all the way back home again. We drove slowly on the shoulder with the blinkers flashing. We talked and talked all the way home. Once we got to Spanish Fork we stopped at Glades Drive-in and had lunch. After lunch we finished the trip on out to their farm in Palmyra. It was an awesome day!

All That Effort For Nothing

I was always coming up with one scheme or another. I decided that I needed some money. So I took a big chunk of steel that dad had. It was actually a piece of railroad rail that was about ten inches long that dad used as an anvil. A friend of mine and I put it in my wagon and pulled it to a Swenson’s metal salvage company on the outskirts of town. We had to have pulled that wagon a mile. There were not any sidewalks so we pulled the wagon on the side of the road past the county fairgrounds. When we got there they weighed it and told us that it was not worth anything. We were totally disappointed. But, come to find out the man who was helping us kept snickering about these two eight year old kids who came dragging this hunk of steel in a wagon and wanted to sell it. To make things worse he knew dad. He knew that this was something that dad would not want me to sell so he wouldn’t give us anything for it. We had to drag it all the way back home. That night dad asked what I had been up to that day. He laughed and laughed and figured that taking it all the way there then having to bring it all the way back again was punishment enough.

Sunday Night TV

TV on Sunday nights was the best! I have so many good memories of sitting in the living room of the pink house and watching TV with the family. I remember shows like Bill Cosby when he was a coach. But my favorites were Bonanza, Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, and Kennecott Copper Theater. Kennecott Copper Corporation sponsored a movie every Sunday night. They had great movies. Instead of commercials they would show clips of things about the copper mine and the refinery. I was impressed by the size of trucks, especially the tires. They would show a man standing next to a tire and he would have to stretch to reach the top of the tire. I could not hardly imagine something that big. We would play with our trucks in the back yard and pretend that we were driving one of those huge trucks.
I remember watching a movie about a person who had the tenacity of an ant trying to move a rubber tree plant, I loved it. There was also a movie about a man who was duped into being a scout master for his girl friends son. They got into a lot of trouble when they went on a campout, but in the end everything worked out. I also remember watching Follow Me Boys, another movie about the Boy Scouts staring Fred McMurry. I honestly believe that this was where I came to love movies.
I remember sitting on the floor with a bowl of popcorn. Mom would pop it in one of her pots on the stove and we all got our own bowl. Dad loved popcorn, as long as I can remember he would sit with a big bowl on his lap and watch TV. I recall him teaching Jock to catch a popcorn cornel as he threw it to him.

Walnuts

On the west side of our house we had a large black walnut tree. It was too tall for us to climb and I don’t remember it as being an attractive tree, but one cool thing was that we could go out side almost any time and pick up walnuts off of the ground. We would spend hours cracking and eating walnuts. The nuts were covered in a husk that was fairly easy to remove but the inside of the husks were messy from lying on the ground so long. We would use dad’s old hammer or in a pinch we would find a rock to crack the small hard shells. It took a while to

develop a soft enough swing to not totally smash the nut but hard enough to still brake it open so that we could dig the nut out of the shell. Mom would use the nuts we harvested to put in some homemade fudge or crumpled on top of a freshly baked chocolate cake. To this day I love chocolate cake with chocolate frosting and some walnuts sprinkled on top.

Canning Venison

Mom used to do all that she could to be frugal. We would can and save everything. One thing that I remember is that when dad would come home from deer hunting, mom would take the fresh venison, season it then put it in pint size jars and preserve it. Mom processed he meet by cutting the meet into chunks and putting the jars in a pressure cooker and cooking it. We thought that having deer meet sandwiches was a real treat. Mom would take the meat from the jars and grind it with the hand crank meat grinder. I would help her. We would clamp the grinder to the kitchen table then it was my job to crank the handle. We would then mix the ground up meat with a little salad dressing, I did not discover mayonnaise until I was an adult, in our house we always only used salad dressing. We thought that it was a special treat when we would add pickles to the grinder as well. Those sandwiches were wonderful with a handful of potato chips and a glass of cool aid.

