Today - January 14, 2014 - is my Mom's birthday.
She passed away on July 26, 2013, so this is her first birthday we've had without her.
In remembrance of her 93 1/2 years here on earth, I'm going to share some of her life story.
Here are the first ten years of her life ... in her own words.
She wanted to include a little history of happenings in the world for each year of her life, so they are at the beginning of each year.
The pictures didn't copy, so I'm figuring out how to get them into the "blank boxes."
Mom was always sad that her Mom and Dad didn't get any photos of her when she was a baby.
The first photo they have of her is when she was about 5 years old, and I don't know if I even
have a copy of that.
Here is a photo of great-granddaughter, Jacee Peterson, reading to Grama A from her life story during the last two years of Verna's life when she lived with Julie & John and family in Saratoga Springs, Utah.
Her eyesight had failed so much that she couldn't read anymore, and she loved to hear her life story read to her.
Thanks, Jacee, for making your Great-Grama A so happy!
Here's Janice with her on her 92nd birthday.
Here's David & Julie's family with her on that same birthday.
And here's the family in 1962...Verna age 42.
Here she is at age 17...1937 just a couple weeks before
she and Arnold eloped.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
V E R N A
An
Idaho Girl
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~
The Life Story
of
Verna Beth Huffaker Albertson
~~~~~~~~~~~
First
Edition
December
2000
Finished
Edition with Photos - 2003
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
New Year’s Resolution for 2000:
“Write my life story this
year.”
--Verna Albertson
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As told to her daughters,
Eileen Albertson Petersen
and Janice Albertson Robertson
Also
includes Verna’s written memories.
This Idaho girl,
Verna,
was born
January 14, 1920.
The 1920s came to be called
“The Jazz Age.”
1920-1929
Farming was done the
“old-fashioned” way with horses when I was growing up. I have fond memories of living and working on
the farm.
Dad was a hard worker. He worked from dawn till dark.
1920’s
Since
world events affected me, I want to put a little
summary of what happened each year of my life…
…they
will be little scraps of history.
1920
Woodrow Wilson , President of U.S.A.
Prohibition
Amendment to U.S. Constitution goes into effect
National
Football League organizes in Canton, Ohio
Radio
is a new phenomenon
1921--Warren
G. Harding, President USA
First
Miss America crowned
1922--“Reader’s
Digest” founded
King
Tutankhamen’s tomb opened in Egypt.
Lincoln
Memorial dedicated in Washington, D.C.
1923--Pres.
Harding dies; Calvin Coolidge becomes President
Popular
songs “Tea for Two,” “Yes, We Have No Bananas”
1924--Ford
Motor Company produces 10 millionth car
[The
historic references are from www.storypreservation.com
and
www.historychannel.com/perl/timeline.pl?year=
and
a few from the Church Almanac as cited.]
And a little about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints...
1920--President
Heber J. Grant, 3rd year as LDS Prophet
Membership
of Church 525,987 in 83 stakes, 24 missions; 889 missionaries set apart this
year
1921--The
M-Men and Gleaner departments in the MIA (Mutual Improvement Association)
were
introduced Church wide to serve the special needs of young people from ages 17
to 23.
1922--The
Primary Children’s Hospital opened in Salt Lake City.
1923--President
Grant dedicated the Alberta Temple after construction for nearly a decade
1924--A
First Presidency statement answered criticism of unauthorized plural marriages
by once again confirming the Church’s policy
against the practice.
Polygamists
within the Church were excommunicated when discovered.
Radio
broadcast of general conference began on KSL.
[The
Church references are from Deseret News
1999-2000 Church Almanac.]
In 1920 when I was born Dad and Mother lived in a
small log house out of Rigby, Idaho, on a dry farm that Dad had cleared of
sagebrush after they were married on May 29, 1913.
I was born Wednesday, January 14 in
that house. I think my spirit got
frostbitten on its way to earth because I’m always cold.
When
I was one year old my parents moved to Wendell, Idaho, in the middle of
winter. “The Magic Valley area has a
milder temperature, with shorter winters and longer summers than the Idaho
Falls area. The fruit harvest is better
and you can get three cuttings of hay instead of just two,” some friends told
them.
Mother
and Dad and our neighbors, the Newman’s and the Tinkers, all moved at
the same time. The first place my folks rented was called
the Andrew place, which we also called the Andrus place. I am drawing a map of the farm and a sketch
of the house.
