AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF WENDELL HILL RANSOM

Preface

At this time our Father and Jehovah came for a visit and found that Adam and eve were then mortal. They were then driven from the Garden of Eden, never again to associate with our Father until such a time as they were once again called into His presence by resurrection. They were not to be left without guidance, however, and sometime in the future they would be visited by Celestial Beings. It was a descendant of these two individuals, Adam and Eve, that I am privileged to be here on earth.

PART 1 — THE FORMATIVE YEARS

I, Wendell Hill Ransom, was born at Blackfoot, Bingham County, Idaho on the fourteenth day of March, 1921, and was the oldest child of William Austin Ransom and Emma Laura Hill. My father and mother were married on the second of October, 1919, and had so lived their lives that they were able to be married in the Salt Lake Temple, which provided me, along with my younger brothers and sisters, the opportunity of being born in the covenant.

The first day of May of that year I was blessed by my maternal grandfather, David Hill, and given the name of Wendell Hill Ransom. I do not know what my father worked at during this time, but during my teenage years he pointed out to some homes that he helped to construct. He also indicated that he helped in the construction of the Tabernacle in Blackfoot. Father also mentioned working for the Union Pacific Railroad in Pocatello, Bannock County, Idaho. Pocatello was a railroad center and more of an industrial center that Blackfoot. Pocatello was approximately twenty-five miles south of Blackfoot. Mother told me later that Father quite working for the railroad because his heart had a slow pulse rate and they were reluctant to give him a perfect physical fitness record. Mother wished later that he had stayed with the railroad. Maybe if my father had stayed with the railroad our early years would not have been so difficult and I probably would have been a different individual than I later became. My parents also mentioned that they had been with my father‘s family for a time.

I was eighteen months old when my oldest sister, Elma was born. The date was the sixteenth of September, 1922. At this time we were living in Wapello, a small farming community about six miles north of Blackfoot, also in Bingham County. I never did find out just where in Wapello the home was. My grandfather and grandmother, David and Emma Flora Wheeler Hill were also living in Wapello.

We were not in Wapello very many years. When I was just a little over three years old, on thirtieth of July, 1924, my next sister was born at Springville, Utah County, Utah. She was given the name Laurel. At this time I had reached the age when a normal person‘s memory begins to have some retentive capacity, and so it was with me. I can remember a lady coming to our home to assist Mother in caring for the new baby.

At the time we were in Springville, my father was a mechanic in a garage, where he was in partnership with a man named Grover. Sometimes Mother would take her children for a walk, and at times I remember ending up at Father‘s garage. I can remember playing with a magnet and some ball bearings, and being amazed at how they would stick to the magnet. In my teen years I was to learn from my father some aspects of the mechanical trade and because some of the automobiles from this time were still around I found out the function of the magnets in the operation of a motor. However, within about five years of this time cars were re-designed so that the magnet was no longer a necessary part of an internal combustion engine.

Within a couple of years we moved from Springville and Father became a partner in a garage in Salt Lake City, Salt Lake County, Utah. The garage was located just south of Twenty First South on State Street, but I can‘t remember a thing about it because it was torn down to make room for other businesses before I was old enough to identified with it. Father was not in this garage very long when he obtained employment with J. I. Case Threshing Machine Company in their Salt Lake Division. We were then living in a home on the west side of Sale Lake on the sixteenth of July, 1926, when my sister Willa entered the family. At this time I was five years old, and when school started in the fall I was enrolled in Kindergarten at the Riverside School. This school was a two story red brick building located on the southwest corner of Sixth South and Eighth (later changed to Ninth) West. The lower grades were in the east end of the building and the room that held the kindergarten class was the first room inside the doors south side of the hall. The student seats were facing west with the teacher‘s desk at the west end of the room and a row of four of five windows behind us.

One block west of Eighth West at this school was the Jordan River. Like the Jordan of the land of the Bible, it drains a fresh water lake and empties into a salt water inland sea. The Jordan River in the land of the Bible drains the Sea of Galilee southward into the Dead Sea, while the Jordan River in Utah flows northward, draining Utah Lake into Great Salt Lake, Across the Jordan River at Sixth South was a foot bridge that led to the doors of Jordan Junior High. The sky between the Riverside School and Jordan Junior High was a favorite flying area for sea gulls and there were many hundred of them every day.

When I went to Riverside School we lived in two different homes. The first was on the east side of Post Street just one house south of Fifth South. Post Street runs north and south just about midway between Eighth West and the Jordan River. Mother instructed us not to play down by the river because it was so dangerous. There was a bridge across the river on Fifth South, and I can remember crossing it twice, once with my mother when she went to visit a lady that lived west of the river and another time when my sister Elma and I were sent on an errant to the bishop‘s home, which was also on the west side of the river. I don‘t remember what the bishop‘s name was at that time or even the ward we lived in, but I remember that one bishop we had was named Mephie, and it seems as if the ward was the Sixteenth Ward in the Pioneer Stake. This is the same Stake that President Harold B. Lee had been president of. He was the man that was very instrumental in the formulation of the Church Welfare Plan. From what has occurred later, and him being the Stake President when the depression occurred, I would believe that he was the Stake President when we lived there.

We finally moved away from this home and into a home on the west side of Eighth West. On the corner of Eighth West and Fifth South was a large vacant lot with houses occupying the rest of the block. We lived in the second house and the address was 516 Eighth West. This was a one story gray house with no basement. This location was just about three quarters of a block north of the Riverside School.

The ward chapel was about midway between Fourth and Fifth South on the west side of Eighth West so that it was about three quarters of a block north of our house. The first Sunday that we went to Sunday School in this new ward I went down toward the front of the chapel and found a few boys about my age and went with them to my Sunday School class. I think that this was the Sixteenth Ward.

The month March in Salt Lake is a fairly breezy month. At times the breeze becomes quite strong. March is, therefore, the season when all boys participated in the kite flying. We went with Mother to visit a family that had a couple of boys about my age or a little older and while we were there I got to help them construct a kite. They showed me how to balance the cross stick on the center stick and shape a string around them to form a frame. After this we made a little flour paste and covered the frame with paper to make a kite. After we attached a tail and a length of string we were able to fly a kite. After that I made kites every spring. I could make a kite and get it to fly but I bought a kite I had to remake it to get it to fly. I made good use of the vacant lot on the corner flying my kite each spring while we lived there.

While we lived on Eight West I was able to attend primary and was in a class known as the Trail Builders. For Pioneer Day celebration one summer, the primary was to put on a celebration, and the Trail Builders were chosen to act the part of the pioneers walking across the plains enroute to Utah. To simulate a pioneer waling across the plains carrying a rifle, each boy was to walk across the stage carrying a broomstick across his shoulder. The plan would probably have gone over as it was intended but Father had another idea. Instead of a broomstick his son would have a wooden rifle. Father obtained a board, and with a little bit of workmanship he carved it into the shape of a rifle. I took it to practice one time and it was seen by the other boys. By the time the program was put on each boy in the class had a wooden rifle that their fathers had made for them. Some of them borrowed mine for a pattern. Father had sanded and polished mine more that the other boys‘ fathers had done, though

Another sister, Donna, made her way into the family on the thirteenth day of September, 1928. This gave Father and Mother a family of five children, of which I was the oldest and also the only boy. At this time I was seven and one half years old.

The age of eight is a very special age in a young Latter-day Saint‘s life. If the eight year old child has been taught properly he is ready for entrance into the Kingdom of God through baptism and confirmation. I had been taught by my father and mother, along with Sunday School and Primary, so that I was ready for baptism when I was old enough. On the fourteenth of March, 1929 I turned eight and on the twenty-third of March of that year Mother took me to the Salt Lake Tabernacle on Temple Square, where I was baptized by a young man by the name of Kermit Fullmer. The Tabernacle is about midway between North Temple and South Temple streets in the western half of Temple Square. The Tabernacle is an oval structure with an oval roof. The western third of the building is built on the manner of an amphitheater built especially to seat the choir, and in the back of this is the famous pipe organ. In front of the choir seats is the row of seats for the General Authorities and the rostrum. The audience sits in the eastern two thirds of the Tabernacle. Around the upper level where the audience sits there is a balcony to hold the overflow audience. Underneath the choir seats is a special room in which the Baptismal font is located. This room in also built in the manner of an amphitheater with the lowest point the Baptismal Font. That is at the east end of this room. The entrance to this room is at the west wall of the tabernacle directly to the outside so that it can be used without disturbing any meeting that is taking place in the main portion of the tabernacle. To complete my entrance into the Kingdom of God I needed to have the Gift of the Holy Ghost bestowed upon me. This was done by my father, William Austin Ransom, on the thirty-first day of March, 1929.

My father‘s uncle, William John Ransom, was a guest in our home on Eighth West for some time for the purpose of doing genealogical research. He was somewhat successful in this work and accumulated quite a few names of ancestors and cleared them for Temple work. On the eighteenth day of January, 1930 he took two boys, of which I was one, to the Temple in Salt Lake, where we were baptized on behalf of them. I was privileged to be proxy for eighteen, but the other boy was able to do more. I started to choke during the baptism, so the one doing the baptizing had me hold my nose. After being baptized for a man I was then confirmed for him while the other boy was going down in the font and getting ready for baptism. In this way we changed turns. Mother accompanied me to the Temple and wrote down the names of the individuals that I was baptized for. I will now give their names and their date of birth. Maybe someday I will have the opportunity of meeting them.

• William Clifton b 1 Jan 1712
• William Clifton b 2 Sep 1663
• Robert Clifton b 2 May 1665
• John Clifton b about 1621
• William Clifton b 29 Sep 1725
• Stephen Ransom b 12 Apr 1798
• Thomas Ransom b 20 Oct 1594
• Thomas Ransom b 26 Dec 1692
• Thomas Ransom b 9 Nov 1725
• Robert Cramp b 3 Aug 1595
• John Cramp b 20 Feb 1597
• Isaac Cramp b 2 Oct 1774
• George Cramp b 3 Jul 1768
• Isaac Cramp b about 1768
• John Cramp b about 1585
• William Cramp b 16 Oct 1762
• John Cramp b 19 Jan 1766
• Richard Cramp b 17 Nov 1771

I was enrolled in a class of violin students. The class met one day each week. I would get on the streetcar after school and ride to town where the class was held. At first Mother went with me to see that I got there and home all right, but later on I went without her accompanying me. A streetcar, or trolley car, was a vehicle that ran on tracks in the center of the street. There was an area painted at each corner in which the people who were waiting for the streetcar would stand. The cars were all numbered so that we knew when the one came along that we should ride on. These trolley cars had an arm at the back that went up to an electric wire strung along there for that purpose. The conductor would stop at these areas and let on all the people who were there to ride the trolley. When the streetcar came to where the car would need to leave the line on another track he would stop, open the window in front of him, and with a large crow bar that was carried on the front of trolley he would change the tracks so he would go down the correct one. When he got to the end of the line he would open the window and let an arm on that end up to the wire and go to the other end of the trolley and pull that one down. These trolleys were built identical on both ends so that they could run either way without the necessity of turning around. I learned years later that the trolley cars had a dual purpose electric motor that, in starting, the conductor would use the motor as a series wound motor to give it a high starting torque and later, when the proper speed was obtained, he would shift it into a shunt wound motor to give it better speed regulation. Later on these street cars were replaced with buses. This act also did away with the need for the people waiting to stand in the center of the street and also opened another lane of traffic on each side of the street for automobiles. Of course when more cars were in use there was more need for additional lanes.

Also, while we lived on Eighth West, my Uncle Clarence Wheeler Hill visited us and with him was his fiancee, Myrtle Keele, from Groveland, Bingham County, Idaho. They came to Salt Lake for the purpose of being married in the Temple. This was done in November 1929. Groveland is a small farming area about four miles west of the town of Blackfoot and north of the Arco Highway. It is on the west side of the Snake River.

Sometime after I finished the third grade we found it necessary to move. This move was made to a home on the east side of Second West (later changed to Third West) in about the 1230 block. There was one other house in the block on that side of Second West. The Surplus Canal ran down Thirteenth South and the boy that delivered the paper every had a brown dog that came long with him, and I remember watching him play with the dog by throwing him into the water to watch the dog swim to shore. I guess that the dog had about as much fun as he did. The Surplus Canal was later covered to make an underground sewer line, and it ran under the street.

My sisters and I wanted a little brother to play with and Mother indicated to us that if we would pray for a little brother that we would be blessed with one. With that assurance we began to pray for a little brother. He arrived in the family on the sixth of October, 1930, and was given the name of James Ronald. I was then nine years old and didn‘t realize at that time that by the time he got to be a ten year old boy that I would no longer be interested in the kind of games that a ten year old likes to play. In the fall of 1930 I was again enrolled in school. I was in the fourth grade at the time, and we were then living in a different school area. The school to which I was assigned was the Jefferson School, which was located on the east side of West Temple Street in about the 1000 South block. The school was a one story building made out of gray cement. Sometimes, in going to and from school, we would walk along the railroad tracks behind a brick yard. Years later when I tried to find this area I was unable to do so as the street had been built up and the brick yard was no longer there. The school was still there though. I became acquainted with a couple of boys my age and started going to primary with them.

One afternoon in the spring I was outside when an automobile drove up and stopped in front of our home. A couple men got out and began running through the vacant lot behind our home. A couple policemen were right behind them. When the men wouldn‘t stop one of the policemen shot one of the men in the leg. They then arrested the two men. A young man living across the street was called over and directed to take the captive‘s car down to the police station. He drove off with it while the police drove off with their captives. I never did find out why they were arrested, nor would it make any difference to me if I knew, but seeing an arrest made at that time made quite an impression on my mind.

The last six weeks of school while I was in the fourth grade gave Father and Mother some great anxiety. My sister Elma was in the third grade and my sister Laurel was in the first grade. Laurel developed rheumatic heart trouble along with a heart leak. It was impossible for a ten year old boy to realize the seriousness of the disease, but I do remember men coming to our home and in the authority of the Holy Melchizedek Priesthood giving her blessings. I also remember the doctor coming to our home a couple times a day to see her. At this time Mother‘s brother George Francis Hill and his wife Georgia Neville Hill lived in Salt Lake along with their family, which at that time consisted of a daughter Lila and a son Wallace. These two children were the only cousins older than I on my mother‘s side of the family. At time Uncle George and Aunt Georgia would come get us kids so as to give Mother as much rest as possible. It was during one of these times when Uncle George and Aunt Georgia were driving with us that they wanted to see a car that had been buried in a mud slide on a road north of Salt Lake. There were quite a few branches off the trees in Salt Lake due to the storm I remember that when we arrived at the scene of the car that a power shovel was working there, and by this time they had removed enough of the mud so that the top of the car was then visible. I understand that the people in the car left it and ran when it became stuck and they saw that it was going to be buried.

I didn‘t realize at that time the miracle that took place in our home that spring until years later when Mother mentioned that the elders had been called in to give Laurel a blessing and in the blessing promised that if it was the Lord‘s will that she would begin improving from that time on. The doctor also came that evening and gave her what he said was an adult dose of digitalis because he said he didn‘t dare give her any more. He had apparently given up hope for her because he told Father and Mother that he would be around the next morning to see if she was still alive.

While we still lived on Eighth West I had got a pair of roller skates one winter for Christmas and learned to roller skate. Another time I got a hand sleight for Christmas. I don‘t recall just which winter this happened, but there was a slide built in Liberty Park and water was run down it and frozen so that it made a good slide for boys and their hand sleighs to coast down. One time Father took me over to it and I took my sleigh up to the top of it. It came my turn to go down and so I put my sleight on it and got on. It went down all right as there were sides built on it and it couldn‘t get off, but as soon as the sleight got to the bottom it made a quick turn to the left and stopped. I rolled off and on my back went sliding down the ice. The boy that was following me said he tried to turn his sleight to miss me but he was unable to do so. He ran into my feet and gave me quite a sore ankle for a while.

Another time I went with Father up on the hill where Uncle George lived. The boys in that area were accustomed to take their sleighs up the hill and come down to the corner and then turn south and go another block past my uncle‘s place. I tried to do that with my sleight, but when I got to the street and tried to turn I just couldn‘t do so. I went across that street and just about started down the hill to the west when I twisted my body around a certain way and my sleigh skidded to a stop If I had gone down the other hill I don‘t think that I could have stopped it before I ran onto one of the busy streets of the city The hill was a pretty steep hill.

Father worked for several years at the Salt Lake shops of J. I. Case Threshing Machine Company. The company made and sold farm machinery. On several occasions my sister Elma and I would walk to town and walk home with Father. There have even been times when we took his lunch to him when Mother couldn‘t have it ready when he left in the morning. Father was a mechanic and his work was in the shop. Working there it the shop, it was Father‘s job to set up and repair machinery for the customers. Father spent most of every summer repairing and setting up combines, and later when tractors became more common he also had the responsibility of keeping them running also. Most of the time in the summer Father was away from home, and most of this time he was in Idaho and a large part of that time was spent in the Rexburg area working on the dry farms east and north of Rexburg. He became acquainted with many of the dry farmers in that area, and especially the ones that had J. I. Case equipment.

In the year 1929 was the beginning of what later became known as the great depression. It started with a crash in the stock market and was to eventually affect the whole nation. Similar occurrences were happening in the rest of the world. About the time that this great depression got to the west was the time that my sister Laurel was in bed with her heart trouble. My father was caught in a reduction in force and he was left without work.

About every summer while Father was away from home and we children were out os school, Mother would take us to Idaho. We spent some time at my Grandmother Ransom‘s place. I can barely remember my Grandfather James Rowley Ransom because he was called home to our Heavenly Father when I was five years old. My father‘s oldest brother, James Austin Ransom, was now the provider for my grandmother and himself. He never did get married so he didn‘t have a family to worry about. I really believe that in his later years he regretted not being sealed to somebody because he recognized that this was the way to an Eternal Increase. They lived on a dry farm in the hills north of Preston, Franklin County Idaho. This dry farm had been homesteaded by my grandfather. He had also purchased some additional land. Also my Uncle Jim had some acreage that he had homesteaded about five miles north of my grandmother‘s. His place was just across the county line in Bannock County. Uncle George Burton and his family lived a little ways up the hill from Grandma and one of his sons lived about the same distance down the hill from Grandma. These three homes were the only homes on that street. There was no electricity here but Grandma did have water in her home that came in by the power of gravity from a spring up the hill. This same spring was a source of water for the corral where some of my uncle‘s horses and cows were much of the time.

The corral was L-shaped with a narrow strip north of the house were the garage and the granary, There was a footpath leading west from the house to the other part of the corral. To the west of the corral was the barn with one part for horse stalls and another section contained stanchions in which the cows were put for milking and where they were left for the night. To the north of the corral was quite a large field that was used to stack the hay that couldn‘t be put in the barn. In the center of this field was the chicken coop, but the chickens were not kept confined, and eggs could be found anywhere around the farmyard, with the barn being a favorite spot in which to find eggs. Also in the corner of this field with the door opening to the east and on the street was a large farm shop. My grandfather must have been a pretty good blacksmith. It seems as if my uncle didn‘t do very much in the way of blacksmithing, but my father had learned and I became pretty good at it being around my father.

At other times we would go to visit my grandfather and grandmother David and Emma Flora Wheeler Hill. They, too, lived on a farm, but it was entirely different from the one where my Grandmother Ransom lived. This place was southwest of Blackfoot, Bingham County, Idaho, and in relatively flat country. To the west of Grandpa‘s farm was a large irrigation canal, and just west of it was a country road.

Across the road was what was known as the Ferry Butte. This was the only hill of any size around. To the south of Grandpa‘s was a fairly good country road named the Truchot (true shot) Road. It received its name from a family of Indians (Native Americans) by the name of Truchot that lived just across the road from Grandpa. These were the only neighbors for a mile or two. It was surely a different situation that being in the city and having neighbors just across the fence on both sides of us.

Grandpa‘s home was a three room home. My grandmother, Ellen Lavender Wheeler, had the one room on the south and with a separate entrance, where she made her home. My grandfather‘s family at that time consisted of my Uncle Merlin Gerald Hill, whose birthday was the 31 of May, 1915, making him just about six years older than me. Also living there was his next oldest brother, Clarence Wheeler Hill, until he was married. Also my mother‘s oldest brother, David Earl Hill and his daughter Elvina. Uncle Earl had married my father‘s sister, Elvina Ransom, on the second of July, 1920, and their daughter Elvina Hill was born the eighteenth day of April, 1921, making her my double cousin and just one month and four days younger than me. On the twenty-sixth of April, 1921, my Aunt Elvina received notification that her mission on this earth was completed and she was taken to the next sphere of existence. My Uncle Earl and his daughter Elvina Hill then moved in with Grandpa and Grandma Hill so that Elvina could be well taken care of.

Uncle Merlin had a riding pony and I remember riding it with him. One evening we were going to get the cows because it was then milking time. They were feeding around the lower edge of the butte. When we arrived at the canal he told me to lift my feet so as not get them wet. I lifted one foot and just about slid off the horse My Uncle Merlin held me on the horse and after that we were all right.

Every spring large flocks of sheep would be herded around the Ferry Butte and east along the Truchot Road to their summer range in the mountains. Each flock would have several men to herd them where they were supposed to go and be followed by a canvas covered wagon. That was used as the home for the shepherds, pulled by a team of two horses. Every fall they would go the other way to get to their winter ranges. Many of them would use the Ferry Butte as a resting place for a few days. At these times from my Grandpa Hill‘s place we could see some flocks of sheep grazing on the hillside, and at nights we could see campfires around each of the camps.

It appears as if my father always knew where we were when we were on vacation. One time while we were visiting with Grandpa and Grandma Hill, Father was able to visit us for a few days.

One of these times while he was visiting us while we were at my Grandpa and Grandma Hill‘s place, he walked up the side of the Ferry Butte for some reason. Whether he went up to one of the sheep camps I don‘t know, but it really doesn‘t make any difference. As Father was descending the side of the butte, but while he was still too far away to identify, my sister Elma started out to meet him. Uncle Clarence, who took it upon himself to be the family buffoon, said to her, “You better watch out–that may be a si-wash.” Elma was then fearful and didn‘t go to meet him. When he got down she ran up to him and said, “Oh, Daddy, I didn‘t know that Indian coming was you.”

Days of prosperity came to an end and Father was left without a job. Because of this, and also thinking that it might be a benefit to my sister Laurel, he went to Idaho and came back driving the car of my Uncle James Austin Ransom. This was in June of 1931 and I had just finished the fourth grade at Jefferson School. Father loaded his family, which consisted of Mother and six children, in the car and started for Idaho. As Mother had never been close to Great Salt Lake, Father drove out to the lake to let her see it before we headed for Idaho.

I suspect that Father intended to go back to farming in the vicinity of Grandfather Ransom‘s old homestead, where my grandmother and Uncle Jim resided. Almost immediately after the family was settled, Father went to Rexburg where he was well known as a good mechanic and obtained some temporary work with some of the dry farmers in that area in preparing the machinery for the coming harvest, which was to begin in July. We children were at home there on the farm riding one of my Uncle Jim‘s horses. We would sometimes play with my cousin, Lincoln Burton, who was about my age. He lived up the hill about half a mile. Some of the time we would be up there and Uncle George and Aunt Mary Ransom Burton‘s place. Lincoln was the youngest child in the family. Just older that he was a brother Willis, and then a girl, Mildred. Both Willis and Mildred were older that I was and so we didn‘t associate with them as much as we did Lincoln. Willis and Lincoln both had horses to ride that they had broken themselves.

We also had chores to do around the place. We would feed the chickens and gather the eggs and any other chore that my uncle and mother thought we could do. We also walked a distance of two or three miles daily down to the main road to get the mail. In the evening we would round up the cows and get them in the corral preparatory to my Uncle Jim putting them in the barn and milking them. After milking, the milk would be separated. The skim milks would be fed to the pigs and calves, while the cream would be put in a milk can to be sold.

Here was a life different from what we had been accustomed to. There was no electricity here and so Mother had to do all the washing by hand. There was an old hand crank telephone, and when it would start to ring everybody would stop talking and mentally count the rings to see if the call was intended for that house or some other.

There were many benefits of the country life. We had fresh home produced eggs and milk. We also enjoyed homemade butter made with a dash churn.

Along come hay harvest time and Uncle Jim cut the hay and prepared it for drying. When it was dry enough to stack I became involved. We would go out in the field on a hay rack, with Uncle Jim, which was pulled by two horses. While Uncle Jim pitched the hay on the wagon we would tramp it down. When the wagon was loaded Uncle Jim would climb up on top of the hay with Elma and I and drive the horses in and up to the front of the barn. Here a Jackson fork would come down and pick up a fork full of hay. The Jackson fork was pulled up to the rafter along the top of the barn and along the rafter by a steel cable attached to a horse. I was the boy that rode the horse in doing this. There was one man in the barn on top of the hay to yell when it had reached the place where he wanted it. It was my job just as soon as the man yelled to turn the horse around and get ready to take up the next load. The man on the wagon had a rope that went up to the rafter of the barn and through a pulley to the Jackson fork. By means of this rope he was able to trip the fork and unload the hay and then he would pull the fork back off the end of the track. By the tension he put on the rope he could control it‘s rate of descent. When the fork came down again he would load it with hay and yell for me to take it away, and the process would start all over again. When the hay was all unloaded from the wagon we would go back for another load.