The Refrigerator

I have to mention our refrigerator. It was an old used Frigidaire and I will never ever forget it. The handle was broken so we had to use a Philips screwdriver to open the door. We would take the screwdriver and stick it in the hole while pulling on the handle. If you positioned the screwdriver just right you could push on the latch with the screwdriver and the door would come open. Mom and dad liked it because it was hard for us kids to open the door. One of my greatest accomplishments as a child was the day that I finally figured out how to open the refrigerator all by myself. Mom and Dad did not get it fixed partly because they could not afford to, but there was the added advantage that it kept us kids out of the fringe.

Hanging Out the Wash

I remember helping mom do the wash, at least we thought we were helping. We had an old wringer washer. Mom would have to fill the tub with water and let it wash then she would drain the water, fill it again, let it agitate for a while to rinse the clothes. After rinsing the clothes she would then take the clothes that were dripping wet and run them through the ringer. When I was lucky it would be my job to crank the wringer. We had to be careful feeding the cloths into the wringer so that our finger would not get caught and drawn into the wringer. We then

would take the clothes that were flattened from going through the wringer, put them in a basket, and take them outside to hang on the clothes line. I remember the sheets flapping in the breeze. All of our clothes would be stiff from drying in the sun. I even remember running out to gather the wash because it was beginning to rain. One of the most exciting days of our time in the Pink House was the day we got a brand new dryer. We were all amazed at how fast it worked and how easy it had become to do the wash.

Apple Fights

In the back yard we had a vacant lot between us and our aunt Thora’s house. In the back of the lot were two old apple trees. As kids we lived in those trees. We would scrape together pieces of scrap wood from around the house that dad may or may not have been using and we built what we imagined was a tree house. In reality we just mailed pieces of wood to the tree trunk for steps so we could climb up into the branches easer. We put a few boards that were long enough to reach from limb to limb up so that we could sit up there without falling out. Mind you we moved from this home when I was seven so this tree house must have been quite amusing to our parents, having been built by a bunch of seven year old children.
This is where I learned to love green apples. From experance

I learned how long to wait in order for the green apple to become nice and sour, and when they would have lost their bitterness. Even to this day give me a fresh green apple and a salt shaker and I will be in heaven.
Another use for the little green apples was to have apple wars. We would divide up into teams and have apple fights. We would use garbage can lids as our shields. We would sit with each team in our tree with our shields in place where we would plot for hours trying to come up with strategies the get a good shot at the rival team. One stratagy was that we would send a decoy off to one side of the tree on the ground hoping that our foes would expose themselves to us from an unexpected angle. It was really fun in the late fall when we would use the rotten apples from off of the ground. The challenge was to gather up the apples without getting hit by the other team who were waiting for us to expose ourselves.
It is amazing to me to remember the fun times. We were always playing one thing or another. We never watched TV. We would play for hours and never go in the house until lunch or dinner.

The Garden

We had a wonderful garden on the side of our house. Our house was on a corner lot and we loved that house. The garden was in the front of the yard on the corner of the lot. I remember dad going out and irrigating the yard. He would put canvas in the ditch that ran infront of our house with a 2x4 under it to hold it up and a rock on it in the ditch to hold it in place. The water would flood over the sidewalk and onto the lawn. He would start on the east side of the lot and work his way westward toward the corner. He would finish up with the garden. I remember the peonies, iris’, and the daisies the most. In fact when we moved to Provo we took many of the plants with us.

The Magic Tree

In our front yard we had a magic tree. This tree was indiscernible as a tree. It was covered with grape vines to the extent that to us kids it did not look like any tree we had ever seen. In the fall we would have wonderful concord grapes that mom would make into juice. But the most amazing thing about that grape vine was that occasonally it would drop a beautiful golden pair on the lawn. For breakfast we often had oatmeal. At the suggestion of mom, we would run out side in the morning to look to see if the magic tree had given us a sweet delicious pair that we could cut up and put in our oatmeal. The fun thing was that we really believed that it was magic.

Growing Up Me

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