1920 Cost of living --
Average Income: $2,227.00 New House: $6,330.00
New Car
$ 425.00 Gallon of Gas: $
0.13
Loaf of Bread: $
0.12 Gallon of Milk:
$ 0.60
Round Steak/per lb: $
0.40 Dozen Eggs:
$ 0.68
First Class Stamp: $
0.02 Postcard: $ 0.01
Hit Songs: I’ll Be with You in Apple
Blossom Time,
Avalon, When My Baby Smiles at Me &
Dardanella
Top Movies: The Hunchback of Notre Dame,
The Ten Commandments & Gold Diggers
Inventions: boysenberries & first airmail
flight (NYC to SF)
The Tinkers rented a place about three miles east of the
folks and the Newman’s settled ten miles away in Jerome.
The folks stayed on the Andrew place for a short time
then we moved to what we still call the Amdahl place about a mile west of the
Andrew place. This place had an L-shaped
porch, kitchen and my bedroom on the east.
My first memory of childhood is of pulling a red wagon up
the walk and going through the porch to the kitchen door. I was wearing new coveralls of blue chambray
edged in red with peg pockets and I was very proud of them.
I also have an early memory of when Morris, 8, and I, 4, were out in the field when Morris
took a long stick and lifted the lid off a beehive. He got many bee stings but I don’t remember
being stung myself. After we ran home,
Mother used the tweezers to pull the stingers from his head.
Another day, David, Morris and I had been out watching
Dad burn weeds by taking burning pails of one pile and setting another pile on
fire with it. I guess David and Morris
thought that looked like fun and when we came back to the house they tried it
on the rose bushes around the foundation of the house.
Mother, who had been to a garden club meeting, got home
just in time to avert the house from being burned down. All three of us got sent to bed without
supper. I remember Mother had cooked rice.
I didn’t even like rice but I thought it sure would have tasted good
that night.
Mother belonged to the Hill ‘n Dale Club in the
neighborhood and I can remember her curling her hair for it by putting the
curling iron in the chimney of the coal oil lamp to heat it. The club that day was being held at the
Holbrook house, which was about a fourth of a mile south of us. Other neighbors were the Jerry Renfrows and
the Forests.
I
remember our kitchen linoleum was blue with a white design. Our kitchen stove was gray enamel with
chrome trim. I remember David throwing
one of my black patent leather shoes up
on the roof and Dad had to retrieve it the next Sunday so I could go to
church. It seems like David was always
pestering me.
Another vivid memory is when I went with Dad to plant
grain. The old grain planter had big
wheels with about a 5-foot wide box in between.
Two horses were hitched to the tongue to pull it. There were spouts (like funnels) that matched
the rows and it could plant ten or twelve rows at a time. Dad let me sit on this box that held the
grain. The wheat went from the box
through the spouts into the ground. The
opening was big enough to let a little stream of wheat flow out into it. There were cogs at the bottom of the box that
kept the grain going into the spouts.
I was letting the grain run down my fingers as it fell
into the spouts. I got my finger too
close to one of the cogs and it cut the tip of my index finger off. I was afraid to tell Dad so I said I wanted
to go to the house.
He stopped the horses, I got down and ran to the
house. Mother put a bandage on my
finger. When Dad came in and saw it, he
put my hand over the wood box and took his razor to trim off the skin that was
holding the tip of my finger.
Instead of being punished as I thought I would be, Dad
said I was a plucky little girl not to have cried and not telling him why I
wanted to go to the house.
The next day when he went to town he got me a box of Poll
Parrot candy all for me. Poll Parrot
candy was one of our favorites. It was
hard round candy sticks about the size of a drinking straw and about three
inches long with different flavors of orange, lemon, grape, cinnamon,
cherry–twenty to a package. We would
suck them to a sharp point. I wish they
still made them.
I don’t think I shared much of my box of Poll Parrot
candy with my two brothers.
There was quite a few Mormon families in Wendell at that
time–the Bleaks, Golds, Prescotts, Collins, Tinkers, McClures and Hansens. Mother worked in the primary so we went to
primary, which was held in the building called the Odeon.
“Verna, if you do that one more time I’m going to go
right through the ceiling,” Mother told me after I kept swiping the frosting
with my finger to get tastes.
“Oh, good, then I can eat all of the frosting,” was my
first thought. Then I got the giggles as
I pictured my mother going right up through the ceiling.
(I want to explain about the round No.10 tub we used for
bathing. I have a picture of a girl
sitting by one of these old-fashioned tubs with her mother pouring warm water in.)
“We don’t want to play with you because you’re a girl,”
Morris and David said to me. I ran into
the house crying and told Mother about it.
“Here, take my hand and we’ll walk down the lane to the
mailbox and see if the mail has come yet,” said Mother. This is the only time I ever remember her
holding my hand and being sympathetic.