When the barn was full of hay there was still more hay to haul and so it had to be stacked outside. This time a derrick was used. The derrick was built with a base about ten feet square with an upright in the center. This upright was about twelve or fifteen feet high with braces to each corner of the base. On top of this upright was a beam. The beam was about fifty or sixty feet long, and there were two pulleys on it, one near the upright and other at the end. This beam was put on the upright about ten feet from the large end of the beam. A chain was attached to the large end of the beam and anchored around the bottom of the upright, holding the tip of the beam about thirty or forty feet in the air. A steel cable was fastened to the top of the beam at each end and held up in the area of the upright by a frame that had been built especially for that purpose, thereby giving it some additional support. Also another steel cable was threaded in the two pulleys on the underside of the beam. The end of the cable that was near the tip of the beam was connected to the Jackson fork while the other end went through the pulley near the upright and down to a pulley that was anchored on the frame of the derrick. The end of the cable that was thus threaded was then fastened to a single tree to which the horse was hitched. In this way the Jackson fork could be pulled up by the horse and also let down when the horse came back. The fork was first raised and lowered on the wagon load of hay, being guided into its location by the one running the trip rope. When he gets the tines of the fork into the hay and it is loaded as he desires it to be, he makes it known to the derrick boy. The forkful of hay is then raised high enough to break loose from the wagon load of hay. It is then either raised or lowered just enough to swing freely above the stack. Here the hay is swung around by the stacker until it is in position and then it is tripped and the derrick, suddenly relieved of its weight, has a tendency to jump. The man on the wagon keeps the rope tight, but even with this control the fork swings momentarily out of control. If the rope is not held tight the fork could swing into the man on the stack. Even with that control there are times when the man on the stack is hit by the fork. When the fork is tripped the man on the stack falls down thereby being out of the way of the fork if it decides to swing in his direction. In a few seconds the man on the wagon is able to pull the fork back in his direction in order to get another forkful. The man on the stack will at this time get up and, if necessary, move some of the hay around with a pitch fork and be ready for the next forkful when it is raised up. With the right kind of man on the stack and a good man operating the fork very little stacking is required. In later years I learned to stack hay using a Jackson fork and got real good at it.

Our stay in this location wasn‘t as long as expected. On the twenty-first of July in 1931 my Grandmother Hill departed from this life. I remember mother being called to the phone and when she hung it up she was crying. Within a day or two Uncle Jim left to take Mother up to her father‘s home where she could help make preparations for the burial and attend the funeral. Now there was my Grandfather Hill left with a sixteen year old son and my Uncle Earl with a ten year old daughter. They needed a person to take the place of a mother and grandmother for these two children. In a few days Mother returned and we began making preparations for another move.

The three room house of my Grandfather Hill was now located about a mile and a half east of where it had previously been. My Great Grandmother Wheeler was by this time departed out of this life and so all of the three room house was now occupied by my grandfather and his family. This house was now located on a twenty acre lot which my grandfather had obtained, and he was leasing another twenty acres just west of this place, giving him a total of forty acres. The closest neighbor that Grandpa had was an Indian (Native American) family that lived one quarter of a mile to the west.

The day we arrived at Grandpa Hill‘s place was a warm summer day. We arrived in the early afternoon. When we arrived there my cousin Elvina was overjoyed to see us. She was so excited about us being there that she could hardly wait to take Elma and me out in the field to see Uncle Merlin, who was irrigating in the far corner of the field. We went out past the barn and jumped the irrigation ditch that was just behind the barn. There was a second irrigation ditch to cross about twenty-five or thirty yards beyond this one. About another twenty five yards we came to another stream. This is the place where we met Uncle Merlin Hill. My Uncle Harvey Ray Hill lived a couple miles away in a small one room shanty. The family consisted of his wife, Verna and three boys. Frank, as he became known to us, was the oldest, although he was a year or more younger than me. Lloyd came next and then Gordon. They spent a lot of time at Grandpa‘s place and I associated with them a lot. Here we spent the rest of the summer in the sunshine, just having a good time. We were able to get acquainted with horseback riding all over again, but this time it was on a relatively flat land instead of in the hills. There were large tracts of vacant ground around where Grandpa‘s cows were allowed to graze in the daytime, and it became our duty to get them back home at milking time in the evening.

The culinary water here was from an open well behind the house. The well was about four feet square and sixty feet deep. The well curbing extended about four or four and a half feet above the ground to keep people and animals from falling in it. On two opposite corners uprights rose higher than the rest of the curb. A cross piece was fastened to these with a pulley anchored in the center. Through this pulley was a one inch rope. On one end of the rope, but later on both ends, was fastened a pail made out of a five gallon milk can that had been cut off around the rim and a bail put on it. When a person let the bucket down in the well and then brought it up again he had about three or four gallons of water that had been kept cold by going sixty feet underground. On the outside of the east side of the well curb was a wooden box with a pipe fastened to it, and by this method the cows and horses were watered with allowing them access to the near proximity of the well.

Also Grandpa used this well as a refrigerator by tying a gallon bottle of milk on a long string and lowering it to a level just above the water. Butter was kept cool in a similar manner in another corner of the well. At one time the string holding the gallon of milk broke and the milk fell down the well. It was sometime later, when they were cleaning out the well, and maybe going a little bit deeper with it, that my Uncle Merlin was down the well and doing the work down there while Grandpa and Uncle Earl were up on top. And while he was down there he retrieved the bottle of milk, still unbroken.

Once again Father knew just where to find us. When he had finished what he was able to do in the area of Rexburg he found his way to where we were. Here was to be our home, and within a few days Father left driving my Grandfather‘s Model T Ford pickup headed toward Salt Lake to get our furniture. Father‘s brother, Thomas Austin Ransom lived a few miles from Preston, Idaho, on a small farm, and Father stopped there on his way down to Salt Lake. When Father returned with the furniture it was in Uncle Tom‘s truck. Father had brought all the furniture that was worth bringing. I had broken the runner on my hand sleigh somehow and it hadn‘t yet been welded, and so it was probably sent to the graveyard of all useless toys. I also had a little red wagon that found its way to our new home. Mother had a washing machine that was brought up with the load of furniture. This was later converted to run off of an old “Star” car that Father obtained for that purpose.

Father and Mother had also acquired a Crosely radio that we had used for several years in Salt Lake. The cabinet of this radio was about two feet long by one foot. The height was about nine inches. The exterior was a rough gold finish. The top would lift off to reveal the tubes. The speaker was external and usually was on the top of the radio. It was about eight or ten inches across. This radio was going to be useless to us without any electricity and so Father left it with Uncle Tom for him and his family to use. After the furniture was unloaded, Father took the truck back to Uncle Tom and returned again in Grandpa‘s Model T Ford pickup.

In addition to farming, Grandpa Hill also picked up milk from the farmers between there and Blackfoot, where it was sold to the Kraft Cheese Company. He had a route that took him west as far as the Ferry Butte, and then north across the Blackfoot River, and from there he followed a winding road up what was known as “Between the Rivers” to the cheese factory in Blackfoot. These two rivers were the Blackfoot River, which flowed southwest and passed about a mile and a half south of Blackfoot, and the Snake River, which had a southwesterly direction, but passed west of Blackfoot possibly two miles. The Blackfoot River emptied into the Snake River about eight miles to the southwest of Blackfoot and maybe half a mile north of the Ferry Butte.

The Ferry Butte had received its name because just west of it there was a ferry across the Snake River. At this time there had been a dam constructed at American Falls to create the American Falls Reservoir, and the bridge that had been across the river at a little place called Tilden had been moved upstream and put across the river just about fifty or a hundred feet north of the ferry, and so now there was a pretty good road across the river at this point. There was a good country road winding up between the rivers with farms on both sides of it. Also there were a lot of trees growing along the rivers so that they couldn‘t be seen from the road except in a place or two. Grandfather used a team of gray horses hitched to a rubber tired wagon to pick up the milk. He hauled it in ten gallon (some of it was in five gallon) cans. Milk weights 8.6 pounds per gallon, and the empty can weighted about 25 pounds, making a total of about 110 pounds for a full can of milk. Every morning Grandfather would take care of the horses by giving them their ration of oats, and while they were eating he would harness them. After this the cows were milked. There were four of rive cows that needed to be milked twice a day. The milk was then strained into one of the cans through a dish towel or some other cloth to take the dirt out of it. Later it became necessary to use a milk strainer with cotton filters that fit in the bottom to strain the milk through. After the cows were milked and a day‘s supply of milk was brought to the house, breakfast was eaten. What milk wasn‘t consumed at breakfast would be hung down the well to keep cool, and then Grandpa would go hitch the team of horses to the wagon and start out on his milk route. By this time of morning his customers would have completed their milking, but there have been times when he had to wait a little while for the milking to be done, and he has even been known to help complete the milking of some of his customers‘ cows.

Grandpa Hill was a man of 63 years of age and had been a hard working man all of his life. He was a High Priest and as active as conditions would allow. The branch of the Church that we belonged to at that time was the Riverton Branch, which was about thee miles north of the Truchot Road on which Grandpa‘s house was situated. It was also on the road where Grandpa passed it every day in hauling milk. The building was a red brick building with a steep roof that had been built for a two room country school house. When it was abandoned as a school the Church acquired it to hold their meetings in. This was the only building, except houses and farm buildings, that was in the community or Riverton. The floor was up a flight of stairs, which made a structure that had a basement without going very deep into the earth. There had been class rooms built down the basement, and a coal and wood furnace was in the back of the basement with which to heat the building. At this time Father had worn out his Sunday suit and hadn‘t yet got a new one, so he didn‘t go to Sunday School.

However, we went with Grandpa Hill. It was a common occurrence to hitch up the horses on a Sunday morning and most of the family getting on the wagon to go to Sunday School. The building had been obtained from the school district and had now become the official meeting place of the Riverton Branch. The Branch President was named J. L. Robertson and he had several boys.

At times one or more of us would be privileged to go to town with Grandpa on his milk route and we became quite familiar with the manager of the cheese factory. We were always treated with respect when we went there. The milk was unloaded in a small room at the southwest corner of the building. Grandpa would get a can of milk and give it to the manager through the window and he would empty it in a vat that was designed for that purpose. When all the milk from that particular customer was emptied he would weight the milk and then empty the vat into a larger one. Then the next customer‘s milk would be unloaded. When all the milk was unloaded, Grandpa would tie up the horses and go around to the other door on the north side of the building and go in it. There was quite a large room with large vats in which the cheese was being made and large rotors were turning in each vat, and while they turned they went from one end of the vat to the other. Grandpa would get the butter and cheese that his customers had ordered. The door to this section of the building had a screen door on it, and the top half of the screen door was electric. It is the only electric screen door that I have seen. A lot of flies would try to get through it, but none of them would make it, and there were a lot laying dead on both sides of this door. Also when I wasn‘t thinking and would reach up to open the door, I would get a shock that was enough to kill a fly but not enough to hurt a person. Grandpa would then drive under a large tank and there load up the cans of some of his customers with whey that they used to feed their pigs.

Uncle Earl also hauled milk. He had a Chevrolet truck and would pick up milk and haul it to the Upper Snake River Dairyman‘s Association at Idaho Falls. His route included the area that Grandpa‘s route included, but different customers. At times we were able to ride with him to Idaho Falls. Grandpa said that he left his job of hauling milk once before and had turned his route over to somebody else, but the other man lost so many customers to the Upper Snake River Dairyman‘s Association that the manager of Kraft came out and got Grandpa to take the route again. Grandpa had a personality about him that made everybody like him. In fact, he would even buy some things for some of the people that were not related to his milk hauling. He would even buy some things for people who were not sending milk with him.

When school started in the autumn of 1931 it was quite a different experience than I had ever known. This time the school was a two room country school. This year there was a young man and his wife teaching school with the young woman teaching grades one through four and the man teaching grades five through eight. The high school students from that area would walk up to the highway and catch the school bus and go into Blackfoot to high school. I was in the fifth grade this year. The teachers thought that it would be advisable for Laurel to take the first grade over again as she had missed so much of it the spring before, but Mother insisted that she be put in the second grade and try it. She was able to complete the second grade, but she did so poorly in the rest of her school years that Mother always did wish that she had let Laurel take the first grade over again. When my brother finished the first grade in Blackfoot and the school wanted to promote him to the second grade, Mother insisted that he take the first grade over again because he had done so poorly.

The school was a gray wooden building with the door opening to the west. Inside the door was the entrance room, and just inside this was two sets of stairs, one going up to the class rooms and the other going down to the basement. The two school rooms were separated by a folding panel that could be folded back to make one large room, which happened every time that there was a PTA meeting. On each side of the stairway was a room. One room was a kitchen and the other a bedroom where the school teachers lived. Down in the basement was a furnace that was used to heat the building, and the teacher served as both the teacher and the janitor. The school was built on the west end of a five acre lot. There was a sidewalk leading to the gate at the street. Between the school and the street (so named “Blackhawk Road” in honor of a family of Indians by the name of Blackhawk that lived adjacent to the street) was a well, but, unlike Grandpa;‘s well, this one had a hand pump on it. This well supplied water for everybody there at the school. Inside the door was a table and each of us were required to bring a cup from home and leave it on that table so that we could get a drink of water at recess and noon hour without having to use a cup that somebody else drank out of. The instructors would let us out for recess and noon hour, and when they were done they would come out and ring a hand bell.

In about the middle of the lot was a wooden barn. This barn had one story and the opening to the south. There was room in it for eight horses. Some of the students lived far enough away from the school that they rode horses every day to and from school. We were some of the closest to the school, being only three quarters of a mile away, and so we got to walk most every day. Some of the time we could play along the road with other students that were going the same way. Because this was a country school on the Fort Hall Indian Reservation there were quite a number of Indians going to it and we would play with the Indian children as well as the white children. Some of the Indians became real good friends of mine.

In a locality such as we were living in, the church house and the school house were the social centers. The church house was about three miles away, and many of our neighbors were not members of the Church, and so the school house became the social center for many of our activities. The teachers formed a small harmonica band that met after school hours and I was a member of it. These extra curricular activities were not entirely for the benefit of the students, and we needed to form some of the entertainment at PTA meetings. Every year many of the students were in a school play that occurred sometime about the middle of the school year. Every year that I went to this school I was in a play.

When we arrived at the school on the night of the PTA meeting the folding doors were opened, making a large room out of the two regular class rooms. Chairs were set up and a makeshift stage was in the south end of the room. There was no electricity here and so light had to be supplied by gas lights that were on the ends of wires hanging from the ceiling. Our church house also had the same kind of lighting for Sacrament meetings.

School was arranged in Idaho so that we had completed the required days in school by the last week in May, while in Salt Lake City school lasted into June. This was done by eliminating the spring vacation that we had in Salt Lake. In this rural district of Idaho where everybody were farmers there was enough to keep the young people busy. The summer was spent in the typical manner of the country boy. There was Grandpa‘s cows to be watched during the days so that they didn‘t get into fields where they shouldn‘t be and, of course, those fields contained the greenest feed. I was able to spend much of the summer on the back of Uncle Merlin‘s horse. The horse didn‘t like to be caught, so by the time that the horse was caught, the ride was well earned. Some of the time, while riding the horse, I would meet one or more of the friends that I had made at school.

The next school year I was in the sixth grade. The same two teachers were employed by the school, so I had the same instructor that I had the year before. His name was Dan Davis. His wife would help out in the after school activities and in directing the plays that were prepared for PTA, and so I came under her direction some of the time. Once or twice during the school year that man teacher would take all the male students and discuss with us some things pertaining to masculine activities. At this same time the woman would take all the female students in the other room.

On the fourteenth day of March, 1933, I turned twelve years of age. On the seventh day of May of that year I was ordained a Deacon in the Aaronic Priesthood in the Riverton Branch of the Blackfoot Idaho Stake. My father wasn‘t at meeting that day and so my Uncle Harvey Ray Hill was asked to ordain me. Not long after this the branch president made a visit to our home and announced that a boy scout troop was being organized and invited me to join. Father paid the required fifty cents dues and I became a scout. The scout meetings would be held in conjunction with mutual on Tuesday evenings. It was also agreed that I would ride my uncle‘s horse to scout meeting, and in doing so I would meet the scoutmaster on my way and we would go together.

Before the first meeting of the scouts was to take place, one of my school mates decided that he wanted to join the scouts also. He had a brother that was then just about seventeen years of age that also became interested in scouting, and after going to scout meetings a few times he became assistant scout leader.

The night of the first scout meeting arrived and my school mate rode his horse over to our house, and together we started for meeting. We were so anxious to get to it that we left home quite a lot earlier than necessary and so, instead of meeting the scout master at the appointed place, we rode up to his home, arriving there before he had finished eating supper. When he was ready to go he got his horse and the three of us went to mutual and scout meeting together.

There was quite a lot of activity in mutual that year, and I enjoyed it while we were living in that branch. There were about a dozen scouts as near as I can remember, and most of them were deacons, so that gave us about a full quorum of deacons in the branch. During the summer there were some Saturday afternoon activities for the mutual age group, and in some of these activities we were to be taught to dance. This is the first time that I can recall doing a dance called the Virginia Reel, although while attending school in the fourth grade in Salt Lake City we had some lessons in dancing and some social activity in that respect. Most of the dancing done at that time was the Waltz.

The winter of 1932 had been perhaps the coldest winter that I have ever seen and also with the most snow. The thermometer registered 45 degrees below zero Farenheit. That is 43 degrees below zero Centigrade of Celsius. Grandpa had obtained some lumber and a room had been added to the west side of the room farthest toward the street. This added room became the kitchen. Grandpa was still picking up milk, which was processed into cheese and butter. In the summer he would drive his team of horses and a wagon, and in the winter he would drive his team pulling a bob sleigh. This was a sleigh composed of a tandem set of runner, with two coupled together with a short chain and a tongue on the front set, which went between the horses. A wagon box was put on with one end on the front set of runners and the other end on the rear set of runners

December of 1932 was real cold with a lot of snow. This is the only year that I can remember when the snow piled up in drifts high enough to require trenches being dug around the barn to keep the cows from walking on it and also steps being dug down to the doors of the barn for the cows and horses to get in and out of the barn.

During this cold month of December, on the twenty first day of December, 1932, my youngest sister was born. She was born during the night while I was sleeping. I found out later that Grandpa and Father had driven the team and sleigh to the highway, a distance of a mile and a half, and sent for the doctor. I never did find out how they notified the doctor as there were no telephones anywhere around My sister was given the name Ema Vee.

When the snow melted in the spring the water table rose so that it was only about twenty feet down to the water in Grandpa‘s well, instead of an average sixty feet.

The fall of 1933 found me in the seventh grade. The man and wife who had taught me for the previous two years had moved on to other employment, and another man by the name of H. F. Fait was teaching the upper four grades, and he and his wife were living at the school. The lower four grades were being taught that year by a young woman whose husband had rented sixty acres of ground, and their house was one half mile west of where we were living. Their name was Wilcox. He had built a home there and dug an open well for their culinary water. The teacher that I had that year was well trained in English and Math, and it is this year that I really took an interest in both of these subjects.

One of these summers while Father was at work repairing farm machinery he was able to purchase a used 1926 Model T Ford pickup from one of the farmers. This pickup was the one that I obtained my early driving experience with and also the earliest mechanical training that I received.

One fall, Father obtained a “Star” coupe, and with a system of belts and pulley, connected the power train of this car to take the place of the electric motor that was used to run Mother‘s washing machine. It was left outside, and the water needed to be heated on the kitchen stove and carried out to it. Most of the time the water was heated with wood, although at times coal was available, and at other times when we were short of fuel we would need to gather sage brush to heat the water. The ironing was done with irons that were heated on the stove and interchanged so that one was in use while the others were heating.

After I started school in September 1933 I found it quite a lot different than the school had been before. I don‘t know if the teacher made the difference or if I was at an age when I begin to learn faster, but this was the year when arithmetic started to gain my interest although I had previously learned the multiplication tables and had learned to add, subtract, multiply and divide. I also acquired an interest in English. I suspect that the school teacher that I had that year had a lot of influence on me learning to like these subjects, as he was good in both English and Mathematics. I also acquired a liking for good poetry somewhere along the way, although I didn‘t realize it until later.

For the three years that I was in this school I was in the grade with the most students. There was one student in the grade ahead of me. The teachers at this time were given a little more freedom in teaching than they had later on, and because of these two conditions, we were taught a lot at the next higher grade level. A few years later one of my high school instructors said that the students that had attended country schools during these depression years were better educated than the students attending city schools because the teachers didn‘t have as many students and had more time to spend with each student in his country school. The teachers would teach one class, and when it was time to go to the next class they would step over to the next row and teach it. The other students in the room would study during the time that the teacher was teaching other grades. When he would go over to the last grade and finished teaching that grade he would move back to the first row and start on the next subject.

A change had already begun to take place in the nation and the world. With the presidential election of November 1932 came the promise of a Democrat for president, where the last several times before there was a Republican in the White House. This new president had devised several ways in his campaign to stimulate the economy and reduce the unemployment. He took office as president in March 1933. With this new administration came some work projects designed to aid the needy and Father was one of these. A person was given work to do so that he could earn forty dollars per month to sustain himself and family. Also alcoholic drinks were legalized to try to stimulate the economic growth of the country. Because my parents and grandparents were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and were active in the religion, they had been taught the Lord‘s law of health as given in what is known as the Word of Wisdom. Perhaps because of this teaching that I have never been bothered with a desire to use the things that are mentioned in the Word of Wisdom as being undesirable. My Uncle David Earl Hill did, however, have a Word of Wisdom problem in that he used tobacco and coffee that he could never seem to overcome

At this time a plan was being formalized to discontinue the country schools and bus the students to town to a more central location, namely city schools. This came about the summer that I spent between the seventh and eighth grades. In Blackfoot there were two grade schools and one Catholic School that taught students of that age. There was also a Junior High School that handled the students in the seventh and eighth grades and also one high school. Also during this summer another event occurred that changed our living conditions. Both my grandfather, David Hill, and my Uncle, David Earl Hill, were married for the second time. They both went to Logan, Utah to the Temple to get married. Uncle Earl and his new bride and his daughter moved in one room of the house and left the rest of us in three rooms.

Shortly after this we moved to a location about a mile south of Blackfoot on the east side of the highway. We had the use of a chicken coop for some chickens that we purchased and an area to keep a pig that we had, and also a place in the barn for a milk cow that Father had obtained from my Uncle Clarence. The care of this milk cow became my responsibility, and over the next year or two she got to favor me and would let me milk her, but if anybody else tried to milk her she gave them a rough time. At this time all the milking was done by hand. She gave us enough milk to use and a little bit to sell to the Kraft Cheese Company. Within the past year or two I had obtained an orphaned lamb and had bottle fed it until it was old enough to eat grass, and then I had to take care of it by tying it into locations where it was able to eat grass in the day , and in the evening I brought it in by the house. It was finally killed that fall by some dogs. I also had obtained a setting hen and raised a few chickens which finally became part of Mother‘s flock.

Sometime in the spring of 1934 Grandpa Hill became interested in a lady by the name of Hermina Dorthea Elizabeth Laubenstein, and Uncle Earl became acquainted with a young lady named Dora Gifford. They both took their spouses to Logan where they were married in the Logan Temple. We were all asleep when they arrived, and I recall that the next morning that we were all in the living room when Grandpa brought his bride out of their bedroom and introduced us to our new grandma. It was a little later that we met our new Aunt Dora, as they had taken up residency in the back of the house. There were now three families living in that little four room house. Uncle Earl had a wife and a daughter that was just my age. Grandpa had a wife and a son and also a newly acquired daughter that was just about my age, and Father had a wife and seven children. It wasn‘t long after this that we moved to our home near Blackfoot.

Our church membership records were transferred to the Blackfoot First Ward. There were two wards in the town of Blackfoot at that time and the railroad was the dividing line. We lived just west of the railroad tracks between them and the highway. The ward chapel was a fairly large building and it was quite a long walk to get to it because it was in the northwest section. The second ward chapel was a couple blocks east of the highway more toward the center of town so it would have been closer. On the same block with the Second Ward chapel was the Stake Tabernacle. Just across the street to the north and also on the east side of Shilling Ave. was the high school. During my high school years I attended this high school and also had a seminary class in the basement of the tabernacle.

I joined the quorum of deacons in the First Ward and was able to attend to the activities of a Deacon. I also started to go to the scout meetings there, but something happened which gave me a distinct disinterest in scouting, and I never again did gain my previous interest. Father didn‘t attend very may meetings, but he always had me take his tithing and give it to the bishop. Father was at that time working on relief to make a living for himself and his family.

Every summer Father would go to the area of Rexburg and repair farm machinery for the farmers that he was acquainted with. This way he was able to supplement the forty dollars per month that he obtained by working on relief. The first year that we were in that house, Father received a call from a farmer that he knew in the Malad area wanting some help on his machine, so he went down there. The call originally came to the owner of the house, who was also a storekeeper and gas station attendant that was about four or five hundred feet south of us, and on the other side of the highway. This man also had some cabins, about the same situation that later became known as a motel.

On some of Father‘s journeys to Rexburg I went with him. Also during beet and potato harvest Father would also find a little work in the potatoes while we were at my grandfather‘s place. Now I was able to accompany Father into the beet fields and help top beets. The first fields that we were in Father was showing me how to top beets, and one time he went to throw a beet across the rows that I was topping. Just at that time I went to pick one up with the hook on the end of my knife and it ended up going in the back of his hand just about in the center. After a little first aid we changed the process a little and he went ahead of me until I came to the area that he had cleaned out, and then I went ahead of him a little ways and started topping

When sugar beets were ready to harvest a machine called a beet puller, or beet lifter, was pulled down the row with horses, later tractors, to loosen the ground. A person then walked down a row taking thee rows of beets at one time, and with a knife about fourteen inches long with a three or three and a half inch pick on the end would pick up the beet with the pick, and while holding it with the other hand would take the pick our of it and cut the top off. Nine rows of beets were put in a windrow. The person to the left of the row where the beets would go would throw them over with his left hand. The person to the right of the row would simply drop them at his left side. That left the person taking the next three rows, and he would throw them to the left with his left hand across the previous three rows into the windrow of topped beets. When the beet truck arrived in the field the toppers would now go to load it. The driver of the truck would drive down between two rows of beets, and the people in the field would throw them into the truck. When the truck was loaded he would drive to the sugar factory or a beet dump near the railroad and there they would be unloaded. The unloading was a lot easier than the loading because here a chain or cable would be tied to the beet rack on the truck and the side lifted until all the beets rolled or slid off the rack. Of course the other side of the rack was lowered. The driver would then drive under the rack where the beets were and take the dirt that had fallen off the beets, so that the sugar company would not have to pay for that weight too. The load of beets were first weighed and then the empty truck so that the difference in the weight of these was the weight of the beets that were delivered. The driver of the truck would then drive back to the beet field, where he would have to shovel the dirt out of the truck, and then he would be ready to start loading another load of beets.