She was not affectionate. She
especially did not show any public affection to Dad while us kids was around.
1925 - Age 5 - Moved to the Hansen Place
1925--Calvin
Coolidge--3rd year as U.S. President
“In
the famous ‘Scopes Monkey Trial,” John Scopes, a Tennessee school
teacher,
was found guilty of teaching evolution in a public school.”
quoted
from: Deseret News 1999-2000 Church Almanac, p. 499
Water
skis patented
F.
Scott Fitzgerald wrote “The Great Gatsby”
Charleston
is fashionable dance
1925--President
Heber J. Grant--8th year as LDS Prophet
Elder
Melvin J. Ballard established a mission in South America with headquarters
in Buenos Aires, Argentina, opening the
Church’s official work in South America
In 1925 my parents moved again and rented the farm on the
Hansen place. On this farm was a
two-story house and, in my memory, the most fun place to live. There was a big red barn with a hay
loft. I remember sweeping it out and
playing up there when it was empty. It
seems like Dad didn’t put hay up there until late summer.
The pump house was between the house and the barn. There was a pump in the east end and a forge
on the west end with a cement walk between them with a door on both the north
and south end of the walk.
The barn yard had a granary and a chicken coop. The lawn around the house was all fenced in
with a 2x4 railing along the top. There
was a porch along the front of the house that ran across the full width of the
house. I used to play school on it with
chairs and dolls. In the back yard
between the house and pump house was a whirly gig made out of a buggy wheel and
set on an axle driven into the ground.
What fun it was.
There was several big trees all around the house. The one in the back yard held a good
swing. I loved to swing up and watch the
neighbors across the road. They were the
Barretts--Mrs. Barrett, sons Harold and Dale and daughter Alice. At that time Harold was courting his wife and
we watched them being lovey dovey. Alice
took a trip to Italy and we have a picture of her feeding pigeons in Venice.
Just at the start of that summer my sister, Lorraine, was
born on June 25. I was five and a half
years old, so I would have been old enough to help hold the new baby.
I liked having a little sister.
THRESHING – BIG EVENT
OF THE SUMMER
The big event of the summer was when it was time to
harvest the wheat. First the cutting and
binding of the wheat sheaves was done by the binders.
I loved the way the field looked with all those shocks of
wheat standing up in their piles.
I remember the big canvases that were on the binding
machines. Dad would bring the torn ones
in for Mother to sew up on the machine.
He would have to hold the end out while Mother put the torn part through
the sewing machine to mend.
We
always looked forward to when the threshers and the hay men came because Mother
always made a big dinner and apple or coconut cream pie for dessert.
When
I was older I realized it was funny how she made coffee for these men. She didn’t know how to make coffee because we
didn’t drink it at our house. She just
made it for the hired men during harvest time.
She’d
put a pan of water on the stove. I
learned later it’s usually made by a drip method by putting your coffee in a
thing and then there’s a thing you put your hot water in and it drips down
through the coffee into the pot. But
Mother didn’t have a coffee pot so she just put coffee and some water together
on the stove and got it hot. She didn’t
know how much coffee to put in or that it needed to be steeped.
I bet
it was so strong that it about ate those threshers’ stomachs out. But I don’t remember anybody complaining
about it.
After I got married and Arnold liked coffee,
he taught me how to make it. I thought
about how Mother had made it and it was sure different.
Threshing
time was a fun time. After dinner
everyone helped clean up the kitchen.
Then in the afternoon, before we were old enough--about 10 or 11--to
work in the fields ourselves, we’d go out and stand in the trucks when the
grain was coming down and let it run over our hands.
After
the threshing was over we always had that great big straw stack to play
on. Then we’d take clean straw and put
it in our mattresses so we’d each have a new clean straw mattress.
Straw
mattresses had big, thick ticking, they called it. We smoothed it out and mashed it down. The mattresses got uneven and lumpy after the
straw was old. They got schusy and flat
so it was fun to have a fluffy one again.
It was nice every threshing season after we washed the old ticking to
refill the mattresses with the fresh straw.
I
have pleasant memories as a child and teenager of going to church in the Odeon.
They had that great big black stove on the stage. There were two Majestic cook stoves at the
back of the stage because the regular kitchen didn’t get built until 1950. On the
main room, they had a great, big brown stove to heat the chapel/recreation
hall.
When I was a little kid I can remember they had those
wood folding chairs and for the dances they would fold them, then pile them up
in one corner. On this big stack of
chairs people would lay their coats on top.
I can remember when I was about five or six years old, laying up there
on those coats during the dances. Dad
would come and wake me up to go home.
Other people would also lay their little kids up there to sleep.
Just before I started first grade Wendell was made a ward
from a branch and my Dad was called as the first counselor to Bishop John F.
Dixon. Mother and Dad had made the long,
dusty 150-mile round trip to Stake Conference in Carey driving the Model
T. It was then that the Blaine Stake was
made by being divided from the Carey Stake.
As a fund raising project for the ward budget, the
bishopric brought in movies every Friday night, and for $1.00 the whole family
could see the movie. The first motion
picture theater had opened in 1902 in Los Angeles. It would be many years before the town of
Wendell had a real movie theater called the “Ace”, but we saw movies every
Friday night in our “Odeon.” Then I
would have fun dressing up in Mother’s dresses and shoes and pretend I was a
movie star like in the movies.
GRADE
SCHOOL YEARS IN WENDELL
1926-27
- First Grade, Age 6-7
1926--Calvin
Coolidge--4th year as U.S. President
Germany admitted to League of Nations
Gertrude
Ederle, first woman to swim English Channel
A.A.
Milne’s book, Winnie-the-Pooh, makes debut
Popular
song: “I Found a Million-Dollar Baby
in the Five-and-Ten Cent Store”
1926--President
Heber J. Grant--9th year as LDS Prophet
Weekday
religious education is expanded to include college students with the
building
of the first institute of religion adjacent to the University of Idaho at
Moscow.
I
started to school a year after moving to the Hansen place. Mother took me the first day. It was kind of scary but I saw my friend
Norma McClure, who had started the year before, standing on the cement block on
the side of the steps and that made me feel better. The McClures were good friends of our family
from church.
My first grade teacher was Miss Velma Andrus from Firth,
Idaho. She put her arm around my waist
and talked to me. She made me feel
special and I loved her forever. I think
everyone in first grade felt the same way about her.
A large alphabet was posted above the black board. On that first day she had us each go up and
stand by the letter that our name began with.
I finally found the “V” near the end.
What fun first grade was.
One day Miss Andrus had a card with the word ‘ain’t’ on it. She put it in a shoe box and had us all go
out by the steps and bury ‘Mr. Ain’t’.
We learned never to use that word.
What fun to learn. We were
reading very quickly and learning to print words.
On the last day of school that year she told us she was
going back to Firth and wouldn’t be with us any more. She cried and we all cried, too.
Our school bus was a big truck with a wooden box with
wood seats. Mr. Russell was our bus
driver. Later he had a newer bus.
When the school bus got to our house Mr. Russell had
already picked up the Rutherfords, the Brevicks and Lorraine Anderson. I think Hebe and John Prescott rode the bus
three or four times and then they must have moved into town because I don’t
remember that Jane, Dean, Tom or Tess Prescott ever rode on our bus.
After
Mr. Russell picked us up he picked up the Zollingers, Wards, Wickershams, and
Arlene Purdy. Arlene could roller-skate
like a pro and how we envied her.
The friends I remember from first grade are Margaret
Hawkes who was my best friend, Lorraine Anderson, Uva Yates, Norma McClure and
Lucille Williams. The next year, when
Tess Prescott started school, she became a good friend, also.
The boys I remember include Warren Weinberg, who sat
across the aisle from me and tattled on me for working on my braiding square. I had to go out and stand in the coat
hall. Mr. Downing, the principal, walked
by and I was really afraid. I tried to
hide back in the coats so he couldn’t see me.
He didn’t do anything.
I also remember a boy, Buddy Pollard, who had blond
hair. When he died that year I could not
comprehend death. I was affected by his
dying and knowing we would never see him again.
It was hard on me that he had just vanished.
We had many fun games on the school yard. I was fascinated by the slippery slide. I would run as fast as I could at recess to
slide down and run around to stand in line to slide down again and again. Sometimes we played hopscotch on the cement
walk in front of the school house.
The school yard was divided. The boys played on the east side and the
girls on the west side. When the bell
rang, the boys went in the east entrance and used the east stairs, the girls
went in the west entrance and went up the west stairs.
Inside the school house, the first, second, third, fourth
and fifth grades were on the first floor which was ten steps up from the
entrance. The sixth, seventh, and eighth
grades and principal’s office were on the second floor. There were two pedestals on each side of the
principal’s office. One had a large,
white bust of George Washington and the other had one of Abraham Lincoln. I think that must have started my love of our
country and the presidents and I am still very patriotic about our United
States.