When summer of 1934 was over and it came time to start school again I was in the eighth grade. Junior High School in Idaho at that time consisted of the seventh and eighth grades. The school was four blocks north of the high school before mentioned. The country school that I had gone to along with others around had been closed, and the students were bussed into Blackfoot to go to school. My school mates of the last three years were once again going to the same school that I was going to go to, although they were not in the same rooms. Here was the first school that I attended where the students changed classes every period. Within a few days a band was formed and I joined it. I chose to play the bass horn, or tuba, and was one of two players of bass horns. There were several cornets and one or two snare drums in the band. The period of the band came when the class that I was in was studying geography, so I missed out on the study of geography that year with the exception of a few days when the band leader was absent and there was no place for me to go except with the class.

Also that year there was a basket ball team in the school. This team met after school and I tried to get interested in it. This meant walking home alone after dark and I just didn‘t get a thrill out of basketball, so I dropped it after three or four practices.

The next summer I enjoyed playing as most boys of fifteen do. That summer also the disease of scarlet fever was perhaps the worst disease that I had. At that time there wasn‘t any vaccine for it. We had been vaccinated for smallpox during the preceding school year. The one thing that made scarlet fever so bad was that complications most generally followed it, and so it was with each of us children. The complications were different for each of us. I had a very mild case of scarlet fever and was up and outside within a week, but was back in bed again in a few days with an abscess in my throat. If I had still had my tonsils, (I had previously had them out when I was about six years old), it would probably have been enough to end my life. As it was when I took a drink of water it would come back up my nose. I couldn‘t drink or eat anything. The doctor was finally able to lance it, and I guess not any too soon because I was informed later that I was about one day from death. This summer, also, I had an abscess grow on my right arm just about one inch below the elbow but on the top side when my arm was resting on the table.

In September of the year 1935 I enrolled in high school at Blackfoot, Idaho. The bus driver that we had the previous year stopped by our house and inquired how many students from there would be riding on his bus that year because there was apparently a need to justify the existence of running a school bus. The first year of my High School I had s study period as my last hour of the day and the first day of school Mother came and got me from the study period and took me to the doctor‘s office, where the abscess on my arm was lanced. From that day on there has been a scar about an inch long and an eighth of an inch wide where the doctor lanced the abscess.

I had always maintained that I wanted to be a farmer when I reached maturity and so in high school I enrolled in an agriculture class. This class came at the same time that the band was in class and so I didn‘t continue on with band or orchestra. During the first year that we lived at Blackfoot my double cousin died of heart trouble and dropsy. She was then fourteen years of age, as was I. Her home ward was the Riverton Ward in the Blackfoot Stake, but the funeral was held in the First Ward in the Blackfoot Stake. There were a lot of people there. This is the first funeral that I can remember attending.

The winter of 1935-1936 passed, and with it came some more changes in the economy of the country. The depression had begun to come to an end. To help people in getting out of the depression the government was granting loans to help people start to farm. My father got one of these loans, and with it got a team of horses and four milk cows along with some other livestock and also a little bit of machinery. We moved back out to the reservation and rented the twenty acres just west of the forty acres that my grandfather had. Uncle Merlin had grown up by then and left to work in Salt Lake, and so Grandpa only had twenty acres and we rented the west twenty that he had. That became our east twenty, giving us a total of forty acres. This community was known as Gibson, as there was a stop on the railroad by the name of Gibson just about a mile and half east of our home. Uncle Earl was still living there and had rented a twenty acre field just east of where my grandfather‘s place was. The summer of 1936 we started in farming, but got a late start that year. I had chosen an acre of sugar beets for my project that year and would probably have done fairly well on them but by the time that they were planted and coming up the weather had turned colder again and they froze down every night. Finally the field was planted to potatoes, which was a later crop

During this spring planting season, as soon as I would get home from school I would change clothes and go out and take over the driving of the horses. We had a fourteen inch hand plow and pulled it with our team of horses. It required a lot of walking to plow an acre of ground. After a day‘s plowing was done it needed to be harrowed and then cross harrowed for the preservation of moisture. Father was able to get a tractor from a man that he knew in the vicinity of Rexburg to do the plowing with that year, and so that job was done faster than it would have been done with just the horses.

This summer all of us needed to work hard. It was a typical day‘s work to start as early as we could see in the morning and work as late as we could see in the evening, then come in and do the chores by the light of a kerosene lantern. This type of light wasn‘t very bright, but it was all the light that was available to us. In a year or two we were able to obtain a gas lantern which gave off more light than the kerosene lantern, but some of the time when it wasn‘t working properly or we were out of white gasoline we would still have to use the kerosene lantern. Also this was all the light that was available for us to get our school work done by for years remaining, as long as I was in high school.

The tractor that Father had obtained that spring was a model K Case and it was one that was designed for running a threshing machine and so to give it more belt horsepower the motor was mounted crosswise. It is the only Case tractor that I have ever seen that had the motor mounted crosswise. When we were done with it that spring, Father got one of the neighbors to take it home with his truck and Father and I drove Father‘s Model T Ford up there. The man lived at a little place called Hibbard, which was just a few miles out of Rexburg, Madison County, Idaho.

This summer we were able to talk Father into attending church with us. He had obtained a suit when my cousin had died and so he didn‘t have that excuse any longer. During the two years that we had lived up near Blackfoot the Riverton Branch had become a ward, and most of the families that had boys had moved so that when we moved back there were only two or three of us in my age group. I was never again to belong to a quorum until such a time that I held the Melchizedek Priesthood

On the second day of May, 1937, I was ordained a teacher in the Aaronic Priesthood by my father, William Austin Ransom, while we were living in the Riverton Ward, Blackfoot Stake. A short time later the first counselor in the Bishopric, Seth W. Brown, asked me to be his ward teaching companion. There were two pair of ward teachers in that section of the ward. Father was one of the other pair of ward teachers. It was many miles between where the families lived. Also I was the only member of the Aaronic Priesthood living in that section of the ward and so I was given the assignment of collecting fast offerings. After a day‘s work I would get on the back of one of the horses and go around to some of the homes and gather fast offerings and take them to Church and give to the bishop the next Sunday.

On the sixth day of February, 1938, I was ordained a Priest in the Aaronic Priesthood in the Riverton Ward in the Blackfoot Stake. I was ordained by my father, William Austin Ransom. As a Priest, my responsibility as well as my privileges increased. The bishop had been on a mission when he was a young man and also my father had been on a mission when he was younger, and the ward was a new ward that hadn‘t yet had a missionary out, and so they tried to prepare me for a mission for which I would be old enough in a couple of years. I was given every opportunity to perform ordinances and to conduct meetings that the bishop could give to me. The Sunday School had a missionary training class, and as part of their training it was arranged to hold a few meetings around at various member‘s homes. Everybody in the ward was invited to attend these meetings, and more especially the members living in the vicinity where the meeting was to be held. I was given several chances to conduct at these meetings. We would try to hold one every week or so. Also, the year 1939 was the 110 anniversary of the restoration of the Aaronic Priesthood and the stake was holding a special Priesthood Meeting for this purpose. The Riverton Ward was asked to furnish a priest to offer the invocation in this meeting. There were two priests in the ward at that time and I was asked to fulfill this assignment.

In the spring of 1938 I graduated from Seminary. At that time there were three years of Seminary. The Old Testament came one year and the New Testament came the next year. For these two classes the high school gave partial credit for graduation. The third year came Church History, and the school didn‘t give any credit for graduation for this class. I had enough credits, however, that I didn‘t need any Seminary credits to graduate from high school. There was some talk of adding a Book of Mormon class, but that came later and so I missed out on taking that class during my Seminary years. The next year, in the spring of 1939, I graduated from high school.

PART 2

Because I would now have more time to spend working and perhaps because of a little urging from me, father rented an additional 70 acres of Indian land, on an improvement lease. On this type of lease there was no cash rent to pay, but the operator was required to fence the land and get as much of it as possible under cultivation. Forty acres of this land was immediately west of the forty we were living on and the other thirty acres was a half mile west and a half mile north of our home. We started to farm this acreage in the spring of 1940. By this time grandpa had given up his twenty acres and moved to a place called Riverside, which was about four miles west of Blackfoot. He farmed his place in 1936, the year that we started to farm out there. The next year it was rented to a veterinarian in Blackfoot and he and father worked out an arrangement whereby we would farm it fora portion of the crop. In 1938 that twenty acres was sold and a couple of years later it was sold again to an Indian (Native American) family. Our irrigation water ran through this place in two ditches, but we didn‘t have any trouble with the Indians. Some of the Indians were better neighbors than some of the white people. On the eighteenth day of May, 1941, I attended a meeting in Blackfoot where I was presented and accepted to be ordained an Elder and receive the Melchizedek Priesthood. After this meeting I was ordained an Elder by Parely A. Arave, who at that time was a member of the High Council. I obtained a lineage of my priesthood from him.

• Wendell Hill Ransom was ordained an Elder by Parley A. Arave.
• Parley A. Arave was ordained by Joseph Fielding Smith who was the Church Historian and later became an apostle and finally the President of the Church.
• Joseph Fielding Smith was ordained by Brigham Young.
• Brigham Young was ordained by the Prophet Joseph Smith.
• Joseph Smith received his authority under the hands of Peter, James, and John.
• Peter, James, and John were ordained by our Savior, Jesus Christ.
  They also seemed to hold the keys of the Presidency [of the Church] after the death of the Savior, Jesus Christ.

I was now twenty years old, and just about the right age for a mission. I was recommended by the bishop and probably would have gone had world conditions been a little different. In 1939 World War II began in Europe. It caused some concern in the United States and before very much longer a draft act was passed and every man between the ages of twenty one and thirty five needed to register. The plan was to call a group into military training for one year and then call others. But it so happened that before the year was up that they needed to be in longer and so were not released. As yet, the draft didn‘t affect me, but the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints quit sending as many missionaries as they would have liked to have done because of this. At Stake Conference one day I was interviewed by the Stake President and one of the General Authorities, but I didn‘t at that time get a call to serve a mission.

In 1940 the government also began establishing a few schools around to give some training that would be useful in case the young men were ever needed in the service and in 1940 I took a mechanics course that was given in Blackfoot. It met for three hours nightly for a period of three or four months. I had already learned the basics of the mechanical trade from my father and so this class was fairly easy for me. By this time we (our family) had moved up in automobiles and had a 1928 Model A Ford. It was some improvement over the Model T. We didn‘t have to jack up a rear wheel to start it, but it still needed to be cranked. The man that sold it to us also gave us several starters to see if we could get any one to work.

The year 1928 was the first year that the Model A came out and there were not very many built that year. This particular year they were not entirely divorced from the Model T and the clutch was a carryover from the old Model T clutch. As a result of this, the clutch housing would hit against the bendix on the starter damaging it. The mechanics instructor didn‘t know this and neither did my father. However, we found a man later that told us the need of a special starter on these particular cars and so we got one and put it on. It now had an electric starter. On Sunday the seventh day of December, 1941, the United States was attacked by Japan...dropping a bomb on Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands. They also attacked the Philippine Islands at the same time. The next day, the United States declared war on Japan and also the following day the United States declared war on Germany and Italy. This war was to last about five years. The young men that had been drafted for one year now found that the emergency was here and they were now in for the duration of the war.

A welding school was started at Idaho State College (then the southern branch of the University of Idaho) along with some other schools to train in the needed skills. I enrolled in the welding school. There was a great need for welders in some of the shipyards along the coast of Washington and Oregon. This school was at the college and I stayed in a men‘s dormitory there on campus. In addition to being able to attend the welding class we also were given a little spending money. Our home was about twenty miles north of Pocatello, Bannock County, Idaho where the college was located and every week end that I was there I found a ride home.

On the eighteenth day of December, 1941, another boy found his way into the family and was given the name William Leon Ransom. It was the first time that mother had been in the hospital to give birth to one of her children. Father spent most every day with her at the hospital at Blackfoot until he brought them home.

About this time there was legislation pending to extend the draft down to eighteen and up to forty five. This worried me considerably as I had always been afraid of war. If I had to register while I was in Pocatello, I would not have as good a chance for deferment as I would have if I registered in Blackfoot because Blackfoot was an agricultural area and Pocatello was an industrial area, especially the railroad. Because of this fear I prayed hard that something would make it possible for me to register in my home area rather than Pocatello.

As things tend to happen as if guided by destiny, I was grinding away at some welding one day when a spark off the emery wheel lodged in my eye. I went to the doctor there at the college and he was able to remove it with a little needle like instrument that was probably a small magnet. He told me that I would have to stay away from welding for a while or I would lose my sight. I then quit school, but later on I wished that I had taken a leave of absence or else transferred to radio school. This quitting school took me back to Bingham County where I was required to register for the draft on the Sixteenth day of February, 1942, just one month before I turned twenty one.

I kept getting deferred from the military because I was in agriculture. Father‘s health wasn‘t the best at this time and he was suffering from a hernia which made it almost impossible for him to do any cultivating. This probably was a help to me in getting deferred from the service. I was called up a couple of times for preliminary examinations. One time I was sent to a doctor in Blackfoot and the next time I was sent to Pocatello for tests, but I maintained a deferred status.

In looking back at my records I find that I was enrolled in the mechanics class at Blackfoot on the third day of March, 1941, and received a certificate of completion on the twenty third day of May that same year. During this time I took our Model A Ford car and gave it a good overhaul. I also assisted in overhauling a 1935 Chevrolet belonging to a young man who was my partner in this class. Also I started the welding class at Idaho State College, at that time the Southern Branch of the University Of Idaho, on the twenty ninth day of December 1941. One the twenty fourth of December, 1943, I started to work as a carman helper at the Union Pacific railroad in Pocatello and stayed there until the sixth day of March, 1944, at which time I left the rail road and returned to the farm. I had saved up enough money to finance half interest in a used Farmall F20 tractor and some equipment. This wasn‘t an ideal arrangement but it was better than nothing. We got it from a man who had sold his farm several miles south of Pocatello. After work was done on the farm that year, I sold my interest in the tractor and got a 1939 Ford pickup. I was not happy with the pickup all the time that I had it. I went back to the rail road again on the eighteenth day of December in the year 1944 as a carman on the rip track and stayed there until the latter part of March 1945 when I left to again return to farming. Again I had saved up enough money so that I was able to get another tractor. This time I acquired a Model C Case tractor with a two bottom plow.

Father‘s lease was up again that year and he had applied for another three year lease on the ground that we had, but before it came through father decided that he would rather leave the reservation and so we began looking around for another farm. One day we went up northwest of Idaho Falls to an area known as Mud Lake and there we saw some very beautiful land. On our way back home we stopped to visit my Uncle Earl Hill who had quit farming on account of his health and had moved to Kimball, Idaho. This was a community about nine miles north of Blackfoot. While we were there Uncle Earl wanted father to administer to him (give him a blessing) and so I drove over to the bishop‘s place and got him to come over. There would not have been anything unusual about this except that I was now an Elder and I got to assist, which was my first time.

At one time during our search we looked at a farm about a mile or a mile and a half north of Blackfoot. On our way back the pickup acted as if it were out of gasoline and so I walked into Blackfoot and got a gallon of gasoline. It started when we primed the carburetor, but almost immediately it stopped again. I got another gallon of gasoline, but this time I sat on the fender and emptied it in through the carburetor while my brother in law, Curtis Worthen, drove it in to the service station in Blackfoot. The attendant started to fill it with gasoline, but almost immediately gasoline was running out of the tank. The pickup was put up on the rack and we found that the gas line had come out of the gas tank. After I repaired it the pickup would once again run. In the spring of 1945 we moved to a farm of approximately one hundred acres just about one half mile north and one quarter mile east of Springfield, Bingham County, Idaho.

Springfield was another farming community and was about twenty five miles southwest of Blackfoot and on the west side of Snake River. It was about five miles north of the northern end of the American Falls Reservoir. The place that we rented had a large pasture just north of the house and barnyard. In the upper end of this pasture were several springs and it formed quite a stream of water running down through the pasture and out of the west end of it. This stream emptied into the Springfield lake which had a natural outlet to the American Falls Lake, but the water had been diverted into irrigation channels.

Springfield Lake is a bird refuge and every year at hunting season the ducks make this their home. The ducks would also come up the channels although they are protected only on the lake. I never did take up the sport of hunting and I eat very little meat of any kind, so as far as I was concerned the ducks would be safe anywhere. About five miles south of Springfield was the northern end of the American Falls Lake. This lake is a man made lake caused by water backing up behind American Falls Dam. When the dam was put in, the town of American Falls needed to be moved, and [therefore] a grain elevator can be seen rising out of the lake where the town of American Falls used to be. Also this lake covered up the little town of Tilden, where my grandfather at one time had some ground and where my mother was born.

We farmed at Springfield during the summer of 1945 and when winter came I worked in a potato cellar helping to sort potatoes. This was the first time that I had worked on a potato sorter. [However,] one fall a few years back I had worked in the sugar factory at Blackfoot helping to process sugar beets into sugar.

At this time a Temple was in the process of being built on the east bank of Snake River in Idaho Falls, Idaho and it was finally finished. On Sunday, the sixteenth day of September 1945, we went to a pre-dedicatory tour of the Temple. My sister, Elma and her little girl was at this time living with us as her husband was then in the military. We obtained tickets and was able to attend the dedication of the Temple on Sunday, the twenty third day of September, 1945 and heard President George Albert Smith give the dedicatory prayer. Elma was able to go with us to the tour and also to the dedication although she and her husband had not yet been through the Temple.

Again I received notification from the draft board that I was in class 1A. By this time both Germany and Italy and also Japan had surrendered although the United States was still officially at war. Much of my fear of the military service had left me. Some of the young men who had been in the service were being released now and were coming home. Because of this the draft board wouldn‘t consider my continued deferment of as much importance as they had before and to have the opportunity to get [into] what I would be [more happy] with I went to Pocatello, Idaho and enlisted in the Army Air Force on the twenty fifth day of February, 1946.

It later was made a separate branch of the military and became known as the United States Air Force. Because of my interest and knowledge of mechanics I wanted to become an airplane mechanic. Two days later, on the twenty seventh day of February, 1946, I went through the Idaho Falls Temple in company with my father and mother and received my Endowments and in the afternoon we went through again. My parents highly recommended, in fact almost insisted, that I receive my endowments prior to entering military service. They had the idea, and perhaps they were right, that it would help me to avoid temptation while I was away from home.

I received a one way train ticket to Salt Lake City, where I was to enter the military service and be inducted at Fort Douglas. Fort Douglas is on the east side of Salt Lake just above the University of Utah campus. Part of Fort Douglas later became part of the University of Utah.

On the fourth day of March in the year 1946 I left Pocatello and spent the night in a hotel in Salt Lake. The next day I passed a physical examination at Fort Douglas and was then sworn into the Army Air Forces. During the next few days I was given some mental tests and was informed that I did really well and that after basic training I would go to Keesler Field in Southern Mississippi to study aviation mechanics. My stay at Fort Douglas was finally finished. The Sunday that I was there I rode the bus to town and went to Church. On the thirteenth day of March 1946, I was given the records of myself and ten other young men and that evening we were taken to the Denver and Rio Grande Western railroad where we were put on a train going toward San Antonio, Texas. I was probably chosen to carry the records because I was a few years older than any of the other young men. I turned twenty five years of age the next day.

When I arose the morning of the fourteenth day of March we were at Green River, Utah which is next to the Colorado border. It wasn‘t very long until we were in Colorado and during the day we went up the Colorado River and through the Royal Gorge. After we got to the top of the Continental Divide, we went down the Arkansas River. The train stopped in the canyon under the bridge that spanned the Royal Gorge and everybody was permitted to get off and see it. It was a long ways up from where we were. That evening we arrived in Pueblo, Colorado, about 7:00 P.M.

The train left Pueblo three hours later and so we had a little while to walk around Pueblo and see some of the town. This is the last place that I have seen a trolley car in operation. They were running on tracks down the center of the street with the rod up at the rear end of the car reaching to the electric wire overhead.

At 10:00 P.M. we boarded the train again on our way to the future. This was the first time in my life that I have been on the east side of the Continental Divide. The morning of the fifteenth of March we were going through the corner of New Mexico. That evening we arrived in Fort Worth, Texas. I had always been taught that Texas was noted for it‘s cattle and oil. During my stay in Texas I saw one scrub cow and I never did see an oil well.

In Fort Worth we boarded another train and once again headed south and when I woke in the morning we were in the vicinity of or approaching San Antonio, Texas. There were many other military recruits also that arrived there that day and we needed to wait at the depot for some time before we boarded a military bus and taken to SAACC Field (the name was later changed to Lackland Air Force Base.) We arrived there the sixteenth day of march 1946.

Basic training in the Air Force is not as rigid as it is in some other branches of the service, probably because the Air Force is not devoted to hand to hand combat, but is devoted [instead] to either fighting with aircraft or else maintaining the aircraft in operating condition. Also all the enemy had surrendered and maybe they didn‘t think that it was as important as it would have been during the war years. During our basic training we were taken out on the firing range a couple times to shoot at targets, though, and we also spent several days in bivouac training. Finally basic training was over and the young men were getting assigned to various schools. There were three of the young men from the barracks I was in that went to radar school in Southern Florida, but I didn‘t yet receive an assignment. I knew that I would go to Keesler Field at Biloxi, Mississippi to study aircraft mechanics. The personnel that stayed at SAACC Field were moved to the other side of the field to be held in waiting until assignment came, so as to make room for other young men in the training barracks

I had managed to get a pass to go to San Antonio several times to go to Church on Sundays. The first Sunday that I was at SAACC Field I went to the protestant meeting on the base, but it seemed so empty that I never did go to one again. However, I did obtain a pass on Sunday mornings to go into San Antonio to the LDS Church.

There were a lot of military bases around San Antonio and it seemed as if the congregation was half servicemen. One Sunday afternoon, a group of us made a little tour that finally took us out to the Alamo, which is the famous Franciscan mission and fort where many Texans were killed by Mexican forces in 1836. The last two or three Sundays that I was at SAACC Field most of the passes were canceled because of an outbreak of polio in San Antonio. The commanding officers in charge, though, gave me passes so that I could go to Church in San Antonio. These passes needed to be marked emergency. One officer told me that because I was a little bit older it was considered that I had wisdom to take care of myself.

I was at SAACC Field for three weeks after basic training. During this time we were kept busy, though. Orders finally came for me to move out. I would get to see Keesler Field all right but only from the window of the train as I passed by on the way to Boca Raton, Florida where I would be studying radar.

It was the seventh day of June 1946 that I left San Antonio. There were three carloads of personnel going to Boca Raton. The train went east from San Antonio and along the Gulf Coast. We crossed the Mississippi River at New Orleans, Louisiana on a bridge that I was informed was five miles long. We also crossed part of the Gulf of Mexico on some bridges that were known as draw bridges but these were built on a pivot rather than rising like one normally pictures the draw bridges.

After getting to Jacksonville, Florida our journey turned south again, but this time along the east coast of Florida. This was very beautiful country with the landscape all covered with Australian Pines. These trees were different than the western pine that I knew. The country was in a high humidity environment and the trees that grew there needed to be adapted to this kind of climate. I found myself hoping that Boca Raton would be situated in similar surroundings.

On the morning of the tenth day of June 1946, the train stopped at Delray Beach, Florida and from there we were taken in military busses to Boca Raton Army Air Field. The country in which Boca Raton is located doesn‘t have nearly as many pine trees as there were farther north, but there are many coconut palms and royal palms. Again there was a three week period of no assignment. The first Saturday that I was there I obtained a pass and went on the bus to Miami, Florida which was about forty or fifty miles from Boca Raton. The everglades hotel in Miami was at that time taken over by the navy for the use of servicemen and I obtained a room there for the night without any expense. The next morning I arose and found the branch of the LDS Church in that city. I needed to walk quite a distance to get to it. After sunday school, I caught the bus and went into town again. I went back to the chapel for Sacrament Meeting. After it was over I rode the bus back to Boca Raton. This is the only time that I went to Church in Miami, although I enjoyed it. I had obtained a copy of the Book of Mormon and also a little book called Principles of the Gospel issued by the Church to servicemen along with a small directory giving the addresses of Later-day Saint places of worship so it became a fairly easy task to find them Along with this directory and the simplicity of the numbering of the streets in Florida it was easy to find my way around.

The streets are numbered using the four quadrants of north, east, south, and west. The Sunday after I was in Miami I found a small branch of the Church located in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It was the only Latter-day Saint Congregation located within about twenty five miles of Boca Raton. The meetings were held in an old home that was also used as a home for a man and his wife when they came there on a mission.

This was a very small branch and a couple other air force personnel attended there regular. Once in a while there would be another one or two service men come. When I started going to meetings, there were also two navy personnel that were also attending meetings there [as well]. One of these navy men was the class instructor. The navy personnel were eventually assigned elsewhere and I was asked to instruct the class until the arrival of a pair of missionaries. The first two missionaries to arrive there were Brother and Sister Dudley and Mae Hamblin form Phoenix, Arizona. He was the son of Jacob Hamblin, the man that has become known in Church History as the Apostle to the Indians.

On the first day of July in the year 1946, I started the basic electronic course along with other young men. The school was held for six hours per day with half of the time being class instruction and the other half being lab work. There were three classes during the day. The first started at six A.M. and went until noon. The next went from noon until six P.M., and the third went from six P.M. until midnight. The students were rotated so that each of us got a turn at each of the sessions. Also the instruction was given in periods of weeks and if we passed one week we were advanced to the next week with a new instructor. Also, if we missed one week we could get in the one behind and so this way we would miss only one week of class. All of the instructors were civilian personnel and some of them were young women. I never did see an older woman teaching, maybe because women had not been in the field of electronics very long or it could have been that the older women were more interested in a family life. Some of the instructors had been in radar when they were in the military and after their discharge had gone into teaching radar.

This kind of work was very much different from the mechanics that I had previously wanted, but I found out that I liked electronics. We were informed that the school that we were assigned to was determined by the grades that we got on the tests that we took while we were in basic training and the students that scored the highest were sent to radar school. There were several students there that hadn‘t finished high school, but none of these were able to finish the radar course. Also some young men were there that had had some college training. One young man said that the tests that he took here were much harder than anything that he had had in college. The basic electronics course lasted sixteen weeks. There were some that found radar impossible to learn and so were eliminated from the school. All those, the ones eliminated, I found out about were high school dropouts. There were others that were required to go to special study classes during the time that they were not in school.

After twelve weeks of this basic electronics training, I developed infection in my inner ear on the right side and was put in the hospital where I had a penicillin shot every three hours. My right thigh became so sore that I turned my left side. It also became sore as did both of my arms. Penicillin didn‘t help much and so every few days I was taken by military ambulance to the regional hospital in Coral Gables, Florida. Coral Gables is south and a little bit west of Miami. I was discharged from the hospital in time to start school again, so that I missed only two weeks. I had one day of my permission to take the test for that week. I was told that they had decided to give the test only on Friday for the ones that wanted to miss the next week. However, after I told them the situation and that I had been in the hospital for a couple of weeks after I had one day of the thirteenth week, I was given the test and passed it. That put me in the fourteenth week of school and only one week behind the class that I started with. At the end of sixteen weeks, we were given the test that covered the sixteen weeks basic electronics. There were one hundred questions and I got eighty two of them right. My instructor told me that I did better than anybody that took the test. For a young man that didn‘t know anything about electronics just four months ago and didn‘t have any desire to learn about it, this seemed to be a real accomplishment.

There were two major divisions in specialized radar training; ground control approach and high altitude bombardment. Some of the radar students left after the sixteen week basic class to go into radar operation. The rest of us were given a choice of the field of specialization that we wanted. I chose ground control approach, but in accordance with the desire of the military I was assigned to training in high altitude bombardment.

When I had enlisted in the service, I had declared father and mother with several brothers and sisters as dependents and indeed they were because father was still suffering from his trouble and some of the farm work agitated it. As long as we kept him off the cultivator he was all right. The time arrived when the military was decreasing its size and to do that decided to discharge those with dependents, if they wanted to be discharged. When this opportunity presented itself, I applied for discharge, although I had been in the service for a little less than one year and had enlisted for three years. I was then twenty five years of age and single. If I had had a companion to share my life with me at that time, it may have made a difference as to what I decided to do. I can say that during my stay in the service that I lived more like a Latter-day Saint should live than I had before, although I was around a group of men who didn‘t believe in the same standards of morality that I did. At least they didn‘t practice them.

Christmas season came and the military personnel were told that if they wanted, they could get a furlough to go home for the two week period. I decided to stay in Florida because I was hoping to be discharged shortly and I saw no need of going home at that time. Most of the military personnel at the base went home, but it was much warmer in Southern Florida than it would have been in Idaho and I didn‘t like cold weather so I decided that I would stay down there. The unit I was with had only about a dozen men left in it when the holiday travelers departed. All of the men that were left there were given various duties to perform. The group had KP (kitchen police) three times during that period. When a person was put on KP it lasted from about four A.M. until something like nine P.M.

I don‘t know why I was not chosen for KP the first day, but I was given a job to do that extended into the next day. That was one of the days that the group had KP also and so I didn‘t get it then either. The work that was assigned to me was finished about noon and so the sergeant asked me to build a fire in each of the two areas where there were showers so there would be some hot water so the men that were on KP could have a warm shower. The water was heated with a wood burning furnace. He also told me that there was a need for a CQ (charge of quarters) for Christmas day and if I applied for it I would be kept off KP the next time that it came around. I applied for it that day as I would have nothing else to do, and so the next time that KP came around I didn‘t have it. This made some of the other men a little bit angry because they got it three times during that two week period and I missed it altogether.

The CQ that I volunteered for was for Christmas night. As there was a ten P.M. curfew and there should not be anything until time to turn on the barracks lights at six A.M. the next morning there was really nothing to do except answer the phone. I lay down on one of the desks and went to sleep.

I finally was allowed to leave school after nine months of schooling because I was then being processed for a discharge. During the next few weeks I was the CQ several nights.

On Friday the twenty first day of February I boarded a train in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on my way home. My duffel bag had been taken to Fort Lauderdale the night before by one of the air force personnel that had a car and left down there for the night.

The time that I spent in the military was really advantageous to me although I didn‘t realize it at the time. I had a lot of free time and I spent most of it reading. One of the accomplishments was the reading of the Book of Mormon. Maybe if I had copies of the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price I would have read them also. I had been in several Gospel conversations with both military and civilian personnel in which I felt the presence of the Spirit of the Lord. Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been [like] if I had stayed in the air force.

There was one thing missing in my life although I didn‘t realize it at the time. There was nobody in my life to share with me my joys and sorrows. Maybe if I had had the stabilizing effect of the responsibility of a happy home that I would be more stable in my life. There had previously been three young ladies, at different times , in my life that had tried to develop a close association with me, but at any of those times I was just not interested nor was I ready to develop that kind of a relationship. I had previously had two or three dates in my life, but neither one of the young ladies was any that was trying to get interested in me. Of course as a Latter-day Saint I have always believed in the eternal companionship of a man and a woman, but the opportunity had not yet presented itself to me in a way that I felt comfortable in accepting that responsibility as yet. There was a very nice young LDS girl by the name of Joyce Brown [who] lived in Hollywood, Florida that attended meetings in Fort Lauderdale with her family, but she was only fourteen at the time and, I thought, too young for me. Also I didn‘t want to get too interested in anybody who was not a member of the LDS Church.

The missionaries that were in Fort Lauderdale Florida while I was there were Brother and Sister Dudley Hamblin from Phoenix, Arizona. While they were there a couple of lady missionaries came. They were Sister Virginia Wright from Riverside, California and a Sister Madsen from Salt lake City. While they were there Sister Madsen was moved to Carolina because of her health and Sister Luana Sorenson from Pocatello, Idaho became the companion of Sister Virginia Wright.

Brother and Sister Hamblin were finally released from their mission and Brother and Sister Christian Knudsen from Preston, Idaho replaced them. Brother and Sister Knudsen had their car with them and were therefore able to go to some areas that the other missionaries didn‘t get to go to.

During my stay in Florida I was able to take a couple tour boat trips up the New River from Fort Lauderdale. On one of these trips I went up the New River into the everglades to the Seminole Indian Reservation. The New River drains the everglades and it is a very muddy river.

I saw some development being done and to build up the ground around the beaches in Florida the developers would put a dyke around the edge of the ground that they wanted to build up and pump water from the river onto it. The water would seep through the sand and the dirt would stay on top of the sand. When it got built up enough the operation would stop.

After boarding the train the evening of the twenty first of February 1947, we went north along the east coast of Florida and finally across Georgia and Tennessee up into Kentucky and finally Illinois getting in Chicago on Sunday the twenty third day of February, 1947. The train was three hours late arriving in Chicago and when we arrived there Chicago was having one of their blizzards from off the lake and it was sure cold, especially for a young man who had left Southern Florida just two days before. The train that came from Florida stopped at one depot and the one [train] that I needed to catch left from another. There was a woman on the train that had made the trip several times and acted as my self appointed guide and showed me the way to go to get to the other depot. In fact, she rode in the cab that I was in, as it took several of the passengers that were going to the other depot. The train, being late, was too late for me to catch the one that I had intended doing. However, I was informed that the streamliner would be leaving at four PM that day and it would be the same fare as the other one. It should arrive in Pocatello at five minutes past five in the afternoon of the next day. This would give me about three hours to spend in Chicago. I made reservations to get on the streamliner and then sent a telegram to Springfield telling father and mother that I would arrive in Pocatello the next day. There being no telegraph office in Springfield the message would need to be phoned out from Blackfoot. Father and mother didn‘t have a phone and so the message was delivered to the landlord, who lived about fifty feet away. It arrived just about ten A.M. about seven hours before I was to arrive in Pocatello.

When I woke up on Monday morning the twenty fourth day of February 1947, we were somewhere west of Chicago and headed west. I heard from one member of the train crew that the train was half an hour late at that time. The countryside was moving quite rapidly past the window so I didn‘t get to see the landscape in much detail. At this time of year there really wasn‘t much that a person could see, anyway, as it was still covered with snow. There was a lot more snow on the east side of the Continental Divide than on the west side.

By the time that the train arrived in Pocatello it had made up the half hour that it was late and was now five minutes ahead of schedule. I was met at the train by my father, mother, two sisters and my little brother. I had to return to Pocatello in a couple of days to get my baggage.

Father‘s two year lease on the farm at Springfield had now expired and the landowner had a son that was then coming home from the military so we began looking around for another place to rent. We finally found one of two hundred acres in size about three miles northwest of Aberdeen, Bingham County, Idaho. Aberdeen is about fifteen miles southwest of Springfield. The man from whom we rented this farm lived in American Falls, Power County, Idaho and was the dealer of the John Deere line of farm equipment. There was no barn on this place so the milking needed to be done in the open corral. We sold several cans of milk daily and it was picked up in front of the house. The house was quite a large house with two stories and an unfinished basement and was on the east side of a fairly busy street. Forty acres of this property was located across the street to the west and the other one hundred sixty acres was located behind the house.

South of us about half a mile was a young man that I knew from my high school days as he had been in an agriculture class with me, although he was a year ahead of me in school. He had graduated from school, got married, and moved to Aberdeen.

On the third day of June of that year I went in company with my father and a younger brother to Lost River in search of seed potatoes. We arrived back in Aberdeen in time for me to catch the bus and go to Salt Lake City to the pageant “Message of the Ages” that was presented in the tabernacle and for which I had a ticket. The fourth day of June I spent around Temple square and finally joined a group of interested people who were being escorted by a young man from Murray, Utah, (a little place a few miles south of Salt Lake.) After the tour was over, the guide and I stood around talking until we were asked to leave the Temple grounds so the officials could prepare for the pageant. We then walked out the south gate and down to the bus depot. He went in to find out what time the bus left for Murray and I turned around and started to leave, but then I decided to go find out what time my bus left for Pocatello. I didn‘t see him in the bus depot but I didn‘t think any more about it because it would have been very easy for him to have gone out the back door. A few minutes later I met him on the street and he informed me that he went in the bus depot and back out again and with the speed that I disappeared he had a first impression that I could have been one of the three Nephites who have been given their desire to live upon the earth until the Savior once again comes in glory. It would be wonderful to live the kind of life that would make it possible, but it just wasn‘t the case with me. This is the second time that the Light of the Gospel seemed to radiate from me within the last couple of days. When I was on the bus on my way to Salt lake City, a woman whom I don‘t recall ever meeting before turned to me and asked what Temple I had been through. I had always heard that if a person was living the life of a Latter-day Saint that his countenance would shine.

I went to the pageant and later that evening I got on the bus to go back home. I arrived in Pocatello, Idaho in time to board the bus and go back to Aberdeen the morning of the fifth day of June 1947.

The bus that goes down the west side of the river between Blackfoot and American Falls is a privately owned bus that starts in the morning in Blackfoot and goes west through Riverside and Thomas and follows the road southwest through Pingree, Springfield, Sterling and Aberdeen to American Falls. From here it goes west to Pocatello and then north to Blackfoot completing the morning run. The mail comes down the line on the bus from Blackfoot. In the afternoon the route is reversed, going south from Blackfoot to Pocatello and then west to American Falls, from here it goes up the west side of the river to Blackfoot, picking up the mail and any passengers.

The rest of the summer of 1947 passed without anything unusual happening that doesn‘t happen in the life of a farm family. We had put all the farm in; grain, potatoes, and sugar beets, and didn‘t have any hay to cut and put up. During the latter part of the summer, father sold all our cows so we didn‘t have them to take care of.

During my time in the Air Force my two upper front teeth became bad and began to deteriorate. At an examination that was given to me when I went to Florida the dentist told me that I had some pretty bad teeth and I was to be put on an emergency waiting list. When I was discharged nine or ten months later I was still on that waiting list. I did have some of my back teeth removed by the military dentist. While I was riding the train on my way home, my two front teeth began to ache pretty bad and so about as soon as we were settled in Aberdeen I went to the dentist. The dentist was from American Falls, Idaho but maintained an office in Aberdeen and was there one day each week. My teeth were bad enough so it was decided that I was to have most of them removed and a full upper plate and a partial lower plate were to be made. I would retain my six front teeth on the bottom. Most people need their teeth pulled sometime in their lifetime, but I was twenty six years of age and quite a lot younger than most. The dentist wouldn‘t pull more than two or three at a time and so I was without teeth until about December of that year when my plates were put in place.

When grain harvest time came and we had one hundred and forty acres ready to harvest we decided to buy a small combine. We were renting the farm from the John Deere dealer in American Falls and bought a six foot cut combine from him. The day we got it home father, one of my brothers, and I went to American Falls and hitched it on back of the pickup we had. It was a 1939 Plymouth six cylinder pickup. The road across the American Falls dam was too narrow to pass a car on and so my brother was taken to the west end of the dam and stopped traffic from entering until we had driven across. We then turned north and went to our home with the combine with no other problems.

During grain harvest that fall I was on the seat of the tractor running the combine. I had worked on both small and large combines before, but this was the first time that I had operated one by myself. This particular combine had a grain tank on and so there was no need of any one riding the combine to take care of the grain sacks. The tank was twenty bushel tank and when it was full a truck would pull up alongside and the tank was emptied in it.

That fall also we purchased a new beet puller from the dealer we were renting the farm from. It was one that was horse drawn. All the other beet pullers that we used we had to walk along behind, but this one had a seat on and it was easier than walking along behind. During beet harvest I was able to haul some of them to the beet dump on a trailer behind the tractor. They were then taken to Blackfoot for processing.

I tried to buy a farm myself through my government benefits, but all that I liked were overpriced and the government would not make a loan on any of them. One such farm was at Pingree, Idaho, a small community about six miles northeast of Springfield and about a mile directly west of the Ferry Butte. Another farm that we looked at was a few miles southeast of Aberdeen, Idaho, but I didn‘t buy this one because it was mostly a horse drawn operation and at this time I desired to get away from horses entirely and get into tractor equipment. There was a small tractor and combine went with this place. I just wish that my foresight at that time was as good as my hindsight later turned out to be and I would have bought it at that time.

The twenty third of September of the year 1947 was Blackfoot Stake Temple Day and so I was invited to go. I rode to Idaho Falls with a carload of friends and attended two sessions that day, one being for John Knight and the other for Phillip Old. President Joseph E. Williams, president of the Blackfoot Stake, was in the hospital at that time and so everybody that was there from the Blackfoot Stake was asked to join in the prayer circle in his behalf.

During the summer of 1947 I developed a pain in my chest. It wasn‘t a very hard pain and I would not have thought anything of it if it had not been so persistent. I went to the doctor and after examining me thoroughly he told me that he couldn‘t find what it was and he told me that to find out what it was I would need to go to a clinic. I didn‘t know at the time that this was to be my last year on the farm and as soon as I left the farm the pain left my chest so it made me wonder if the exhaust form the tractor was the cause or at least an irritant of this condition.

Some time in the fall of 1947 the American Falls Stake was organized with the center of the stake in Aberdeen and consisting of the Aberdeen and Springfield and also the Sterling Wards from a division of the Blackfoot Stake and the American Falls and Rockland wards from the Pocatello North Stake. The stake president was George R. Wooley whose home was in Aberdeen. I was able to attend the organization of this stake as it took place in the Aberdeen ward chapel.

While I was in radar training in the Air Force I became interested in electronics and because I was in the military service I had some schooling [and] I was eligible for and decided to go to school and study radio and television. One of my sisters was investigating a school in Kansas City at that time and so a representative of that school came around. The school in Kansas City offered a course in radio and so I was giving some consideration to enrolling in it for the purpose of studying radio. Before I had committed myself to go to school in Kansas City we found out that there was a good course in radio and television engineering at Idaho State College in Pocatello, Idaho ,and so mother and I went to Pocatello to investigate the school and to find out if there was a chance that I could enroll in the class starting the second semester. We went to the building where the class was taught and talked to the man who was in charge of the vocational training along with one or two of the radio instructors and was told that there would not be any new class starting the second semester and that I could start the following week and make up the work that I had missed. Mid term exams were being given that week and so it wouldn‘t be advisable to start with them in process. I knew before that a course in radio was given at the college, but I thought that it was only a temporary course given then for the purpose of training radio personnel for the national emergency that was upon us.

At the time that I enrolled in radio and television electronics there was no television stations in the intermountain area. I enrolled in school that day and then we looked around for a place for me to stay in Pocatello. The room that I obtained was a basement room about two miles from school. I needed to walk to school in the morning and home again after classes and then go up to the school again for the evening meal.

The radio and television course was a three year course, but it was intended to make it into a four year course in a year or two. It would then have two years of radio and the other two years would be television.

I started classes on the seventeenth day of November in the year 1947. I had the same instructor all day. There were two classes of instruction, one in radio physics and the other in mathematics for electricians and radiomen. After these two classes were over we went into lab. These two classes took about two hours and lab took the rest of the day, about four hours. Fridays were different form the rest of the week. The three classes met together in a class of instruction in radio repair and the lab period was devoted to repairing radios that had been brought in. There were five other men in the class that I was in.

When the end of the semester arrived and we had our final examinations I was just about the average, having done eighteen weeks school work in the last nine weeks. About the third week of January 1948 was finals week for that semester and I was pretty happy with the results.

The day that school was out my sister and her husband from Springfield, Idaho, were over to Pocatello to see the doctor and I rode back to Aberdeen with them. Father and mother had moved closer into Aberdeen and now lived only about a mile out from the center of town. My sister Donna and her husband Delton Hawker were expecting their first child and they were staying with my parents due to the uncertainty of the weather.

The morning after we arrived home my brother in law and I went into Aberdeen to see if we could work in the potato packing plant for a few days. I was going to be able to work for about a week or ten days before going back to register for the second semester of school. We found the work that we desired and so stayed there and went to work.

During the day while we were working a storm came up and by the time we were off work for the day the roads were blocked with snow and we had to walk home We heard that the bus was making its afternoon run and when the snow was so deep he turned around and went back around by way of Pocatello and from there to Blackfoot instead of going up the west side of the river. The next day the news broadcast reported that a semi had run off the road the evening of the heavy snow and by morning it was completely buried. All the time that I was home we needed to walk to town to work and home again in the evening. The snow piled up so deep on the railroad tracks that the train wasn‘t able to get to Aberdeen, either. I worked at packing potatoes until time for me to register for school and as neither the train nor the bus could get to Aberdeen I still continued to work in the potato processing plant.

The day finally came when all potato sorting had to be curtailed because of no place to stack them and they could not be shipped because of the train not being able to come. I didn‘t then have a job and couldn‘t get back to Pocatello to go to school either so all I could do was to try to keep warm around the house.

The time finally came for my nephew to leave the friends he knew and loved and make his home among the earthly inhabitants. I don‘t know if they choose the hour of coming or not but at this time my brother in law‘s car was in Aberdeen and we were without it. Father‘s car was home, but it was useless in the weather we were having because we couldn‘t go anywhere with it. My brother in law and I walked to town one cold dark night after the doctor. The doctor got his nurse out of bed and loaded the necessary equipment in his car and we started for home. He was able to get within a half or three quarters of a mile from home and from there the four of us walked home and carried the necessary equipment that he would need.

The day finally arrived that the train made its way to Aberdeen. To get through there were two engines with a snow plow on the front one. I got in the caboose and we headed for Blackfoot, a distance of approximately thirty miles the way the train travels. We left Aberdeen at about 3:00 P.M. and arrived in Blackfoot about six hours later. From Blackfoot I rode the bus to Pocatello. The next day I registered for school. The late fees were canceled because nearly everyone that lived away from Pocatello was late in getting back. There were three other students came in the class for the second semester, making a total of nine students.

Nothing unusual happened during the second semester. I had started attending meetings at the LDS Institute. The family I was staying with moved into another home taking me with them. I was now only about a mile from school. I continued to walk to school and back twice each day and at times I would attend a concert at the school in the evening. I was invited to join the LDS sponsored fraternity, Lambda Delta Sigma, and so I did. Lambda Delta Sigma at that time had some chapters for men and others for women. I got some social life through this organization.

In the spring after the snow was all gone in Pocatello my landlord, who was an engineer on the railroad, told me that there was snow in the hills around Soda Springs and Lava Hot Springs that would hide a large semi truck from him as he was riding in the cab of the train along the railroad.

In the first part of June we had final exams for the year and I ended up as one of the two top men in the class.

In June 1948 I went to Salt Lake for the purpose of taking the radio telephone test. I didn‘t feel as if I was quite ready for it but decided to take it anyway. The test is given every three months in Salt lake. On the fifteenth day of June 1948 I went to Salt lake and the next day I took the test. I went back as far as Brigham City the sixteenth day of June and stayed with Aunt Verna and Uncle Roger Sederholm that night. Aunt Verna is my father‘s sister. The next day was father‘s day and I went to Sunday School in Brigham City that day. I rode the bus back to Pocatello that afternoon. I got work for the summer repairing radios at Montgomery Ward in Pocatello, Idaho. Another young man that was taking the radio class but a year ahead of me was also working there. My primary interest in working there was to gain some experience in radio repair, but there was not enough work in radio repair to keep even one person busy and so I became involved in repairing other small appliances and I also became involved in the larger appliances [as well].

Some of the things that I worked on that summer besides radios were record players, which were closely associated with radios in their structure and were many times in the same cabinet with radios; electric ranges and refrigerators, freezers, electric water heaters, and such small appliances as toasters. We also got involved in repairing electric motors, although we didn‘t wind any armatures. There were also things mechanical such as outboard motors for small boats and at another time I was sent to a home to help install a Venetian blind. A lot of work was done in the shop, but we also went to the customer‘s homes. I didn‘t have a car of my own at that time and so all the traveling I did was with somebody else except for a few times when another person would give me the keys to his car and send me out alone.

During the summer I went from Blackfoot to Soda Springs. This year was the first time that I crossed the Blackfoot River north of Soda Springs, Idaho.

In September 1948 I started school again. This year was a continuation of the same as I studied the year before. I got more involved in television this year. The department was in the process of constructing a television transmitter. There were some experimental projects in lab, but a large part of the time was devoted to working on TV transmitting and receiving equipment. About this time the first broadcast station was erected in Salt Lake. It turned out that it would be about five years before any station made its appearance in the Upper Snake River Valley in Idaho. Nothing unusual happened during this school year. I continued to attend the LDS institute and to take an active part in the activities of Lambda Delta Sigma. I did not attend any activities that required me to take a partner to because I didn‘t know anybody of the opposite sex that I was interested in.

I had been taught as a member of the LDS Church to obey the law of chastity and maybe I had a little fear of myself the reason that I didn‘t develop a close association with anybody.

In July I got a set of five records for the purpose of learning morse code. In studying radio and television I had become interested in amateur radio also. I also got a small record player and adapted my radio so I could play the records through it. The records had code from five to fifteen words per minute. I learned the code so that I could recognize a letter or number by sight and then put on the slowest record to learn to write it by sound. I was lost this way and so I put on the record and read the instruction book at the same time that I wrote the letter. It seemed slow for me to learn the code.

During the summer while I was working for Montgomery Ward I was able to purchase a short wave radio (a halicrafters S40A radio) that had a BFO so that I could receive code. I modified it somewhat by adding a phonograph pickup so that I could play my record player through it.

In learning code I finally arrived at a speed of five words per minute and it seemed as if I would never get off this speed when all at once I found myself at ten words per minute. I was stuck again on ten words per minute for a long time when I suddenly realized that I was up to fifteen words per minute. I was now up to the maximum speed of the records.

To obtain an amateur license it was necessary to attain a speed of fifteen words per minute in both receiving and sending. I obtained a code practice oscillator and learned to send code, also. I wanted to obtain a greater speed than fifteen words so I took the turn table off my record player and put a piece of rubber hose over the drive on my record player. This increased the speed somewhat and also the tone because now the tones were higher pitched but I got more speed.

By the time February of 1949 came around I thought that I was ready for my amateur license. At that time there were two classes of amateur licenses issued, the class A and the class B. A person would need to get a class B license and have it for a year before he could obtain a class A license. The class B license restricted the person to the portions of the amateur radio band that were for code while the holder of the class A license could operate on any of the amateur radio bands and could go audio as well as code. There was also a class C license that was just like the class B only it was restricted to the applicants who were at least one hundred miles away from the nearest place of examination. This could be given by a licensed amateur radio operator. I lived more than one hundred miles away form the nearest place where it was given, which was Salt Lake City, and so I went down to where one of the instructors had a radio shop one Saturday and got him to give me the test. He had a tape machine that was designed for code and gave me the examination there . I was able to pass the test and I obtained my class C license. In March 1949 I again went to Salt Lake City to take the test for a radio telephone first class license. I rode down to Salt Lake with another member of the class and his wife also went along. The young man that worked at Montgomery Ward the summer before with me also rode down to Salt Lake with us. He and I got a motel room while the man and wife shared another.

The next day the examination was given and I rose up early that morning and read a small book that I had brought with me entitled “Radio Operating Questions and Answers.” This book was a copy of the questions and answers that they would ask, however, they didn‘t use all of them on one examination. There was a total of four elements and a multiple choice questionnaire of fifty questions was given on each element. The first element was radio operating law and it needed to be written out. I took the examination, which was given in the post office building at Fourth South and Main Streets in Salt Lake. The other young man that rode down with us came especially to get his second class license and so he needed to take the first three elements, but when he was finished with them he decided to try for his first class. He then left the examining room and read the fourth element in the Question and Answer book and when he came back in, it was fresh in his mind. He took that element and both he and I obtained our First Class Licenses that year. I had passed the first element the year before and so didn‘t need to take that element again. This time I had three elements to take to get my First Class License so that made one hundred and fifty questions. To pass a person needed a grade of at least 75 percent. It never was revealed what the final grade was, but in a week I got my first class license so I know that I did at least seventy five percent on each of the elements.

In the spring of 1949 the course was made into a four year course with the first two being radio and the other two being television. Because it was only a three year course before, I got involved in the television end of it and in the construction of the television broadcast system I did most of the audio work on the transmitter. The school had not yet applied for a commercial broadcast license and so all the broadcasting that we could do needed to be closed circuit. On the sixth day of June 1949 I graduated from radio and received a certificate of completion. After school was out I moved to Sterling, Idaho where my father and mother were then living. Sterling is a small community about six miles southwest of Springfield and about twelve miles northeast of Aberdeen. Sterling is near the American Falls Lake in the vicinity of where the small community of Tilden used to be. Sterling had one small store and a post office. About half a mile south of the store on the east side of the street was the school, but school had been discontinued there quite a number of years before and the students were bussed to Aberdeen.

The LDS Ward in Sterling had acquired the school property. There was an artesian well on the property and a pipe out near the street where water was constantly running. The church house was located east of the school and the door to it opened to the east. The artesian well also supplied water to water the meeting house lawn. Just north of the school and church house was an area of approximately five acres that the ward farmed.

The summer of 1949 was spent by me in working for the Agricultural Conservation Association. I was working out of Blackfoot, Idaho and had all the ground from Aberdeen to Pingree between Snake River on the east and the desert on the west. This job required me to meet and talk to other people. That was hard for me to do on account of my backward disposition. I needed to measure potato and wheat ground and send in a report every day. I didn‘t have a car of my own and so I used my father‘s pickup.

On the twenty first day of July of that year I went back over to Pocatello and took an examination for a job in radio maintenance. It is a civil service job and there were openings in both Alaska and Hawaii. I would rather be a broadcast engineer. If one of these civil service openings occurred that I was qualified for I would much rather go to Hawaii than to Alaska. In Alaska the weather would be too cold and I would prefer a warmer climate. However, neither job materialized and so I didn‘t need to make a choice. I answered one or two job openings in radio stations, but the small radio stations desired a man with a pleasing voice that also had a radio telephone license and I just didn‘t have the quality of voice necessary to be an announcer.

That fall I also cut grain with the combine and made quite a little money. Another decision took place with me that summer. I decided that I would go to the Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah rather than continue going to Idaho State College any more. I had my records transferred from Idaho State College to BYU but it really wouldn‘t have mattered because the classes I had been taking were vocational and didn‘t carry any credit toward an academic education.

On the thirteenth day of September 1949 I was in Provo and found a room for the coming winter. I had timed my trip to Prove to coincide with the radio examinations given in Salt Lake and the next day I was in Salt Lake to take the radio amateur test. That day there were quite a few of us going to take the amateur examination. There was a group of scouts, (I never did find out where they were from) that were brought in by their scout leader to try to obtain amateur licenses. The first part of the test was receiving code.

Due to limited area there were only six of us at a time allowed to sit down at the table to receive code. I was among the first group of six. After this part of the test came transmitting. I was the only one of the six that was allowed to continue with the transmitting which indicated that the other five didn‘t receive at the required speed of fifteen words per minute.

After transmitting I was allowed to continue and take the written test as they were satisfied with my transmitting also, I got my class B Amateur license. I didn‘t have at least a year‘s experience on the class C license that I held that would have qualified me to obtain a class A license. I built a wooden frame on which I built a small one tube transmitter. The radio receiver that I had also had a plug in the back of it so that an external DC power source could be connected to it. I took out this plug and wired it so that I fed my transmitter from this source. I got a crystal on the amateur frequency and built a crystal oscillator with the key in the cathode and the output fed to an antenna. I measured thirteen and one half watts of input power. That doesn‘t seem like much power compared to commercial radio stations, but using pulsed CW on the amateur band I had several conversations in code from the western part of the United States and I also received confirmation of an amateur receiving me on the east coast of the United States.

On the twentieth day of September in the year 1949 I arrived in Provo with my baggage. It was required that all first year students arrive a week early to take a series of placement tests. On the twenty seventh day of September I registered in two classes in speech, first year Spanish, freshman English and one class in religion. The religion class was “An introduction to the Book of Mormon.” At this time the BYU had classes at a lower campus and also an upper campus so the classes could be just about a mile apart. There was a lapse of fifteen minutes between classes. This first quarter I had a special class in private speech on the lower campus.

The first year I was in Provo I was living in the area of the Provo Fifth Ward and I attended that ward sometimes, but as I was eating my meals at the school and as it would rush me to get to the dining area after sunday school I attended most of the time on campus. It was held in the Joseph Smith Building. The organ in the Joseph Smith Building is a pipe organ and we were told that it was the organ that was in the Tabernacle in Salt lake and had been moved down to the BYU a few years before and a new one had been installed in the Salt Lake Tabernacle.

During the autumn quarter I affiliated myself with the Lambda Delta Sigma organization on the BYU campus. There is a much larger organization here in Provo than there was at Pocatello, but it is natural that there is because BYU is a school that is owned and operated by the Latter-day Saints Church and, therefore, most of the students there are church members. In November of 1949 Lambda Delta Sigma had initiation for new members and I volunteered to give one of the five speeches. The initiation ceremony is the same for all Lambda Delta Sigma organizations wherever they are. The speech that was given to me to learn and give was the speech on Priesthood.

School was out for Thanksgiving [on] Wednesday evening, [the] twenty third day of November 1949 and I went with my cousin Vilarr Ransom, who was also going to school in Provo, to his home near Preston, Idaho for Thanksgiving. The following Saturday morning, Vilarr‘s younger brother, Paul, invited me to ride with him on his milk route which I did. He picked up milk from the area known as Mink Creek north of Preston. There were some very beautiful dairy farms up in that area. This route also took us up the main road where my Grandmother Ransom and Uncle Jim had got their mail.

My cousin and Vilarr‘s twin sister. Vilate, invited me to go with her to take one of her relatives back to Logan, Utah the morning after Thanksgiving. This person needed to get back to Logan to go to work that day. Vilate took the car that Vilarr had had in Provo and we left their home and went south down to Utah and from there the road went east to meet the highway. By taking this route she would avoid going through the town of Franklin, Idaho.

It seems to me as if many plans are changed and it was so with this one also. We had just entered Utah and reached the street to turn east when the car quit and Vilate phoned her father from a nearby home to come and get us. In the afternoon he had the car repaired. The trouble could very well have been repaired by me if I had known about a polarity reversing switch that Chevrolet had put on their cars that year. As it was the mechanics in the nation didn‘t understand the operation of this switch and so they were all removed whenever they went into the shop.

The following Sunday, we [Vilarr and I ] went back to Provo so we would be there to start school again on Monday. On the ninth [of] December, 1949, I attended my first formal dance. I had learned to waltz, but I didn‘t care enough for dancing to learn some of the modern dances. However, formal dances were waltzes and this one was the Christmas Formal given by Lambda Delta Sigma. My partner for the evening was a wonderful young lady by the name of Mary Dean Stringham.

The next activity of any importance was the final examinations. These occurred in the three days of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth of December. I had two tests on the fourteenth and one on the fifteenth and the other two on the sixteenth. After these were over and in accordance with prior arrangements with Vilarr, I rode with him to Preston and from there I caught the bus to Sterling. Due to the bad weather we stayed in Provo the night of December sixteenth and started out in the daylight on Saturday. We arrived in Preston the afternoon of Saturday, December seventeenth after several hours over bad roads. The next morning I got on the bus and arrived in Sterling about 11:00 A.M. on Sunday morning.

I wanted to work in a potato cellar during my two weeks between quarters at school, but the potato cellars were not busy at this time and so I didn‘t get to work.

BYU offers two quarters of study in Genealogy and I planned to register for the first one of these during the coming winter quarter so during my two weeks at home I copied the records that father had obtained recently. I found them to be quite mixed up and when I mentioned it father said that he knew that they were but didn‘t know how to get them in order and so he was waiting for me to come and help him correct these records. At that time father was 66 years old and his eyes were getting dim. I also had made arrangements to go to Brigham City to copy the records that Aunt Verna had but father was chairman of the ward genealogical committee and father and mother wanted me to stay there and give a speech on a program that the genealogical organization was giving the evening of the first day of January 1950. At that time in the history of the church each auxiliary organization had two sundays per year in which to present the meeting. These meetings were designed to be held on Fast Sunday in place of the regular sacrament meetings. Fast meeting was held earlier in the day. These meetings were later discontinued so that the members could be home with their families on those evenings.

After meeting was over father and mother took me to Blackfoot to catch the bus. I arrived in Preston, Idaho at 2:00 A.M. Monday morning and my cousin Vilarr was there to meet me and he took me to their home until daylight. I then rode to Lewiston, Utah with my Uncle Thomas Austin Ransom and his two boys and there I saw a nice looking herd of Holstein dairy cattle. I believe that they went to Lewiston because my cousin Paul was slightly interested in a farm there and they wanted to see what arrangements could be made. That afternoon, Vilarr and I left Preston and drove back to Provo where we were to register for winter quarter the next day. On the afternoon of [the] third day of January 1950, I registered for the winter quarter. I registered for only sixteen hours that quarter. I registered for one class in speech, the continuation of English and Spanish classes, the beginning genealogy class that I wanted a folk dancing class, and a class of private instruction in speech.

I still had hopes of improving my speech enough so that I could get into radio broadcasting. The class in private speech was on the lower campus and the class in folk dancing was held in the women‘s gym one night per week. This gym was just across the street from the lower campus and just about three doors from the home that I was living in at the time. All my other classes were on the upper campus.

Classes started for the winter quarter on the fifth day of January, 1950. As I was taking radio production I affiliated myself with the campus radio station, KBYU. There were at this time two television stations in Salt Lake and they gave a fair signal in Provo. As yet all television broadcasting was in black and white. There were a few sets in Provo, but radio was the main broadcast medium. The radio station KBYU had a license for somewhat like fifty watts of power, which wasn‘t very much for a radio station, and with that low amount of power they were able to use the power lines of the city for a transmitting antenna so that it could be received all over town. Such an arrangement would never have worked in a commercial broadcast system, but KBYU was only an educational station and was erected with no profit in mind.

The thirteenth day of January in the year 1950 was an important day in my life. All through fall quarter I had my eye on a blue eyed blond girl that was in one of my classes. She was about five feet five inches tall and quite plump and I had talked to her on several occasions. On the day just mentioned, it being a friday, I met her and asked her to be my date for the evening. She accepted. She was to have an important place in my life although we neither one of us realized it at the time. I found out that her name was Rosemary Nelson and she was from a place called Scottsdale, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix.

On Saturday, the fourth day of February, 1950, I was able to go to Brigham City carrying my typewriter and genealogical record book with the purpose of copying the records of my ancestors that Aunt Verna had that we didn‘t have. She had a lot of records and I worked that day and part of Sunday in copying her records. I would type for a while until I got tired of typing and then I would write for a while. Finally when I would get tired of writing I would go back to typing. I never had taken a class in typing but I had decided to learn to type and so during the previous summer I had typed every opportunity I could find on the typewriter that my father and mother had obtained for my sisters to use when they were taking typing in school. I had bought a Royal Portable typewriter of my own prior to going to Provo so I had one with me which I continued to practice on. I was able to copy all the records of Aunt Verna that pertained to my direct line and in addition to that she gave me several articles of information that were my father‘s that he wrote and obtained while he was on his mission and while he was a young man before his marriage that were among the records she [Aunt Verna] got when my grandmother was called out of this life to join her eternal companion.

The instructor that was giving me lessons in private speech encouraged me to get an amateur radio station on the air as there was no use having an amateur license and not using it. With that encouragement I built the transmitter that has been previously described. I also joined a radio amateur club at the BYU on the sixteenth day of February and had some activity through them and on the eighteenth day of February I started to build my transmitter. I started to use it the first day of April in the year 1950.

Our final examinations started the fifteenth day of March that year. I had two tests in the morning and then I boarded a bus to go to Salt lake and take the examination for a class A amateur license. It was the highest class of amateur license given at that time and allowed an amateur the opportunity to go on the audio bands as well as the code bands. I received my class A amateur license, but I never did build an amateur audio transmitter as I wanted to get more experience in the use of code.

Before going back to Provo I again went through the Temple in the evening of the fifteenth day of March in the year 1950. During winter quarter the genealogical class made a trip to the genealogical library in Salt Lake and on the seventeenth day of March after my last final for the quarter I again went to the genealogical archives and found some additional records. On this trip I got what I think was all the records available on my line in the archives at that time and so if I got any additional information I would need to go into actual research.

There wasn‘t as long a waiting period between the end of winter quarter and registration for spring quarter as there had been the quarter before because there was no holiday to occupy this time. I registered in the spring quarter for a class in pantomime, one in radio production and a continuation of classes in English, Spanish, and genealogy. During the second quarter genealogy class we were to make two excursions to the genealogical library at Salt Lake, but I got by with just one trip because I had made one trip between quarters. About the time that Rosemary entered my life another young lady by the name of Joan Cottam from Provo also came into my life and I had several dates with her. I had a choice to make then between the two of them. I really thought that Joan was the sweetest girl but my decision was probably made because Joan was taking nursing and would be in Salt Lake the next year. I was then in need of companionship and desired to find a young lady whom I could have as a companion for eternity and so I started to see Rosemary more and Joan less, a decision which I later came to regret.

On Saturday the fifteenth day of April 1950 I took Rosemary to Springville, Utah to the art exhibit. The art exhibit at Springville is sponsored by the high school and I understand that it is the greatest art exhibit sponsored by a high school in the intermountain area, if not in the west. There were paintings from quite a few artists and I recognized some of them as being the handiwork of a young man by the name of Wesley Burnside who was an art teacher at Idaho State College that I had become acquainted with while I was there.

It was the next Wednesday, on the nineteenth of April that I asked Rosemary to let me change her name to mine. She didn‘t accept right away and I had to wait until the next tuesday to receive an affirmative answer. I wanted Rosemary to become acquainted with my family and so we left Provo the evening of friday the fifth day of May 1950 on the train and arrived in Pocatello the next morning. One of my sisters, Willa, was then living in Pocatello and we went out to her home and got her to take us over to Sterling. We were able to have her meet all the family except one brother who was then away from home in the army at the time. We went to Idaho Falls where she was able to see the Idaho Falls Temple and also the falls after which the city of Idaho Falls received it‘s name. We had made plans to be united in Holy Matrimony in the Temple and to make our companionship eternal, but she desired it to be the Arizona Temple at Mesa. It doesn‘t really matter to me which Temple we are married in just so we are united by the Priesthood and have that companionship sealed for eternity.

We left again for school on sunday the seventh day of May 1950. Before I had asked Rosemary to marry me I had the impression that she had been the victim of a mistake in her past life. The night that I asked her to be my wife she told me that there had been a mistake in her life that I didn‘t know anything about and I told her that I did know what it was but that it didn‘t really matter too much to me as much as she thought and if the Lord was willing to forgive her that I couldn‘t do any less. She had let me read her Patriarchal Blessing and had even let me have a copy of it. It told her that she would be united in the House of the Lord by one who was called and given the sealing power. I knew when I read this that it would be possible to take her to the Temple. During my association with Rosemary we became more familiar with each other than we should have and I feel as if it wasn‘t for the intervention of a loving Heavenly Father that we would have had carnal knowledge. The fears that I had in the past had now become reality and if it were not for my Father in Heaven I think that I would have then become immoral. As it was at that time I believed in prayer, which I had been taught in my childhood and also my Patriarchal Blessing told me to seek the Lord in Prayer and Supplication and I feel as if my virtue was preserved, possibly for some mission that I was to perform in the future. I guess that my prayers were answered because some other power greater than my own was directing my life at that time. I am also grateful for the principle of repentance because even at this time I would feel hopeless without it.

On the second day of June in the year 1950 spring quarter was ended. I did got some work in [a] radio station KCSU in Prove. This station was a 250 watt station located about a mile south of the city of Provo at the end of a dead end street. The street is kept in good repair because it is the street that goes to the golf course. I didn‘t have a car so I had to walk. I was employed as transmitter engineer.

Rosemary had found a ride to her home in Scottsdale, a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona for Monday and would be leaving about 4:00 A.M. I decided that I would go with her and meet her folks. Early Monday morning we left Provo going south in a car with about four other students. This was the first time in my life that I had been south of Springville, Utah on that road and I enjoyed it. We crossed the Colorado River and entered into Arizona. That evening we arrived in Phoenix and went on to Scottsdale to Rosemary‘s home arriving there about 9:00 P.M. I became acquainted with Rosemary‘s mother and one of her older sisters as well as her younger sister. The next day we met Rosemary‘s father. He was the owner and operator of a swimming pool in the Phoenix area and we spent a lot of time in the water. Rosemary had taken training and become a life guard. Rosemary‘s mother left in a few days for Salt Lake to attend mutual conference so that left the family without any parental guidance as her father stayed over at the swimming pool at night as well as during the day.

I got to see quite a lot of Phoenix with Rosemary and one of her girl friends, who was not a Latter-day Saint, along with her [the friend‘s] boy friend. I also attended Sunday meetings with Rosemary‘s family. While I was there I called the radio station that broadcast in the Spanish language and went out there and talked to them. I could have gone to work there if I had been fluent in the Spanish language, but I had only one year of it and just wasn‘t fluent enough. I was greatly impressed with the beauty of Phoenix. It is a city without any high buildings. Rosemary also took me to Mesa where we saw the Arizona Temple and we were there on the Temple grounds when the Temple president left the building and walked by us. We talked to him for awhile.

One of Rosemary‘s brother in laws who was trying to sell some real estate invited us to go for a ride with his wife and him to look at a farm at Chandler, Arizona that was for sale. There I saw some of the most beautiful land that I had ever seen and if I had the asking price I would probably have bought it and stayed there.

I stayed in Phoenix until June fifteenth of that year and then left for home. I stopped in Provo and gathered up my belongings and then boarded the bus again for Sterling, Idaho. I arrived home on the eighteenth day of June and started to work on the twenty first at the same job that I had the summer before, that of measuring crop acreage for the Agricultural Conservation Association. I put my application in at several radio stations for a job as a broadcast engineer with the hopes of getting one of them. I worked at this job until the seventh day of August in the year 1950 when the job ran out. By then grain was getting ripe and it would soon be time to start the harvest season. I cut grain for a couple of days. It was all that was ready at the time. I then went to Phoenix arriving there Sunday morning the thirteenth day of August and Rosemary was there at the bus depot to meet me. I didn’t stay there as long this time as I did before and left there the evening of August fifteenth. I arrived back in Sterling the morning of the seventeenth and went back to cutting grain.

PART 3

The next day I drove to Orem quite early to find Rosemary waiting for me and we left Orem and headed north. We stopped in Lewiston to pick up the passengers that I had left there the day before and had to wait a little while for them because Alice didn‘t think that I would be so early and had let her children go to Sunday School with their cousins. We left there in the afternoon and drove home without any trouble leaving Alice and her two daughters at their home in Springfield as we drove through.

While Rosemary was with us I spent a few days stacking hay for my brother in law Curtis Worthen at Groveland. Groveland is a small farming community across the Snake River just to the west of Blackfoot. It was the first time that Rosemary had spent any time on a farm and I would drive to Groveland in the morning and I would stack hay all day while father would drive a tractor on the derrick and during this time mother and Rosemary would help my sister with the cooking. Some of the neighbors were also helping in the hay harvest so I was kept pretty busy, but I enjoyed it. I had grown to like to stack hay under a Jackson Fork. We would drive home at night tired enough to get a good night‘s rest and be ready to go again the next day.

The next friday, being the twenty second day of September, Rosemary and I along with my father and mother and my youngest brother, William Leon Ransom, went to see the Craters of the Moon. This is a national monument a few miles southwest of Arco, Idaho. Arco is a small town in the south end of the Lost River Valley and about sixty miles west of Blackfoot. Between Blackfoot and Arco is quite a lot of desert.

The following Saturday, being the twenty third day of September, father and mother wanted to go see if they could find any chokecherries and so we went. My Uncle John Austin Ransom was herding sheep in a place called Strawberry that was between Preston, Idaho and Montpelier, Idaho. It was a pretty drive and we found his sheep camp and had dinner with him. We also got several bushel of chokecherries and a few elderberries.

The beautiful autumn season must come to an end and on Monday the twenty fifth day of September, Rosemary and I left Sterling to go back to school in Provo again. This time my brother in law Ren Wilkinson took us. I had found a room on University Avenue just across the street from the lower campus. This quarter I didn‘t have any more veteran‘s schooling coming so I would need to work my way through school to get an education. I applied at the school for part time employment and on the tenth day of October of that year I started to work as a custodian in the new science building.

The science building had been dedicated the spring before by the President of the Church who was then George Albert Smith. I had attended the dedication of it. The work that I obtained began at 4:00 A.M. and gave me three hours of work before school started. On Saturdays the work started at 4:00 A.M. and lasted until noon. I had picked apples down by Spanish Fork the Saturday before I started to work and made a few dollars doing it. I had also applied for an engineering job at radio station KQVQ in Provo. Thanksgiving day of that year was on Thursday the twenty third day of November. I was able to work both Friday and Saturday at the school.

On Saturday the twenty fifth day of November in the year 1950, I worked eight and one half hours at the school and hadn‘t been home very long when the chief engineer at KQVQ called to see if I didn‘t want to work there. I worked from 3:00 P.M. until midnight that day. It made a long day, but after wanting to be a broadcast engineer I didn‘t think I should miss the opportunity.

For the next two weeks I worked mornings at the school and after school was out I went out to the KQVQ transmitter and worked there until midnight. One of the English teachers at the school was an announcer and had a late show at KQVQ. I never had an English class from him at the university but he read over some of my reports and assisted me in some of the structure of my sentences. KQVQ was maybe a couple of miles out of town and most of the time I had to walk. Finally, KQVQ got a man that could announce as well as had a license and so that eased my work load and after that I only worked Sundays at the radio station.

Final exams for that quarter came the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth of December. I could stay in Provo and work at the school over the Christmas Holidays if I so desired and thereby increase my financial status and this I was greatly tempted to do.

I stayed there and worked until the twenty third of that month and then rode the bus to Sterling, Idaho arriving there the morning of the twenty fourth of December. On Sunday the twenty seventh of that year father, mother, and I attended a missionary farewell in Springfield for two young men. One of these was Preston Hawker, who was the younger brother of my brother in law, Delton Hawker, and the other was Harold Lloyd, who was the son of the owner of the farm that we were on while in Springfield.

On new year‘s day, the first day of January in the year 1951 I left Sterling and went back to Provo with the hopes of registering for another quarter of school. I had found out during the autumn quarter that I still had fifteen days schooling coming from the government and I could buy back another fifteen days, (whatever that means), so that I would have enough days to register another quarter under veteran‘s benefits, which I did and it helped out on my financial situation. I still continued to work at the school in the morning.

Just after school started for the winter quarter I felt in such a run down condition that I went to the health center at BYU to see what the trouble was. I had a series of vitamin B shots which greatly improved my feelings. The doctor thought that I had a hyperactive thyroid and set up an appointment for me to take a breathing test at the health center there. The morning of the test I didn‘t get up and go to work but slept a little longer and at the appointed hour I went to the health center to take the test. I have been short winded for as long as I can remember and by the time that I had walked up the hill I was breathing too hard and the test didn‘t come out. The doctor then arranged for me to spend the night at the health center so I wouldn‘t need to exert any energy getting there. On the appointed evening I went up to the health center and went to bed. I was to ring the buzzer as soon as I woke up the next morning so they could give me the test while I was still rested from a good night‘s sleep. I suppose that I must have been a little anxious at that time and when I woke up and pressed the buzzer the young lady that was attending the health center came in and told me that it was then two o‘clock in the morning. I went back to sleep and slept until morning. The test was then given to me, but due to the shortness of my breath it didn‘t turn out either.

This winter quarter I registered for seventeen hours. I was able to arrange them this quarter so as they all came in the morning. I worked three hours each morning before school and after school was out for the day I was free all afternoon to do my studying. Just after school started this quarter I got a call from the radio station at Richfield, Utah asking me if I would be interested in working for them. Maybe I would have been interested enough to go if it was going to be a permanent position, but it would only last two or three weeks and would cause me to miss that amount of school so I didn‘t accept the job. I never did learn where they had heard about me as I hadn‘t applied there. The man that called was quite anxious for me to go. I was still going with Rosemary and trying to talk her into getting married right away, but she kept saying that she wanted to finish school first. I got a call from a man by the name of Harold Clark, who was at that time employed by the school and also had something to do with the alumni, requesting me to go see him. My fiancee had a roommate that she was friendly with in Phoenix while they were still in high school that was strongly opposed to Rosemary becoming my wife and so she had written to Rosemary‘s parents telling them of my lack of academic ability and getting them worried about their daughter marrying somebody that was far inferior to her intellectually. Rosemary‘s mother had written to Doctor Clark asking him to find out about me. Doctor Clark requested that I give him the names of my professors which I did and he did the checking and found that I was doing much better than had been reported to Rosemary‘s parents. Also, through Doctor Clark, I was able to see the results of my tests and was well pleased with my score on them.

Somehow my mother‘s cousin Lorenzo Hill in Salt Lake found out that I was in Provo and so he wrote to me asking me if I would contact his niece and her husband, Lucille and Lester Martin, who were in Provo where he was the owner and along with his wife Lucille, operated a dental laboratory. I found them and got acquainted with them. They seem to be very good people. Lucille had lived in Slat Lake with her parents and the rest of the family when we had lived there when I was a child, but about the time we moved to Idaho, her father had moved to an area a little north of Seattle, Washington taking his family with him.

The sixteenth day of March was the last day of the winter quarter. In the afternoon I went to Salt Lake for the purpose of copying the records of Lorenzo Hill. I went with him through the evening session of the Temple that same evening and the next day I spent in copying the records that he had that I didn‘t. Sunday, the eighteenth day of March, 1951, I went to Priesthood Meeting and Sunday School with him and in the afternoon I went back to Provo to be able to register the next day.

Monday came registration for spring quarter classes. I was able to get all the classes that I desired. Again I was able to get them all in the morning. I was able to do some more engineering in radio stations. I got a job for part time at radio station KCSU and then one afternoon after I got out of school, the manager of radio station KNEU came looking for me.

It seems as if he needed a man; and the man in charge of the custodial work at the university belonged to the same ward that he did and knew that I had an engineering license and so I was recommended. Mr. Garn Carter, the manager of the radio station had been trying to contact me for several days. He had been around early in the morning before school would have begun, but I was working at the school and wasn‘t available. Again he had been around later in the day but I was away at school. I worked at both radio stations KCSU and KNEU for the rest of the school year. I also continued with my work as custodian in the mornings at the school, but I missed a lot of the work at the school because of the difficulty of my studies. I was able to study while working at the radio stations.

On the thirtieth and thirty first of May, and the first of June were the days of finals for the spring quarter at the university. I stayed in Provo and worked at radio station KCSU about sixty hours per week and a few hours at radio station KNEU until the seventeenth day of June when I moved to Salt Lake where I had obtained a summer job at radio station KUTA. I had to buy a car and obtain a Utah driver‘s license because KUTA was not in walking distance from town. I bought a 1939 Chevrolet sedan.

In Salt Lake I was able to stay at the home of one of my cousins, Agnes Roholt, and her husband James and their family. I spent several days at the KUTA transmitter with the chief engineer Wendell Bell learning about it.

KUTA transmitter was a 5000 watt Gates transmitter. The engineer was required to keep the transmitter functioning as well as record and play back programs. There were three magnacorders by the engineer‘s desk. Each engineer went to the transmitter and stayed for twenty four hours and then had forty eight hours off. During my first week there I worked days along with another one of the engineers to learn about the operation and function of the transmitter. I started to work there on the eighteenth day of June of the year 1951. On the twenty third day of June I drove to Blackfoot, Idaho to attend the Aaron Hill family reunion and returned to Salt Lake the next day. On the twenty fifth day of June I assumed control of the transmitter by myself. The engineer, of which I was one, would go to the transmitter one morning and would stay there until the next morning when he would be relieved by another engineer. During the time I was there I would need to maintain the transmitter and keep it operating. I also needed to record and play back programs. There were times when one of the magna corders would be recording a program and another would be playing a program. That left one magna corder free. The next half hour we would need to record on one and playback on one. To do that we would have a tape all ready to go on the free recorder and another tape would be threaded in two reels laying on the desk.

As soon as the half hour was up and the other programs would need to be put on, the magna corders would be turned off and both reels on the one would be pulled off along with the tape that was on them and the other would be put on in its place. When the announcer had finished with his announcement both of the magna corders were turned on, one on record and the other on playback. We would have about a thirty second station break in which to do this. At midnight the station was turned off and a half hour was spent in housekeeping duties around the transmitter after which we would go to bed and sleep until it was time to turn it on again and be ready when the announcer would sign on at 6:00 A.M. There was a refrigerator there in which we could keep some things to eat and so it was ok. The time for the engineers to change was set at 9:00 and so during the twenty four hours that we were there took parts of two days.

The summer of 1951 I had a lot of free time as I worked one day and was off the next two days. I wasn‘t especially interested in any young woman that year and felt somewhat disappointed after having my engagement to Rosemary broken off and my ring returned. I would walk into town from where I was staying, a distance of about three miles south of the business district, and do research at the genealogical library. I didn‘t find very many records that I didn‘t already have. On the third day of July the library closed for a period of time for vacations. and so my source of research was eliminated temporarily.

The evening of the fifteenth day of August 1951 I went through the Temple again and after I was through I was asked to be a witness for a sealing of a couple who had finally decided to enter the Temple to have their marriage sealed by the Holy Spirit of Promise and having their son sealed to them. It was the first time that I had been in a sealing room in the Temple. I had attended a marriage ceremony before, but to hear the words “For Time and Eternity” was more beautiful than any other wedding could be. After this was over I was asked to attend another sealing, this time to be proxy for a man to be sealed to his parents. A young lady by the name of Isabel Carlisle had returned from a mission not long before and this evening had some of her contacts from the mission field there doing some genealogical research and sealing. This young couple acted as proxies for the parents and Isabel and I knelt across the alter from each other with our hands together and again heard the words “For Time and Eternity.” I think that I would have liked to have become better acquainted with Isabel but I never did see her after that. The next day I again went through the afternoon session of the Temple.

The twenty second day of August of the year 1951 was the last day of work at that radio station that summer. I had seen in the paper where students were needed to help close the tourist season in Yellowstone Park and I had written up there and had work there for the remainder of the season. On the twenty third day of August my work at the transmitter was over and after stopping in town to get my wages I got ready and drove to Sterling, Idaho where my father and mother lived.

I should have listened to my father who tried to persuade me not to go to Yellowstone, but instead I left Monday morning the twenty seventh day of August in the year 1951 going north. I had been north as far as Saint Anthony, Idaho with my father when I was yet a boy, but I had been no farther north. Now I would get an opportunity to go farther north. I drove through Saint Anthony on my way north and from there on it was mainly through range land until I got to Ashton, Idaho. North of Ashton I left the range land and entered a portion of the Targhee National Forest that had become known as Island Park. From then on I was in pine country and it was beautiful. I finally entered the little town of West Yellowstone, Montana where the west gate of Yellowstone Park was. I was given a pass and entered the park. I was to go to West Thumb and to get there I needed to go through Old Faithful. I didn‘t see it erupt at this time, but in a few days I drove back especially to see it. I had heard about it. West Thumb is a group of cabins on the part of Yellowstone Lake that extends like a thumb from the west end of the lake. It is mainly a resort for fishermen. There is a general store there and a post office. A young man who was working there showed me around and introduced me to the employees. The young lady in the post office was from Salt Lake and a nursing student by the name of Verna Jacobson and I assume that she was a Latter-day Saint. She seemed like a really nice girl and I was wishing that I had met her earlier and I possibly could have been better acquainted with her. It seems like beautiful young women have a way of popping into my life at the wrong time. She was then pretty homesick and would have been a wonderful partner for a date, but there wasn‘t much time left until I would be going back to BYU and she would be attending school in Salt Lake. I, therefore, considered it best not to try to become friendly with her and perhaps have one or both of us emotionally hurt when the season ended and we parted.

On several occasions after work I went to the boat dock and procured a row boat and tried my luck at fishing, but I suppose that in life I am not supposed to be a fisherman and all the fish knew it. At any rate they didn‘t give me any encouragement and I always rowed back to shore with the same bait on my hook that I put on in the beginning.

West Thumb is situated in an area of mineral springs and I developed a head ache there that wouldn‘t go away and so I left there on the fourth of September after having been there one week. I had procured a map and studied it to find the shortest route home. The shortest route in miles was through the south gate in Wyoming and then from there into Idaho. I had three passengers as far as Jackson, Wyoming who were employees there that had terminated to return to school. Verna had to stay and work a while longer but she was so homesick when we left that I thought she was going to cry and I wished that she were going with me.

When I stopped in Jackson, Wyoming to discharge my passengers I parked next to three young men who had an Idaho license on their car so I inquired about the road to Idaho Falls. They informed me that the best road to Idaho Falls was south for quite a few miles and then west. Once again I didn‘t heed advice and had read on the road map that the shortest route was west from Jackson and so that is the road that I chose to travel. I broke a fan belt and the car was hot by the time I got to a little place still in Wyoming, named Wilson and there I had it replaced. A few miles west of Wilson I had to shift down to climb a small hill. That didn‘t worry me because in crossing a range of mountains a person climbs hills for a mile or two and then it is downhill for a while. However, seven and a half miles farther along I was still in second gear. I was then on top of Teton Pass, or Jackson Pass whatever the name of it is, and stopped to rest for a few minutes. Another man coming from the west also stopped and informed me that there were only three and one half miles of second gear driving going down the west side. When I got to the bottom I was in the Teton Valley in Idaho and from there I went south through what is known as Pine Creek into Swan Valley. Here at a little place that has the name of Swan Valley I got on the highway east of Idaho Falls. If I had listened to the three young men in Jackson I would have entered this highway a few miles south of Jackson and wouldn‘t have had all that steep mountain driving. I wasn‘t out of the mountains yet, but the rest of the way was good driving. I drove over some dry farm area that is known as Antelope between there and Idaho Falls. I arrived at the home of my parents late in the evening of the fourth of September 1951.

I stayed in Sterling until the first day of October during which time I obtained a little employment but also while I was there I helped father overhaul his car. My Uncle James Austin Ransom was at the home of mother and father when he was called into the eternal world on the seventeenth day of May in the year 1950. Before he died he signed the title to his car and so after he died mother and father acquired the car without a court order. It was a 1942 Mercury coupe and would be a pretty fair car for them. It had one annoying feature, however, and that was that no matter where they were and a little cloud appeared in the sky, that would give it an excuse to get wet and quit running. At one time I was with father and mother going towards Lava Hot Springs from Soda Springs when a small cloud appeared and the car decided to rest for a while.

While I was at home my brother in law Delton Hawker decided he wanted some slabs to do some building around his place. Father and I along with Delton took his two trucks and went to a sawmill for them. To get to the sawmill we went east of Idaho Falls and ended up in Star Valley, Wyoming. We went down the valley until we came to a little place called Smoot and from there the road went east up in the mountains to a place called La Barge Creek where the sawmill was located. It was farther up in the mountains than previously reported and by the time that we got loaded and back down out of the mountains all the service stations were closed and one of the trucks was out of gas. We spent the night by the side of the road in Alpine, a small place on the border of Idaho and Wyoming, with a small fire going so we could keep warm. We got some gasoline the next morning and drove home O.K.

On the first day of October 1951 I again left for Prove, Utah. I had decided to go into the physical sciences rather than to take radio production and the year before I had taken classes that would orient my studies toward the physical sciences. Radio engineering is one of the sciences but they cover a lot larger group of studies than just radio. I had obtained a room at the same address on North University that I had the year before. This quarter I registered for calculus, physics, and because I could not take any more classes in physics at the same time and I needed more hours I registered for a class in archaeology and two classes in religion, the Old Testament and Biography of LDS leaders. I again worked at the school at the same job that I had the previous year and again worked in the early morning hours. Sometime during the year the full time janitor that I, along with about half a dozen other young men I worked with, decided to go to greener pastures and left employment at the school for the same type of work in one of the wards in Provo. Instead of replacing him right away I was given the key to the building so that we could get in and do the work that we had been doing. He was gone several months and then decided that the greener pastures that he left for were not so green and so he returned to his employment at the school. Also I was again able to work at engineering at radio station KNEU on weekends.

I worked weekends at KNEU for a while and then they decided they needed me more. They would have liked me to work every afternoon but my schedule at the school wouldn‘t allow it and I could only work Monday and Wednesday afternoons. About the first of November the station manager, Garn Carter, asked me if I could type. As I didn‘t consider myself a good typist, although I had been practicing every time I got a chance, including the time that I was there at the station, I told him I didn‘t. A few days after that he asked me to take over the station log and told me that he had noticed that the lady that was doing it would all the time be coming to me for help.

This made it so that I had to go to the station every afternoon, but some of the time I was only there long enough to type the log for the next day. I also wrote some of the spot announcements that were given over the air from the station. Garn Carter later told me that I was the only one that they had typing that log that could keep it straight.

During the fall quarter I had become interested in a sweet nineteen year old girl from Seattle, Washington and had several dates with her. She had a mother who was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but her father was not a member. This young woman, by the name of Lorraine Smith, had been baptized not long before this and after being baptized she had given up tea, which she told me that she really enjoyed. She was a tall slender girl with dark brown hair. About the only thing she had in common with Rosemary was that she also had blue eyes. I saw her quite regular for a while and then didn‘t see as much of her until after Christmas. She told me that there had been a few times in her life when she had been tempted to have a sexual experience but when this had happened that she was prevented from it by the intervention of the Lord. It happened the same way with me and I also was stopped in moments of great temptation with her as well as before with Rosemary.

At this time I was working about twenty five hours per week at the school and about the same amount of time at the radio station. A new national network was trying to get started, called Liberty Broadcasting Company, and the station became affiliated with it. Because of this the station purchased a tape recorder and did some recording and playback of programs. It was also discovered that the announcer could put his spots on the tape and I could run the station alone by playing music and the announcements and station breaks that had been previously recorded I was left alone at the station a large part of the time after that. That year I had to work on Thanksgiving day at the radio station. All the station personnel were invited for Thanksgiving dinner at the home of one of the owners and as far as I knew everyone except me attended it and I was left to keep the station operating. I wasn‘t forgotten, though, and the station manager brought me a plate of food that they had prepared and so I enjoyed a Thanksgiving feast while working.

On the seventh day of December 1951 the campus branch had an excursion to the Salt Lake Temple and so I arranged to go with them.

A bus was chartered and was pretty well crowded. I met some very good students on this trip. Also during this quarter I met a student at school who gave me the name of his sister in Mesa Arizona who was working on the Lamb genealogy. She is Mrs. Joe Stradling and I understood that her husband was in the Temple presidency in Mesa. However, in writing to her I found that she didn‘t have any more records than I did on the Lamb line. I sure hope that someday someway that the records of my ancestors will be made available to me.

I spent Christmas day in the year 1951 at home in Sterling, Idaho but had to get back to work at the radio station on the first day of January 1952. The next morning school was to start and I had contacted a cold, probably by the changes of climate when I went to Sterling and again when I returned. I was really happy to have the work, though.

I started seeing Lorraine Smith again. She was from an entirely different background than I was and was twelve years younger than I. She was attending the BYU studying music and was a very good pianist. I would have liked very much to have made her mine. She at that time had hopes of being married in the Salt Lake Temple. She told me that she had been engaged once before but her father and mother were opposed to the young man and some way the engagement was broken up. I was not able to take her to every social event that she would have liked to have gone to because I would have to work some of those evenings. She also would go out to the radio station with me at times while I did my work. Some Sunday mornings I would take her by the hand and together we would walk up in the foothills overlooking Provo and enjoy a very beautiful and peaceful time together. At other times we would go for a ride and at times we would drive to Salt Lake and there spend some time at the capitol or the zoo, but most of all we enjoyed Temple Square.

On Mother‘s day in the year 1952 I put a ring on her finger and we started to make plans for a marriage to take place in the Salt Lake Temple the next September. She was a much sweeter person than Rosemary and I considered myself blessed to have her acquaintance. On the thirty first of May 1952 I had my last test at the university. I had written to several radio stations to see about summer employment and had accepted a job for the summer at KID in Idaho Falls, Idaho and also I would be working at the other radio station in that city, KIFI, while they were on vacation, [as well.] In the afternoon I headed for Sterling. I had Lorraine with me as far as Salt Lake and there we spent several hours together before I had to leave and she caught a bus back to Provo. Her father and mother would be down to Prove in a few days to pick her up and take her home for the summer. About a month before this I drove to Sterling with Lorraine with me so that she could meet the rest of the family.

I started to work at radio station KID on Monday the third day of June 1952. That day there was another engineer at the station with me. The transmitter was an RCA 5000 watt transmitter and was non-directional during the day but at night the power was reduced to 1000 watts and went directional. There were three antennas and only one of them was used during the day, but at night all three were used and by the phasing that was fed to them the proper directional effect was obtained. KUTA in Salt Lake was directional all the time and had two antennas. The duties that I had while at KID were about the same that I had at radio station KUTA in Salt Lake the year before. There were three magna corders in the room and there was also one recording turntable. Most of the programs for playback went on tape because they were not required after use while the disk recorder was used to record some of the spot announcements that would need to be given more than once. Also the disk recorder was used if there was anything wrong with one of the magna corders. In addition to being a radio broadcasting station a weather station was set up here with the engineer required to measure the rainfall during a twenty-four hour period and also the minimum and maximum temperatures that had occurred during the twenty four hour period. To measure the rainfall there was a funnel that was the size of the can and so when there was ten inches of rain in the can it meant that there was one inch fell. There was also a calibrated stick to measure it with. Also we were supplied with minimum and maximum reading thermometers that had to be read and set every day. A report had to be mailed to the weather bureau in Boise every day.

I worked at this station for a couple of weeks and then went over to station KIFI. This was a small 250 watt station and had a Gates transmitter. I also had to record and playback programs at this station. With the Gates transmitters all the tuning was done by two way motors and so to tune the station required holding a switch one way to increase the frequency of the resonant LC circuits and the other way to decrease the frequency. Of course the station was given a frequency to operate on and was crystal controlled so the oscillator couldn‘t be changed. Then again when a station is running properly it doesn‘t need constant tuning of the various amplifying stages.

Every few days I wrote a letter to Lorraine, but never did receive an answer. She had told me before that her father and mother were very jealous of her and didn‘t want to see her married. Also she indicated to me that she didn‘t especially want me in this life but wanted me as a companion in the next life.

Radio stations have a habit of being on the air every day during the week and Sunday was no exception. My days off alternated as did my working hours.

On the seventeenth day of June that year I went through the Idaho Falls Temple as proxy for John Randall making the fifteenth time that I have been through the Temple as near as I can recall. I hope that the people that I have gone through for will recognize me in the hereafter and come introduce themselves to me as I can‘t recall just who I went through for and if I did recall their names I would not be able to recognize them by sight. On the third day of July of that year I again went through in behalf of John Cooper. One the fifth day of July in the year 1952 when I returned home from work there was a package there from Lorraine. It was the ring that I had given her and also the letters that I had sent her, I guess that our engagement was broken at least for this life. We were engaged just two months. There was no explanation and I don‘t know whether the choice was Lorraine‘s or if her parents made the decision for her. I can always hope that she meant what she said about the next life.

Ricks College in Rexburg, Idaho was at this time beginning a four year course and I didn‘t feel as if I wanted to go to Provo again because it would bring back fond memories of the times that I had been with Lorraine. I don‘t know why breaking up with Loraine should have hurt me any worse than when I broke up with Rosemary, but it did somehow.

On the fifteenth day of July I drove to Rexburg to see about the school there and was given encouragement. It is a school that is also sponsored by the LDS church the same as BYU.

The next two days were my days off from work and on Wednesday the sixteenth I again went through the Temple. This time as proxy for Seth Giezendanner. After the Temple session I drove to Sterling to see if I could make up my mind about what to do. A pure sweet girl can have a great deal of influence on the life of the man who loves her and I began to wonder if I was just a little too strict about my morals. I saw the Stake President at this time and suggested to him that I would like an opportunity to fulfill a mission. I am not sure if my desire to fill a mission at this time was genuine or if it came about as a consequence of not being able to share the companionship of the girl I had a great love for. One or two of the engineers at radio station KID were talking of quitting in the fall and it may have been possible to have worked there and go to Rexburg to finish my schooling.

A salesman of radio station transmitting supplies came around and in talking to him I asked him if he knew of any station that needed an engineer. He took my name and promised to do me some good if anyone inquired of him.

This salesman told me about a station in a town in Montana that had a college and I could possibly complete my education there. It was a college sponsored by the Catholic church, however, I didn‘t especially desire to go to a private school unless it was one sponsored by my own religion. I did have an offer to go to Havre, Montana to try for an engineering position in a radio station there and when I talked to the station manager by phone he invited me up to spend the week end with him. There are several reasons that I didn‘t go. One is that Havre is in the northern part of Montana, up near the Canadian border, and so it would be extremely cold there in the winters and I didn‘t like cold weather.

About this time station KID acquired their television license and so the chief engineer would be busy with it which would leave the radio station short one man, and I was asked if I would like to stay and work there on a permanent basis. I accepted the engineering job at station KID in Idaho Falls, Idaho. The transmitter where I was working was about eight miles northeast of Idaho Falls and just a mile or two north of the little community of Iona.

I had always liked classical music and to fill in some classes at BYU the spring before I had taken two music classes. One was music appreciation and the other was fundamentals of music. Now I enrolled for some private instruction on the piano and began to learn to play it. The hours were flexible and could be adapted to my work schedule. The man gave a lesson every day for five days per week for a half hour and I could practice there as long as I wanted and so I enrolled. At the end of three weeks he told me that I had accomplished as much as a child would do in nine months. All the time music kept reminding me of Lorraine and how much I missed her. I began to take piano lessons on the eighth day of September in the year 1952 and took them for two months before I found that I had to drop them because of some added expense on my car. I had hopes of starting them again soon. The family where I was then staying was a family that had been neighbors to us when we lived on the reservation when I was a boy. By now all of their children were married and had established homes of their own and so the man and woman were there alone in a small house. I got to live with them and they treated me like one of the family. She had worked in the linen room at the Idaho Falls Temple and had become acquainted with a young lady that worked in the kitchen. She saw this young lady one day and asked her if she would like to meet me and got an encouraging answer. I was away at work at the time but when I came home she told me about this young lady. On Friday the twenty first day of November 1952 I called her and arranged for a blind date that evening to take her to a dance that was given by one of the wards.

I really didn‘t care for dancing but here was an opportunity for some companionship again. When I went to pick her up I found a girl who was blond and quite short and had blue eyes and so she reminded me of the previous young lady that I knew from Phoenix, Arizona, and that her name was Vernessa Skinner. She was the same girl that had attracted my eye a couple of years before when I was with my father in the Temple and we were having lunch in the lunch room when she walked by to clean off some of the tables. She was then working in the lunch room in the Temple.

I saw a lot of Vernessa during the next few days. Maybe it was because I needed companionship that I saw so much of her and maybe it was because I had so much free time. I found the time to go through the Temple in Idaho Falls twice during the month of November making a total of twenty times as near as I could remember that I had been through. Vernessa had also been through the Temple and so we started off with at least some things in common. As I kept seeing her I grew to like her a lot and finally it turned to love and a desire to have her as an eternal companion and so on Saturday the sixth day of December in the year 1952 I asked her if she would become my eternal companion and she accepted and began to wear my ring.

In November of the year 1952 the bishop called me and asked me if I would like to go on a mission. I told him that I would and it was arranged that I would be supported by the seventies quorum of the American Falls Stake. In all my moving around I had not as yet established a home of my own and my Church membership was still in the Sterling Ward with my parents membership. The seventies quorum had been organized since the stake was created about five years previous and to get enough men to make a quorum many elders were called and ordained seventies. Many of these men had been in elders quorums with me in Springfield, Sterling, and Aberdeen.

As I was working in Idaho Falls and wouldn‘t be able to get to Aberdeen at the time of stake conference to be interviewed by one of the general authorities the stake president asked me to try to arrange an interview with one of the general authorities when conference was held in Idaho Falls. I missed being interviewed in the South Idaho Falls Stake when a conference was held there to the disappointment of my stake president, as he had brought some more young people up there to be interviewed that day, but when the North Idaho Falls Stake had their stake conference I was there. This was held the first or second Sunday in December and the general authority that was in attendance that day was S. Dilworth Young who was a member of the First Council of Seventy. After meetings were over that Sunday I was able to be interviewed by him. There was a young lady and a young man from Idaho Falls also interviewed the same day.

I met the young lady a few times after that and learned that she had received a call to go to Hawaii. President Young asked me if I had a girl friend and I told him that I had been engaged a couple of times before and had lost both girls and that I presently had a girl friend that had promised to become my companion. Perhaps on account of my age he told me that to get married and raise a family was a greater mission than was preaching the gospel but because I wanted to go that he would recommend me. On the twelfth day of December of that year I drove to Sterling and found that a mission call was waiting for me and I would be going to the Western Canadian Mission. I was to enter the mission on the twenty first day of January of the year 1953. That made it possible for me to spend Christmas Season with my promised companion and my parents, at least part of the day. I wanted to get married before I went on my mission, but mother wanted me to wait until I returned home I guess that it was better to wait.

On the thirtieth day of December in the year 1952 the Temple in Idaho Falls was open for their annual holiday opening. They were to have one session and I got there pretty early. There was enough people [who] came so that the session was going to have to be divided into two sessions. I was there early enough to go on the first session and I would have gone on it except father and mother also came that day and were too late to go on the first session, and also two of my friends from Sterling. Rowayne Anderson and Marilyn Herbert, were getting married and I would be able to attend their wedding so I waited to go on the next session. The next session was overcrowded too so the marriages would need to wait for the third session. We finally got out late in the afternoon after I had been in the Temple about eight hours and getting only one session.

The morning of the seventh day of January in the year 1953 found me in the Temple again as proxy for Andrew Lugger. I had now completed twenty two endowments in the Temples at Idaho Falls, Idaho, and Salt Lake City, Utah.

On the twentieth day of January I left Sterling for Salt Lake City, Utah. I had worked at KID until a few days before this and had spent much time with my promised companion. I stayed the night of the twentieth of January with my cousin Agnes Roholt and the next morning I entered the mission home. We had a pretty busy schedule for the next week, but we also had some time in which to make a few purchases. I made some friends here and there was one young man from California that I associated with quite a bit. Father and mother and also Vernessa came to Salt Lake to be with me for a while before I left for Canada.

Before I left for the mission home President Ralphs of the American Falls Stake asked me to go into the Church Office building and see if I could be ordained a Seventy. I went and talked to President S. Dilworth Young and told him what the stake president had said. He advised me that it was Church policy for personnel to be presented to their stake priesthood before any ordinations could be performed and inasmuch as I was being assisted by the seventies quorum he asked me if it would make any psychological difference to me and I told him it wouldn‘t. I left his office and returned to the mission home still an Elder. The next day, however, the twenty seventh day of January 1953, there was a message waiting for me at the mission home after I had had my daily routine of classes. [The message stated that it] wanted me to go to the Church Office Building. I went and entered the office of President Oscar Ammon Kirkham and was informed that I was to be ordained a Seventy. I told him about the conversation that I had the day before with President Young. President Kirkham indicated that President Ralphs had been in communication with him and he also asked me if there was any reason that the members of the stake priesthood would not sustain me being a Seventy. I replied that I was not aware of anything that would cause a negative vote. With that he left his office and in a few minutes came back and told me that it was all right with President Young and he ordained me a Seventy preparatory to me leaving on my mission. On my way from the office of President Kirkham his secretary handed me a card with my line of genealogy of the priesthood of Sevently.

• Wendell Hill Ransom was ordained a seventy on the twenty seventh day of January, 1953, by Oscar Ammon Kirkham of the First Council of the Sevently.
• Oscar Ammon Kirkham was ordained a Seventy the twenty sixth day of February, 1906 by Joseph W. Mcmurrin.
• Joseph W. Mcmurrin was ordained a Seventy the twenty first day of April, 1884 by Royal Barney.
• Royal Barney was ordained a Seventy in the year 1835 by Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon.
• Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery received the Melchizedek Priesthood in 1829 from Peter, James, and John.
• Peter, James, and John were ordained by the Lord Jesus Christ: (St John 15:16.)

PART 4 — MISSIONARY EXPERIENCES

If you would like to read the day-by-day experiences of Wendell Hill Ransom
serving in the Western Canadian Mission of the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, please click here.

PART 5

I returned from my mission in October of the year 1953, after having been gone for a period of nine months. I had an extremely bad cough when I was in the colder parts of Canada and it was made worse by my exerting any physical activity by walking. Probably because of this condition among others I was not able to stay for two years on my mission. I came home by bus and arrived in Idaho Falls early in the morning. I went over to Vernessa‘s home getting there before she needed to go to work that day. After she got off work, we were able to spend some time together. It happened to be American Falls Stake Temple day and I saw one of the neighbors of father and mother and was able to ride with him to Sterling.

The next few weeks were busy ones for me in preparing to get married and also trying to find some work. I was hopeful of getting work as a broadcast engineer. At this time of year the potato and sugar beet harvest was in progress and I was able to get a little work during harvest season. I also wrote some letters to various radio stations hoping to find employment. I did get an offer from a radio station in Muskogee, Oklahoma which I did accept. I did not want to go down there until I had the opportunity to take my fiancee through the Temple.

On the twenty fourth day of November, 1953, I was able to ride to Idaho Falls with a neighbor who was going up there. We went in the afternoon and I went over to Vernessa‘s place where I spent the night. Early the next morning I took Vernessa and we walked to the Temple and made preparations to be married. Vernessa had already asked President William Killpack, President of the Idaho Falls Temple, to perform the ceremony. Father and Mother were there along with several of my sisters and their husbands. Also, Vernessa‘s parents were there along with several of her siblings and their spouses. After the ceremony, we went to Vernessa‘s parents‘ home where we had dinner and in the afternoon we went to a studio and had a wedding picture taken. In the evening was a reception. After the reception, Vernessa and I rode to Blackfoot with Father and Mother, who were on their way home to Sterling, and there we stayed at a hotel where we spent our wedding night.

We woke quite early on Thanksgiving morning, the day after our wedding, and walked out to where Vernessa‘s sister and her husband, Verda and James Clark lived. We had arranged for my sister, Elma, and her husband Curtis Worthen to meet us there and from there we went with them to Sterling where we had Thanksgiving dinner with my father and mother.

President Killpack had told me at the time that he married us that if I wanted to work in the Temple there that he would give me a job. I know that he would have liked to have kept Vernessa there.

The day after Thanksgiving we went to Salt Lake City. My brother in law and his wife, Ren and Laurel Wilkinsen, drove down with us. Father and mother were with us also. I had disposed of my car when I went on my mission and so didn‘t have one at that time. That day I went to see some personnel at radio station KUTA. They had at that time acquired a television license and were then building a transmitter and I was hired there. I then sent a telegram to the station in Oklahoma telling them that I would not be able to go down there to work. We then found an apartment in walking distance from town.

I then returned to Idaho with my new bride and the next Sunday, the twenty ninth day of November, I returned to Salt Lake on the bus with enough of our utensils to get by for a while. Vernessa hadn‘t yet terminated her employment at the Temple and needed to be there for two more weeks while I worked in the shop at station KUTV helping to construct transmitting equipment. The transmitter was to be constructed on a peak in the Oquirra range of mountains. There were two other television stations in Salt lake. The first one to be constructed was KDYL-TV and then also came KSL-TV. At first the transmitting was done from the top of one of the highest buildings in Salt Lake, but later they moved the transmitting stations out to peaks in the Oquirra range of mountains.

KUTV was owned by a group of people that had in the neighborhood of twelve or thirteen radio stations and was constructing TV broadcast equipment for all of them. Each one of them had an engineer working in the shop. I was at first put on the payroll of KIFI-TV in Idaho Falls, Idaho, but later on I was changed to the payroll of KGEM-TV in Boise, Idaho.

I lived alone for two weeks and then one night after Vernessa had terminated her employment at the Idaho Falls Temple, her brother Dean Skinner brought her to Salt Lake City so that she could be with her husband once again. Our life together began then, although we had enjoyed a few days of married life two weeks before this.

Our apartment was a two room furnished apartment at the rear end and up a flight of stairs of a building at 420 South Fifth East in Salt Lake City, Utah. It was not an ideal place to live, but it was all right for us at the time. Next door to the apartment was the Ninth Ward meeting place and our Church membership records were sent for and arrived in the Ninth Ward of the Liberty Stake. We began to take an active part in the ward. The first Sunday that I was at that home I went out the door to try to find the Church house. I had looked in the servicemen‘s directory and had located one just two blocks south of where we lived and so I started to go to that one.

Just at that time the ward clerk arrived and we introduced ourselves. He was a large man by the name of Govert Vandermeydan and was also a Seventy. We went to meeting together that day. The ward population was right around nine hundred and it was a highly transient ward with many people coming in from foreign countries, especially the Netherlands, and living in that ward until they could find another home. Many of the people would come into the ward and by the time that their membership records had arrived they would already have been moved out. The ward clerk told me at the end of the year that we lived there that there had been a turnover of twelve hundred in the ward.

There were three presidents of the Tenth Quorum of Seventies living in that ward. The Senior President was a man by the name of Cornelius Asmus. He was an older man and at that time was living alone as his children were all married and had families of their own and his wife was in a rest home. I met her once when I was there with President Asmus. He told me that along with other Church members he was scheduled to come to America on the ship “Titanic” but because of the foresight of the mission president at the time that the reservations of all the Church members in Holland were canceled. The ship “Titanic” was built to be an unsinkable ship and it is reported that the captain of the ship had made the statement that “Even God could not sink this ship.” The words of the captain were in the steamship office window one day when the mission president walked by, and so he went in and canceled the reservations of all the Church members and then sent word to them that they would not be leaving on that ship. It is history what happened to it.

The other members of the presidency of the quorum that were living in the ward were Don Austin and Peter Nordhoff. The bishop‘s name was Silas Burton.

From this time the history of my wife and I are the same as we are so closely associated together. The only difference is that my activities are masculine, and in all of them I have had the support of my wife, and her activities were feminine.

I taught the Seventies Quorum a few times. I was also asked to be the first assistant in the Genealogical Organization. The chairman was a High Priest and the second assistant was an Elder. The chairman had sold his home in Salt Lake and bought a farm at Vernal, Utah and while he was waiting until he could move there, he had moved into the Ninth Ward. He finally moved out of the ward and I was sustained as chairman. At this time the Genealogical Organization was treated as an auxiliary organization although genealogy has always been a function of the Priesthood. It later was taken out of the classification of auxiliary organization and treated as a function of the Priesthood.

The ward had movies at the meeting house every Friday evening under the direction of the Seventies Quorum, and Govert Vandermeydan ran the projector. He asked me to assist him and so I went over there and helped him. Finally, I was left to run it alone a few times. Also, at one time it became necessary to sustain a new quorum secretary and I was asked to fill that position. There were three groups in the quorum and I needed to take the three reports each month and make a quorum report from them. I also needed to take minutes at all monthly quorum meetings, along with the roll, and also attend and take minutes at the meetings of the quorum presidents. During some of these meetings with the quorum presidents we had our wives with us.

During the few months that we lived in that apartment at 420 South Fifth East in Salt Lake City, Vernessa was asked to work in the Primary Organization which she did for a while.

We went out to visit my cousin, Agnes Roholt one evening and while we were there we walked across the street to a car dealer. It was late in the day and the place was closed except a salesman was there in the used car department. I mentioned to him that I would like to have a car but I didn‘t have any money for the down payment and he told me that I would need to contact the owner of the dealership to make that kind of a deal. Just then the owner drove up and we talked for a few minutes and then he told me to pick out the one that I wanted. I got a 1947 Plymouth six cylinder sedan. While we were still living in this apartment we found out that we were to provide a home for a spirit who would soon be coming to the earth. Vernessa was especially sick during this time. We were able to get the north half of a duplex at 441 South Fifth East. It was because Vernessa was so sick with the coming spirit that she had to leave her job in the Primary of this ward. During the time that we lived in the upstairs apartment, I had found other employment and had left the TV station. I was now employed at Hill Air Force Base installing and testing radio equipment. Some of the time I worked day shift and at other times I had other shifts.

On the eleventh day of January in the year 1955, one of the spirits that was present in the pre-existence made his way into our home. Vernessa had a hard time with him and was very sick. She developed toxemia poisoning and was in the hospital several days. Also, the baby was born with both feet turned in, a condition known as club feet. After we brought him home, an orthopedist came to the house and put casts on both of his feet. He needed to be in these casts for four and one half months. Over the years he was to have had four operations on his one leg and a spline was finally put in his leg and left there in order to hold it straight.

It may be that at some future date that he will need another operation to have it removed. This boy was named Garth LRay Ransom and given the name by his father, Wendell Hill Ransom. To be better taken care of than her husband was able to so, Vernessa and Garth went to stay with her sister, Rhea Clark at Squirrel, Idaho for a while. It was after they returned to their home in Salt Lake that Garth was blessed by his father in the Ninth Ward in the Liberty Stake. When Garth was born and due to the time that Vernessa had with him, the doctor told Vernessa not to have any more [children] and so all the children that have been born since then were against doctor‘s orders. Sometime after Garth was born, another spirit apparently tried to enter our home but due to being malformed, decided to wait for a more perfect body. At least that is what we think occurred. We didn‘t go to the doctor to verify this but Vernessa apparently had a miscarriage after she was about a month into pregnancy. Meanwhile, the boy we had was growing and became very jealous of his father paying attention to any other child. When his mother would have him and I would pick up any other child, he would start fussing until I put down the other child and took him.

About a couple of months later we had a positive indication that another spirit was to enter our home. In the fall of 1955, Vernessa‘s father and mother were visiting us and we decided to buy a home. We went over to an area known as Rose Park where new homes were being built and saw one that was for sale. Vernessa‘s parents would like to help Vernessa get a home because she had helped them out before when her father was unable to work, so her father made the down payment on it. The home was located at 1296 Nocturne Drive in Salt Lake. That November, we moved into our new home.

The home that we got was a three bedroom home. It had a large living room and a kitchen and dining area was one room. There was no door between this area and the living room, but a wall was extended about half way to the front of the house. The house was on the east side of the street and had a large window on the west side that would let in the afternoon sun, and in the summer the living room would get plenty hot because of this window. Due to the high water table in that area, homes couldn‘t have basements. There was however, about a four foot crawl space under the house with a sheet of plastic covering the whole area. A General Electric furnace was in about the center of this crawl space. A utility room was built on the south side of the house with the door opening to the east. The entrance to the kitchen was also in this same area, but on the south side of the kitchen. The utility room had in it the water heater and also a drain when we drained our washer. The entrance to the crawl area was through the floor of the utility room.

Along came the cold month of December of that year. I was on the swing shift at Hill Air Force Base and when I arrived home just about one A.M. my wife and infant son were in bed trying to keep warm. The furnace had gone out. I took a flash light and went down into the crawl space and reset the circuit breaker on the furnace. The next night when I arrived home the same thing had happened. This time I took a screw driver with me and found my way to the furnace. The furnace blower was set to come on when the temperature in the heat accumulator reached one hundred and fifty degrees and at this heat the relay controlling the flame would also operate causing too much current to flow throughout the circuit breaker tripping it. There were three settings at which the heat accumulator would energize at. One of them was ninety degrees and the other was at one hundred and twenty degrees. I turned the thermostat so that the blower would come on when the temperature reached ninety degrees and we didn‘t have any trouble after that. We had acquired a small electric range when we moved over to this house. In the previous two places that we lived we had gas ranges. Vernessa had not used gas before we were married because there was no natural gas available where she had lived before.

Ever since Garth made his entrance into the family we had to be very careful about what we fed him. We tried to give him a formula that the doctor recommended, but Garth couldn‘t hold it down. The doctor then recommended one special brand of evaporated milk and it wouldn‘t work either. We tried another brand until we found one that would stay down and so we stayed with it. Also, in making his formula , if we used water from the hot water faucet it wouldn‘t agree with him, but we could get water from the cold water faucet and heat it and mix his formula with it and it would be all right. This unusual stomach was also evident when he got older. If we were going anywhere and he missed eating, he would turn sick to his stomach. Also, if he ate anything that he was not accustomed to eating, he would turn sick to his stomach.

The month of May in they year 1956 brought another trip to the hospital for Vernessa. This time for a girl that was born on the fourth day of May. We had found a place for Garth to stay for a few days with my cousin Agnes Roholt and I would go out there every day to see him. Even at the age of just over one year he seemed to know what was happening and he didn‘t fuss to be with me. Also, after mother and daughter were home from the hospital he didn‘t seem a bit jealous when I held his little sister. She was blessed by her father and given the name Wendella but was known to all who knew her as Wendy. At this time we had one crib in one corner of our bedroom where Garth slept and one in the opposite corner where Wendy slept. One night Garth woke up screaming and after that time he would never sleep in that corner of the room.

At an early age, Wendy developed the habit of sitting on the floor and rocking back and forth. She would rock forward until her head just about touched the floor between her knees and then rock back until her head just about touched the floor behind her. Also, during these early years, Garth had a little toy truck that he would play with. One night when I got home from work, Wendy was fussing and wouldn‘t take her bottle of milk. I looked in her mouth and saw the hub cap off Garth‘s toy truck stuck to the roof of her mouth. When I removed it, she could drink her milk all right. I am just glad that she didn‘t swallow it.

Rose Park at that time was a fast growing area for young families. We were in the Rose Park Fifth Ward when we first moved there. The next year the ward was divided and we were put in the Rose Park Sixth Ward. The following year found us put in the Rose Park Seventh ward by another division. I was asked to be group secretary of the Seventies Quorum and acted in that position for some time. During the time that we lived in the Ninth Ward and all the time that we lived in the Rose Park area, I was active in Temple attendance. I also would go to the genealogical library in search of my ancestry.

Vernessa was not asked to take a part in primary or anything else in the Rose Park area for which we were glad because she now had two children to take care of and we were expecting another one. He arrived on the eighteenth day of June in the year 1957, also in the LDS hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah. The birth was quite difficult and Vernessa had been in labor for five days. Finally, it came time to take her to the hospital and while I was in the waiting room, I received a page to the telephone. Vernessa‘s father and mother had come down and were over at the neighbor‘s where they called from. I had put an emergency key outside that day and I told them where it was. The neighbor then went over with them and they found it and was able to get in.

This child was blessed by his father also, and given the name of Robert Alma Ransom. He turned out to be the most robust of any of our children. He would embarrass his mother by always singing whenever she would take him to town and be walking down the street with him. It made everybody stop and look at him. Also, he seemed to be the most intelligent of any of our children.

A short time after this I found other employment closer to home. Sperry Gyroscope Company had opened a division in Salt Lake City in 1956 and I had applied there for work. It was in November of the year 1957 that I finally started to work there. I quit Hill Air Force Base on the fourteenth day of November and started with Sperry Gyroscope on the seventeenth day of November, 1957 which was a Monday. The Salt Lake division was then known as SUEL (Sperry Utah Engineering Laboratory) and was at that time working on the Sergeant missile. At first I was in incoming test.

The next child that came into our home was a little girl who was also blessed by her father and given the name of Barbara Ann Ransom. She grew to have a nice personality although when things didn‘t go exactly as she wanted them to, she could display a temper. Her date of birth was the sixteenth day of August in the year 1958. A few days later, I brought her and her mother home from the hospital and to the house at 1296 Nocturne Drive in Rose Park. At one time while she and her mother were still in the hospital and feeding time came around, Barbara wasn‘t brought in to her mother. This was of some concern to Vernessa and so she asked the nurse about it. She was told that Barbara had been born with some dry blood in her stomach and was at that time in the incubator but that she would be all right.

Rose Park was in the northwest corner of the city of Salt Lake City, and just north of there a few miles, in North Salt Lake, were several oil refineries and just about every evening the smell of sulfur would be awful strong. There was also a hot mineral spring in the north part of the city of Salt Lake which had been made into a swimming resort and the output of this spring ran uncovered a short distance north of Rose park. Also, the area north of Rose Park had a number of stagnant pools of water which were favorite breeding areas for mosquitoes, and during the latter part of the summer, they all seemed to congregate in the populated area of Rose Park. Every evening during this season, the mosquito abatement department would send their fogger along all the streets in the Rose park areas to try to hold down the population of mosquitoes. Maybe they did succeed to some extent, but the entrance of cooler weather in the fall is what brought the decrease in the numbers of mosquitoes.

We finally put our home up for sale with the provision that we wouldn‘t sell it until we had another to move into. The real estate agent showed us quite a few homes that were for sale. There was finally one that we liked that was owned by the real estate company, but it was not yet connected to the sewer, although the sewer had been in that area for several years. It was a two bedroom home with a finished basement. We indicated that we would like to acquire it if it was connected to the sewer. It took the real estate company several months to decide to connect it to the sewer. The home had previously been owned by two different families and was seven years old when we acquired it. The last family had traded it in on a new home that the real estate company had built. It had been vacant for several months when we got it. We moved in about the middle of March in the year 1959. The home that we had now bought was at 2996 East 3215 South and had a Salt Lake address although it was not inside of the city limits. We now had our Church membership records transferred to the Canyon Rim Second Ward in the Canyon Rim Stake. This stake was created a short time before this as a result of a division of the East Mill Creek Stake. Just in back of our lot was a cinder block wall that was separating our property from a lumber yard. There were also several stores of different kinds along that street, which was Thirty Third South, and a fairly busy street. Our front door opened to the north and our rear door opened to the west into an attached garage. The garage had the large door opening toward the norh and a small door opened to the south into our back yard.

To the east of us about a mile and a half away was the Wasatch range of mountains. In this area the mountains ran in a northwesterly direction and so passed to the north of us about two miles. About a mile south was a stream that came out of the mountains and it is known as Mill Creek. It is a very beautiful canyon and there are quite a few areas that have been built up into picnic grounds up that canyon. We have been known to drive up the canyon in the evening with a barbecue and some hamburger in our car and while we were there we would cook the hamburger on the barbecue and have a picnic. Also, up the canyon was a boy scout camp that was known as Tracy Wigwam. It was a fenced in area though, and not open to the public.

Sometime during the summer while we were sleeping one night, Vernessa woke up quite disturbed. I have been interested in gathering genealogy and this night she said that a man came to her and tried to give her a book which she wouldn‘t accept and she even knocked it out of his hands. I had her describe the man to me, and she did so in enough detail that it sounded as if it could have been my grandfather who died in 1941, long before Vernessa came into my life. It could be that when she refused to take the book, that it was given to somebody else to do the work. I do know that enough additional information on my mother‘s ancestry was found to connect it into a line going back to Adam and Eve. I later was able to acquire this lineage even though I didn‘t do the research on it myself. It only required about eight or ten generations from where we had it.

Vernessa also woke up a few times with tears in her eyes and told me that another young woman had appeared and said that she wanted me. I assured my wife not to worry about it as she was the one that I had chosen for my wife and I had no intention of letting another young woman take me away from her. It may be that some day there may be another one or more women united with me for eternity but if it is so, it will only be with Verness‘a consent.

It seems as if when Vernessa was a smaller girl that she picked some flowers belonging to a neighbor to take home and give to her mother. Instead of being happy to receive the flowers, her sister told Vernessa that the neighbor could have her put in jail for that. Vernessa was pretty frightened and for a long time after we were married, she worried about it. Also, at times it would seem to her as if she were shrinking. I never did find out what was the cause of such sudden feelings to come upon her and it took many years but these moments became less frequent and finally seemed to disappear.

On the eighth day of September in the year of 1959, another boy left his home with other spirits and decided to enter our family. He also was born at the LDS hospital in Salt Lake City, and was blessed by his father and given the name of David Joseph Ransom. The David being named after his great grandfather; David Hill, and the Joseph being after his grandfather; Joseph Alma Skinner. This was the only one of the family who grew to be taller than his father. David‘s father was six feet and one inch tall, and when he [David‘s father] was fifty years old his weight was about two hundred and eighty pounds. His paternal grandfather [David‘s great grandfather] was just as heavy but he was only six feet tall. David‘s grandfather had three brothers and they were all taller than the six feet that he was. Also, David‘s mother‘s brothers were all about six feet tall and so David came from a line of large men.

We now had a family of three boys and two girls. We decided definitely at this time that we were not going to have any more children. Our decision was encouraged further and emphasized stronger by the doctor, however, sometime in the future, maybe about a year after David was born, Vernessa woke up one night and said that she had seen a young woman appear to her and asked her to have her child. Vernessa said that she told the woman that she wasn‘t supposed to have any more children. At this the young woman started to cry and all the time pleading with Vernessa to have her child. I didn‘t get a good enough description of the woman who appeared to recognize her.

During the month of June in the year of 1961, Vernessa‘s parents had their golden wedding anniversary. As her father was employed at the Temple in Idaho Falls, he invited all of his children and their spouses that could to go through the Temple with them that morning. We were able to go to it and in the meeting that preceded the session a special recognition was made of him being there with his family on his golden wedding anniversary. We were able to attend with the family although some of the sons of Joseph Alma Skinner and Anna Fluckiger Skinner were not.

Since alternating our children with the oldest being a boy and then a girl then the third child was a boy and the fourth child a girl then the fifth child being a boy, it seemed likely that the sixth child should be a girl. We determined to name her Clarisse when she was born. October of 1961 came and it was an early winter. On Sunday the twenty ninth day of October in the early morning hour, Vernessa needed to go to the hospital. I called in one of the neighbor women to come and help and she called another of the neighbors who was a nurse. The snow had drifted during the night and piled up in the driveway so I was unable to get the car out of the garage. Of necessity I called the ambulance.

There were two men [who] came with the ambulance. One of them was the driver and the other rode in the back with Vernessa in case she needed emergency assistance. Also the neighbor who was a nurse was in the back with Vernessa and I rode in the front with the ambulance driver. We went to the LDS hospital with the siren blowing. Also, the ambulance driver was in contact with the hospital by radio so that they were ready and waiting for us with a wheel chair for Vernessa the moment that the ambulance arrived at the emergency entrance. Within about ten minutes from the time that we arrived at the hospital, my third daughter and sixth child was born, but I wouldn‘t get to name her as she was stillborn. The doctor hadn‘t yet arrived at the hospital, but the interns that took care of the emergency situation said that she looked like she had been [dead] for about a week, but just two days before this incident we had Vernessa in for a check up and the doctor said that he had heard the heart beat of the infant at that time. I didn‘t see her at the time of her birth. Several years later I dreamed that I was in the Temple and she appeared to me. At first I thought that it was her older sister, Barbara, but I later came to realize that here was my infant daughter that I didn‘t get to raise in this life. She looked like Barbara only was a little heavier.

The mountain range to the east of us ran in a southeast and northwest direction, and so it passed north of us also, but it was two or three miles to the north. Our home was at an elevation of one hundred or so feet above the elevation of the city of Salt Lake on a ledge that was formed by the prehistoric Lake Bonneville. The snow at the elevation where we lived was usually heavier than in the main part of the city. This made it a little hard to drive up to our home at times in the winter. However, the street department cleared the streets as fast as they could and sprinkled course salt on them to help melt the snow and ice.

I was asked to be the group secretary of the Seventies Quorum and held this office for several years. The ward was divided, or rather three wards were created making the Canyon Rim Third Ward out of parts of the Canyon Rim Ward and the Canyon Rim Second Ward. We were put in the new Canyon Rim Third Ward. Also, a Canyon Rim Fourth Ward was created using some of the Highland View and the Highland View Second Wards. We continued to meet in the same Ward Chapel in which we had been meeting, but at a different time. When we first started attending that meeting house, there were three wards meeting there but one of them was a ward from the East Millcreek Stake which is the stake directly south of us. They finally found room in the boundary of their own stake and when they moved out it gave us room to create a third ward and meet in that chapel.

We were still meeting in that chapel in the year 1962 and in November of that year we celebrated Thanksgiving by having Vernessa‘s parents with us. It was a few days later, on the fourth day of December that our five and one half year old boy, Robert Alma Ransom, developed a sore throat and we had the Bishop of the Ward and his First Counselor in to administer to him. That night, he didn‘t sleep very well and spent the majority of the night in with me. To make room for him in with me, Vernessa went in the front room and went to sleep. About four A.M. on the morning of Wednesday the fifth day of December, he got out of my bed and got in his own. He then went to sleep.

I rose early on the morning of the fifth day of December as was necessary for me to do to go to work pretty early in the morning. My wife arose with me in order to prepare my breakfast and the lunch that I would take with me. Robert got up and came into the kitchen with us. It was his habit to get up early every morning with his father and so there was nothing unusual about this. I asked him how he felt and he said that he felt all right. He then turned pale and I picked him up. He quit breathing and I tried to revive him. The ambulance was called. He was pronounced dead at the hospital. Vernessa tried to call the bishop, but he had left for work extra early that morning and so wasn‘t at home. A few minutes later, I received a call from the first counselor telling me that either he or the bishop or both of them would be over shortly. A short time later, the bishop was in our home to help prepare for the funeral. I can only guess how the bishop found out about it. He was out that morning looking over a new building that he was having constructed and so there was no phone where he was. I believe it possible that the bishop‘s wife called the first counselor and he drove out to find the bishop.

The funeral was held on Friday the seventh day of December in the year 1962. Robert Alma Ransom was a very happy little boy and seemed to live every minute with a smile. He was able to leave this life as he had lived, with a smile and very little suffering. Garth was so upset that day that his school teacher called and asked if he could come home as he couldn‘t seem to do anything at school.

Robert was an extremely brilliant boy for his age. At one time a few months previous to this experience he said something that wasn‘t entirely in accordance with my principles and so I took off my belt and hit him on the bottom with it. He looked up at me and said that it didn‘t hurt. I then picked him up and held him tight and told him that I didn‘t want to hurt him but that what he said wasn‘t very nice. Ever since that time if he said something that wasn‘t quite right or did something that was not quite in keeping with the principles of the Gospel, I would only have to tell him once that it was wrong and he would never say or do it again. He wouldn‘t even let any of his siblings or friends say or do it. Robert Alma Ransom seemed to be the one that could hold the family together.

Another meeting place was constructed for the Canyon Rim Third and Canyon Rim Fourth Wards. We were at the ground breaking ceremony of the new Church house. It was put on property that was and had been owned by the LDS Church for several years and was sold to the stake at the price that the Church had paid for it some years before. The building was built with a few labor missionaries, but for the most part, members of the two wards and also other members of the stake helped in the construction of it. I was able to put in some time on it. The building was to also be used as a stake center and the stake offices were down stairs in the south part of the building with stairs going down to the offices. Also, from the high council room, there was a set of stairs leading outside to the south parking lot.

The building was on the east side of Twenty Ninth East and had parking places on both the north and south sides of it as well as in back of it. It was built just about midway between the Canyon Rim and Highland View Chapels. This building was the first building that was built in the stake that was large enough to hold a stake conference in, and even with the size of this building, stake conference was carried by closed circuit television to the Canyon Rim chapel. Before this building was constructed, we needed to go down to what is known as the South East Tabernacle to hold stake conference. The South East Tabernacle was on about eighth east and twentieth south so it was quite a distance from us.

The meeting house and stake center was arranged so that the main chapel was constructed with the audience facing the west. Just to the west of the audience was the rostrum and behind it was a row of seats that was occupied by the authorities that were in charge of the meeting. On both the north and the south sides of the chapel and separated from the rostrum by a group of three or four steps was a table. The one on the north was used as the sacrament table while the one on the south was used by the clerk of the meeting.

As there was no sacrament on the days of stake conference, the one on the north, or rather the bench behind the table was used for overflow seating for the high council or other speakers of the conference. Behind the row of seats where the presiding authorities of the meeting sat was a space where portable seats could be set up. They were put in mainly for the high council during conference. Behind this were four rows of choir seats. The stand of the building was arranged in the form of an amphitheater so that the audience had a view of all the members that were on the stand. Just behind the choir, in the west end of the building, was the ornamental pipes of the pipe organ. To the north of the choir seats was the console of the pipe organ and to the south end of the choir seats was a grand piano. These were arranged so that the pianist and the organist could see each other. At times there was both an organist and pianist playing for meeting.

A park was finally constructed to the south and to the east of the chapel. Behind the Church parking lot in one corner of the park was a tennis court. The Canyon Rim elementary school was just north of the Church house.

In the year 1961, my youngest brother, William Leon Ransom, was called on a mission to Brazil. Father and Mother came to Salt Lake to see if we wanted to help support him on his mission, and we told them that we would. For the next two or two and one half years he was gone on his mission and we were able to help him all the time that he was there. If my memory is correct, we sent fifteen dollars per month to father and mother to be deposited in his bank account.

On the twenty sixth day of September in the year 1965, I was ordained to the office of High Priest by Ervin M. Skousen who was at that time a member of the high council. I was called in to the Stake President‘s office and interviewed by the Stake President, and the next evening I was presented to the Stake secretary of the Canyon Rim Third ward group of the Seventies Quorum, and the Quorum Secretary later told me that he was somewhat annoyed because now there would need to be another secretary appointed in my place.

The genealogy of my Priesthood as High Priest is given:

• WENDELL HILL RANSOM was ordained on the twenty sixth day of September, 1965 by Ervin M. Skousen.
• ERVIN M. SKOUSEN was ordained by Verl Franklin Scott.
• VERL FRANKLIN SCOTT was ordained by Joseph F. Merrill.
• JOSEPH F. MERRILL was ordained by Heber J. Grant.
• HEBER J. GRANT was ordained by George Q. Cannon.
• GEORGE Q. CANNON was ordained by Brigham Young.
• BRIGHAM YOUNG was ordained by Joseph Smith and the three witnesses to the Book of Mormon, Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris.
• JOSEPH SMITH received the Priesthood from Peter, James, and John.
• PETER, JAMES, and
• JOHN were ordained Apostles by the Lord Jesus Christ.

Verl F. Scott was the president of the Canyon Rim Stake when we moved into it. In the Canyon Rim Second Ward, I was asked to be on the genealogical committee and later was one of the chairman‘s assistants. I also was on the genealogical committee after we became part of the Canyon Rim Third Ward. I was also group secretary of the High Priest group for many years..

I have held the position of ward teacher in every ward that I have lived in since I was ordained to the office of Teacher in the Riverton Ward, Blackfoot, Idaho Stake. I have also been Church magazine director in several wards. I was secretary of the Tenth Quorum of Seventy and when one of the presidents moved out of the stake, my name came up to take his place but the senior president of the quorum told the Stake President that I was doing more work as the secretary than I would be required to do as a president, and so I was left as the secretary. Since that time, I have been group secretary in every quorum that I have been in.

In the year 1976, I attended the Temple one time in February and while there I was asked by one of our neighbors who was a Temple worker to fill out an application to be a veil worker in the Salt Lake Temple. It took me a month or two before I decided to fill one out. I didn‘t know until later that the Temple Presidency contacted my Bishop and Stake President concerning this application, but I was finally contacted and notified of my appointment. An instruction meeting for new veil workers was held on Tuesday, the fourth day of May in the year of 1976 at 6:00 A.M. I made arrangements to miss the first couple hours of work that day so that I could attend that meeting. There were quite a few new veil workers there that day and after this meeting we were given a choice of the session that we would be assigned to. Our daughter, Barbara, was at that time working a few nights each week in addition to going to [high] school and I took her to work and went to get her after she was finished working. She had Tuesday nights that she didn‘t need to work, and so I chose to be on a session each Tuesday evening after I got off work. The next Tuesday, the eleventh day of May in the year 1976, I started going to the Temple and being a veil worker. Vernessa was at that time working in the Temple and on Tuesday evenings she got off work and needed to wait for me so that we could go home together. On the other days, I needed to drive down town to get her after I took Barbara to work.

The Temple was open Saturdays until two P.M. and I needed to take Vernessa to work and go get her again when she got off work for the day. To avoid driving to the Temple twice on Saturdays, I volunteered for Saturday assignments also as a veil worker starting with the eight A.M. session. It was later changed to the seven A.M. session, and I stayed there until the last session of the day. I went through the Temple on the first session and stayed there to represent the Lord at the other veils during the day. That gave me five sessions on Saturday and sometimes they would need to divide one of the sessions and at times they would need to divide two of them. In that case, there were seven sessions on Saturday and one on Tuesday. I started on Saturdays on the seventeenth day of December in the year 1976.

I continued with the one session on Tuesday and the four or five sessions on Saturday. I was able to go through the Temple for an endowment session on the Tuesday session and the first of the Saturday sessions. The Temple could accommodate three hundred patrons on each session and at times they would overload each session and some of the patrons would need to stand. Some of the time on Saturday sessions, while waiting for the next session, I would be approached and asked to be a witness for a sealing or a wedding.

The session that I went through on Tuesday evenings was what was known in the Temple as a “live session.” This meant that it was one of the three sessions during the day that was available for the individuals going through for their own endowments such as the ones getting married or going on missions. Because it was the first time through the Temple for many of the individuals on that session, it took a little longer to get through. The reason for this was because when the session was just about over, a lecture was given as a summary of what had taken place during the session. This lecture lasted from thirteen to fifteen minutes. On Saturday, there was one, later changed to two live sessions.

The Temple President, when I began as a veil worker, was a man by the name of John Edmunds. In the fall of the year of 1977, the Temple President was changed and a man by the name of Ray Curtis was installed as the new president. Among the changes that he made was one asking that the veil workers be set apart for their callings. I was set apart as a veil worker on Saturday, the eighteenth day of March in the year 1978, Also, some scheduling changes were made and I needed to be there for two sessions on Tuesday and five on Saturday. Also, during the administration of President Curtis, the lecture that was given at the end of the “live sessions” was recorded and so done away with anybody giving it. However, there was still somebody with the book standing behind the veil of the Temple in case the recording didn‘t work or ceased functioning during the lecture.

There were other recordings made but they were not as readily apparent to the people on the session.

There would be a meeting every fall for the Temple workers and I would be invited to go to it. It would be held in the large assembly room on the fifth floor of the Temple. It was a long climb for me to go up the circular stairs to get to that room and some of the time I would ride the elevator.

Sometime during this period I developed a pain in the area of my stomach one night. There was nothing that I could do about it and it gradually got worse until it felt as if it were going to explode. About this time I vomited and the pain started to decrease in intensity until there was no more pain. This same condition occurred after that with increasing frequency. The doctor was consulted and he made a diagnosis that is was gall stones and I would some day need an operation. However, at this time there wasn‘t a pressing need for an operation and so I didn‘t have one.

New Years day in the year 1980 came on a Tuesday and so the Temple was closed that day. The coming Saturday was the fifth day of January and I was there to fulfill my assignment. I was also there on Tuesday the eighth day of January. On Wednesday the ninth day of January in the year 1980 I was again attacked with severe cramps in my stomach but this time the attack came while I was at work. I left work early and went to see the doctor. He gave me a shot and said that there was a lot of pollution in the drinking water. The cramp ceased and I went back to work the next day. When Saturday came again I felt too miserable to attend the Temple and the next Tuesday was the same. I missed going to the Temple until the beginning of the month of May.

Sometime toward the end of the month of January in the year 1980 as Vernessa and I knelt down for our evening prayer before retiring, I asked her when she offered the prayer if she would release me from this life of suffering and let me go into the life eternal where I could continue my work among the Lord‘s children. She didn‘t pray for my release from this life and when I asked her about it she told me that she already had done so. After we retired I was privileged to have a glorious dream or vision.

I was taken to a large and narrow room filled with people. The room was built in the form of an amphitheater and it seemed to me that I was at the east end of it, which was the lowest end, and looking toward the west. It is very possible that I was somewhat above the floor as I didn‘t have any feeling of my feet touching the floor. Just in front of me were my two children who were called out of this life at an early age.

At this time my son Robert Alma Ransom would have been a little over twenty two years old, but he looked more like he was sixteen. He was in front of me and on my right side. About the same distance in front of me and on the left side was the little girl that was called out of this life just before she entered mortality. At that time had she lived, she would have been a little over nineteen years of age, but she looked like she was about thirteen. They had a large red and white ball that they were playing with. There was no indication that they were aware of my presence.

The other people in the room were all adults and were all sitting on benches. My two children and the ball they were playing with were in color, but all the rest of the scene was in various shades of gray or black. On the first bench in the center of it were my parents. My father was toward the same side of the room as my son and next to him was his eternal companion. I didn‘t see any expression on their faces that told me that they were glad to see me, or even that they were aware of my presence. I was impressed that they [would] rather that I wouldn‘t be there at that time.

On the bench directly behind my parents were my grandparents. All my grandparents were alive when I was born and so I was able to recognize them. Behind my grandparents and as far as I was able to see, there were other people sitting. I was given to understand that all of them were my ancestors. Whether any of them knew of my presence I don‘t know and I could not detect any such information from the expression on their faces. They surely must have known that they were being assembled for some purpose.

This scene vanished with the opening of another glorious vision. I was taken to the right and left the room in which I had been in. I got the feeling that this scene was outside although there was no uncomfortable feeling due to the weather. In this scene I saw a great crowd or assembly of men and women as far as I was able to see. I got the feeling that these people were all standing rather then sitting.

This crowd was divided into two groups. The smaller group was in front and to the left, or rather my left, of the group and was all men. These were the men who had received their endowments with me acting as proxy for them. The greater part of this group were men and women that I was able to take through the veil of the Temple, that is, take the ones through who were acting as proxy for those choice individuals. I was unable to detect from the expression on their faces that they were aware of my presence. I did get the feeling, however, that they were glad to see me or at some future date would be glad to see me. They, likewise, must have known that they were being assembled for a special purpose. I wasn‘t able to recognize any of them and can only hope that when I enter the world beyond the grave that they will be glad to see me and will take the opportunity to make themselves known to me.

Once again the scene changed with me moving to the right. It seemed that my guide led me past a wall of some kind, but whether it was a physical wall or a wall that separates time and space in a mental frame I do not know. I do know that I saw another group of men and women. As the previous group seemed to draw me to them, this group seemed to be pushing me back. Once again, this group appeared to be standing and extended as far as my vision could see. This group also consisted of both men and women, and like the other group was divided into two divisions with the smaller division consisting entirely of men and toward the front of the group and to my left. I was impressed that this smaller division was the group of men for who I would act as proxy in going through the Temple. The larger division consisting of both men and women were the choice individuals whose proxies I would take through the veil of the Temple while I was acting as a representative of the Lord. I was informed that it would take me at least another year to complete my mission upon the earth. As to my guide, I don‘t remember ever seeing him or talking to him, only through the impressions that I got.

Within a few days of this vision it was decided that I would need an operation to remove my gall bladder, although an x-ray of it didn‘t detect anything in the order of gall stones. My eternal companion woke up one night shortly after this and told me that my mother had appeared to her and told her not to worry because everything was going to be all right with me.

The doctor made arrangements for me to enter the hospital on the twenty eighth day of February, which was a Thursday. My oldest daughter, Wendy, took me to the hospital and I registered that afternoon. I had made arrangements to be excused from my assignment at the Temple until the beginning of May and I also made arrangements to be off work for a while. I was put in a room on one of the upper stories of the hospital and a room that was also just east of the nurses desk on that floor. On the east side of that room were a couple of windows through which the morning sun could come, but I had the bed that was at the west side of the room. There was a curtain that could be closed between the two beds in the room. There was another man in the room who had had the same operation that I was in for a few days previous and was to be discharged the next day.

The doctor came in that evening and said that they were going to give me some sleeping pills that evening and he wanted me to take them as I was so close to the main activity on that floor and would probably be kept awake without them. Also, that same afternoon, a young man was sent around to shave my stomach where the doctor would need to cut to perform the operation. The morning of Friday the twenty ninth day of February in the year 1980, I awoke and cleaned up. The nurse on duty came in and gave me a pill which she said would make me a little drowsy. The man in the other bed was still there.

Operation time approached and I was put on a cart and rolled down the hall and into an elevator. That last thing that I remember was a nurse or two standing at the right side of the cart with me laying on my back on it. Also, a doctor taking my left arm and saying something like it would soon be over. The next thing that I remember was being pushed back to my room. The man that had occupied the other bed had been released from the hospital and the area had been cleaned up. A young woman was sitting over on the other side of that bed. For a moment I began to wonder if she were going to occupy that bed but I soon learned that she was waiting for somebody who was in the operating room and would be in shortly. The doctor told me later that my operation had been a hard operation. The common tube that connected the gall bladder to the stomach was about three times it‘s normal size. My gall bladder was removed and with it twenty three gall stones that were about the size of peas. It makes me wonder if when I got the cramps in my stomach that one of them was trying to get through the tube and when I vomited it dislodged the stone making me feel better for a while.

A short time later, the man that was to be my roommate for the next few days was brought in. He was a [black man] that was about nineteen years of age and was from New York. He had been involved in an accident in Southern Utah and was brought in to the hospital by the young woman‘s husband and he was just about converted to the LDS Church. The young man and woman were at that time trying to get him interested enough in the Church to join it. His arm gave him considerable pain where it had been broken and at times he would let out a scream.

Supper time came and I was able to eat a small amount of supper that evening. The day shift nurses went home and other nurses came on duty. Everything went all right and finally the shift changed again. This time a beautiful young lady by the name of Tracy came on duty. She had lost one arm because of cancer when she was sixteen. She didn‘t let that stop her from becoming a nurse, though, and she was now working at the hospital. Sometime during the night, more like about four A.M. on Saturday morning, the first day of March, I woke up with a little bit of movement or churning in my stomach. I was on my left side and knew that I would need to turn over to get the plastic pans the hospital supplied, but every time that I moved, the incision and the stitches in my side hurt.

I finally succeeded in turning to my right side and reached down and got the pan. I lifted it upon the bed and proceeded to empty it. The curtain was drawn between the two beds and I guess that Tracy was talking to the young man in the other bed to try to make him feel a little bit better. When she heard me stirring she came over to my side of the room in time to help me empty the basin. We no longer got it emptied than I vomited in it. My liver was secreting bile and since I didn‘t have a gall bladder for it to go into, it went into my stomach.

After I finished vomiting, Tracy took the pan and emptied it and cleaned it out. She brought it back and started to put it away but with my stomach feeling so uneasy, I suggested that she might as well leave it out because I probably would need it again. It was then left within easy reach of me, and it wasn‘t very long until I needed it again. This time Tracy was out in the hall and as soon as she heard me, she came in to assist me. By the time that the day shift nurses came on duty, I had vomited three times and the forth time came shortly after this. The doctor was contacted by the nurse and a stomach pump was put on me by running a small plastic tube through one of my nostrils. I could neither eat nor drink anything for forty eight hours. I did receive several pints of fluid fed directly into my veins. I was allowed to have a few ice cubes to keep my throat moist.

The doctor came in to check me every morning, and on the morning of Wednesday the fifth day of March, he removed about half the clamps that were holding the incision together. This is the first that I knew that clamps were used instead of stitches. The next day, the rest of the clamps were removed and the plastic tube that was in my side was pulled out also. I knew that there was a tube in my side because the nurse that was assigned to me each day would check the bandage to see if my side had been draining.

The students studying nursing at the vocational school would be sent to that hospital for their final training and so each nursing student would be assigned a patient for the day. If there arose any problem though, that they were unable to handle, they would need to call the resident nurse to check it. At one time the nurse that was checking my blood pressure was confused with the reading that she got from my left arm. She went around and checked it in my right arm and found it to be the same. Then she went out and got the nurse, this time it happened to be Tracy, to come and check it. My blood pressure had dropped to sixty from the usual reading of about eighty. I don‘t know why all of a sudden it went down that far, but twelve hours later when they checked it again, it was back up where it should be.

I was released on the sixth day of March, after having been in the hospital one week, and my oldest son Garth, came after me. He had obtained the use of a van and Vernessa and he came to get me in it. Vernessa couldn‘t check me out of the hospital and I needed to go down to the accounting office to make the arrangements and then bring the papers back up. The nurse told me that there would be no need for that and she filled out the papers at that time and sent the young woman that was assigned to be my nurse that morning to go down with me and bring the papers up effecting my release.

This operation put me in a rather unique situation. It would be another four years or the year 1984 before another operation of any kind could be performed on the twenty ninth day of February and twenty eight years or the year 2008 before another operation could be performed on Friday the twenty ninth day of February. The doctor told me at the time that I was released that I would not be able to eat a great amount of greasy foods. I returned to work the first of April that year and for about six months somebody went with me to do all the lifting that was required. I resumed my duties at the Temple the third day of May in the year 1980.

In the fall of the year 1981, Sperry along with other large companies in the nation started to decrease their work force and so offered employees over fifty five an opportunity to retire. Sperry would continue to pay the employee fifty percent of his base wage until he reached the age of sixty two, at which time he could go on social security and also retirement. The division of the company where I worked had changed from being a defense contractor and was now under the division of the company that manufactured computers. I had taken several classes in computer science at the University of Utah and also some classes from the BYU continuing education division here in Salt Lake City, and was at this time working in computer programming. When the company offered the chance for retirement, I decided against it for a couple of reasons. For the last few years, Sperry had an employee stock purchase plan and each person could put in up to ten percent of his gross pay. I had been investing in this. Twice each year, in May and November, the company would put the money accumulated into stock. The employee would get the stock at a fifteen percent discount of the lower of the two prices at the beginning and end of the period without any commission. To take early retirement at this time would deprive me of the opportunity of investing any more money in this stock on this option. Also, at that time I was just short of sixty one and so I would have my half a wage for only a little over a year.

The year 1982 came and my health kept getting a little worse. I found it much harder to breath and so on the first day of April I obtained a medical retirement.

I continued my seven to nine sessions at the Temple. I was well aware that when the Temple closed for vacation about the middle of July that a renovation project was planned that would last for six months. The Jordan River Temple had been completed and was then in operation so that there was still a Temple in the valley. I did get through the Jordan River Temple twice during the month of October that year. In December a meeting was planned for the Temple workers. The occasion was to change the Temple President again. President Curtis had been in office for five years. This meeting was scheduled to be held in the Assembly Hall on Temple Square but when I got down to Temple Square I found that the meeting had been changed and would be held in the Tabernacle because the Assembly Hall would not hold all the Temple workers. To do this would require waiting until the choir broadcast was over and everybody out of the Tabernacle.

At this meeting President Curtis was released and Marion D. Hanks who is one of the members of the First Quorum of Seventy was sustained as President. We were told at this meeting that during the month of September that there had been sixty seven thousand endowments performed in the Jordan River Temple making it the largest number of endowments that had ever been performed in a single month in any Temple. We were also told that the Jordan River Temple was the fourth largest Temple in the Church. The Los Angeles Temple in Southern California was the largest in the ground area that it occupies, the Salt Lake City Temple was the largest in floor area, and the Washington, D.C. Temple was the tallest.

In the latter part of November in 1982 I received a letter telling me of changes in the sessions again. There was not going to be any Saturday sessions when the Temple opened on Monday the third day of January, 1983 and to please indicate the sessions I would like to help out on. I kept the two Tuesday sessions. The session size was reduced from three hundred to two hundred and the seats would now be a little larger making it easier for us large people to sit down and get up again. It appears that the average size and weight of this generation is a little larger than the generations in the past. That fact was found out in the military. When the young men went into the military during the second world war, it was found that they were on the average one inch taller and ten pounds heavier than were their fathers who entered the military in the first world war.

In actual practice there were as many as two hundred and twenty allowed on some sessions. Also the sessions would begin every forty five minutes now instead of every hour as they had done in the past. I chose the five and the five forty five sessions on Tuesday to continue working with. This made it possible for me to go on the five P.M. session and then stay there and help with the five forty five P.M. session.

There were times when the supervisor would ask me and other veil workers to stay and help with the six thirty session. Most of the time after the Temple opened I would attend either the three thirty session or the four fifteen session and wait to help on my assigned sessions.

Sometime after the beginning of the year of 1983 I kept getting strong impressions that I should finish paying for my home. The impressions kept getting stronger and more frequent and at this time I had one hundred and ninety two shares of Sperry stock that I had purchased through their stock offering. I also had bought one hundred shares of Utah Power and Light stock and letting the dividends be reinvested. I had also purchased thirty shares of American Electric Power stock and had let the dividends buy more shares along with adding other payments until I now had close to sixty shares of stock. The dividends in American Electric Power were reinvested with no commission and a five percent reduction in the price of the stock on the day that it was purchased which was the tenth day of the month following the dividend date. Also, I could invest up to ten thousand dollars per quarter with no commission. Utah Power and Light stock was the same with the dividends being reinvested on the first day of the month following the date the dividend was paid and there was no discount in the price of the stock as there was with American Electric Power. I could also invest up to ten thousand dollars per quarter in this stock with no commission. In May of that year I sold seventy shares of my Sperry stock and finished paying for my house. That decreased the dividend I received from Sperry, but it also eliminated my house payments.

When I was sixteen years of age and we moved out in the country, there was a yard of about twenty or thirty hives of honey bees about a mile from our home, and I became interested in them, but didn‘t mention it to anybody. They were located in the edge of a quarter section of sagebrush that was northwest of where we were farming. On the reservation we were allowed to turn our cows and horses out on the vacant areas as long as we didn‘t let them in any productive areas. I would need to pass the area where the bees were kept quite often. They were there for five years and then we rented the thirty acres just north of them. One day I was cultivating when two men in a truck came and opened the hives of bees. When they smoked the bees out of the hives they drifted north east right past where I was working with the horses. Neither the horses nor I were stung that day but within a few days the hives of bees were gone. I never did find out where they had been moved to nor would it make any difference because they were not mine.

When I was nearing completion of my senior year of high school in 1939, the school bus driver offered to loan me twenty five dollars to get started in bee-keeping, but I didn‘t take him up on it. I don‘t know if twenty five dollars would have bought the necessary equipment at that time but it would have been pretty close to enough.

In the year of 1970 I did obtain a few hives of bees. I found a place where I could keep them at a little place called Lakepoint adjacent to where the ward at Lakepoint had about twenty acres of alfalfa that they raised for seed every year. Lakepoint is a little place about twenty or twenty five miles west of Salt Lake City and near the southern edge of the Great Salt Lake. This was an ideal spot for honey production in the summer and they produced a good crop of honey that year. The only trouble with this location was that it was midway between the Kennecott smelter at Garfield and the Anaconda smelter at Tooele. In the winter in the Salt Lake Valley a temperature inversion would occur and this would hold the gases from the smelters to the ground. The gases would get so thick that they would kill the bees. As a result of this I would need to restock the hives every spring with swarms I captured. I then found a location at Bluffdale where I could put a few hives and had some in both locations for a few years. One year I advertised in the Farm Bureau publication for a place to keep bees and a man in Herrimann answered the ad. I went out there to look at the place and in a few days I had some bees on his property. I then had hives in two places in Bluffdale and one place in Lakepoint and at this place in Herrimann. I finally moved all my equipment away from Lakepoint. While burning weeds one spring along a ditch bank, the man in Bluffdale burned up the hives of bees that I had at one location there and the other place didn‘t produce any honey that year and was very hard to get to. When the farmer was irrigating, it was impossible [for me to get to] and so I moved them all. The man that burned the hives told me that he would make me some more, but he never did. That left me just one place where I had bees and that was about a mile or two west of Herrimann, Utah. As to income from the bees, I had very little. I did sell a few nine pound cans one year. For the most part the honey went to pay for the rent on the property where they were and also for our own use and the use of some of my children.

In the spring of 1983 I decided to get a small computer and try to do some genealogy on it. I did buy a computer and began to learn how to operate it. I had taken several courses in programming at the University of Utah and was a programmer at Sperry Univac and so it wasn‘t entirely new to me.