There were two big heat registers, one on the east side
and one on the west. I used to stand on
the one on the west side almost every morning in the winter because I was about
frozen from walking to school the one and one-half miles when we lived on the
Dean place when I was in sixth, seventh and eighth grades.
(I want to make a diagram of the school and school yard.)
Between the ages of 7 and 10, (after that I started
working with the horses running the derrick) in the summertime and after
classes during the school year, sometimes I
brought the cows in. Dad or the
boys usually got the cows but once in a while I was asked to do it. This meant I walked about a half-mile out to
the pasture where they ate during the day.
It took me 20-25 minutes to walk out there to get our 7 or 8 cows. I liked to do it, to me it was fun. Each of our cows had a name. Some I remember are Blackie, Maude, Dolly,
Spot, and Nellie. And then there was
Clara whose bag was twice as big as the other cows. She gave twice as much milk. I felt sorry for her because her teats
dragged on the ground sometimes. PHOTO
OF GIRL BRINGING THE COWS IN
Another interesting thing that happened with the cows was
years later in the fall of 1941 while I was staying a short time with the
folks. Lorraine was 16 and playing
clarinet in the high school band. Sometimes
she would go out on the front porch to practice and all the cows would come
from wherever in the field they were and line up by the fence close to the
house. It seemed that they thought
Lorraine was putting on a concert just for them. Mother always got such a big kick out of
this. We all did.
The names of our work horses were Bess and Queen, who
were Dad’s favorite team. We also had
Nance and Bawly.
Bawly was the horse we would ride bareback. He was mean and would turn around and bite at
us. However, I think he got that way
because David was mean to him. David was
such a tease and I don’t know if he was just teasing Bawly but sometimes he
would just slug Bawly in the nose with his fist.
David told me once he didn’t remember having a dog, but
in Mom’s photo album there is a picture of David at about age 10 with a Collie
whose name was Tippy.
When I got the cows I had to open some gates but that was
nothing because when I went to Rozella’s house to play I had to climb under the
fence. Her Mom and Dad, Niels and
Ingeborg Petersen, [Note added later: Niels was Andrew Petersen's brother. Andrew is Walt Petersen's grandfather] were about the most wonderful people I had ever known. They were so friendly and nice to me when I
went to their house. They had four
daughters. Rozella was a year younger
than I was, so when they moved to Wendell from Roseworth when I was in second
grade, she was in first grade. I liked
her three older sisters, too: Ruth, 14, Esther, 12, and Oda, 9.
One Christmas their Dad made them each a doll house. And to my surprise he made one for me,
too. I was just thrilled. One of my favorite things to do was to
arrange the furniture in the doll house and make the house all pretty. I am so sad that I don’t know what happened
to this wonderful doll house Brother Petersen built for me.
Their mother, Ingeborg or “Inga” as people called her,
always kept their house so clean and taught her daughters to help. She always had their long hair fixed
beautifully. I was sad when they moved
to Eugene, Oregon, in 1932 when I was 12.
Rozella told me that her mother had discovered on a trip to Oregon that
her severe asthma and hay fever did
much better in the climate there. Sister
Petersen had another baby daughter a year before they moved. Her name was Betty Jean. Rozella and her sisters were excited over
their new baby sister. I loved to hear
their mother’s Danish accent.
Little did I know that way in the future, after I had a
grown-up daughter, she would marry the grandson of their uncle, Andrew
Petersen.
1927-28
- Second Grade, Ages 7-8 School year September to May
1927--Calvin
Coolidge--5th year as U.S. President
“Charles Lindberg aboard his ‘Spirit of St.
Louis’ monoplane completes the first transatlantic solo
flight
from New York City to Paris, a distance of 3,610 miles in 33 1/2 hours.” CA,
p. 500
First
talkie movie, “The Jazz Singer”
Sonja Henie, Olympic ice-skating
champion
Babe
Ruth hits 60 home runs for the Yankees
Sept.
7, 1927, a young Latter-day Saint inventor, Philo T. Farnsworth, produced
his first television picture—a single
horizontal line.
The
world’s first general public demonstration of television came 7 years later,
August 25, 1934.
1927
President Heber J. Grant--10th year as LDS Prophet
President
Grant dedicates the Arizona Temple at Mesa,
completing
a project begun six years before.
In
second grade my teacher was Mrs. Crutchfield.
Morris had been in the first grade two years and now was
repeating the second grade. So he was in
the same class I was in.
“I think Morris can’t hear,” Mrs.
Crutchfield said to my parents. “If I stand
by his desk and give the assignment, he does it. But if I give the assignment from the front
of the room, he doesn’t do it.’”
Mother and Dad had him checked and discovered that he did
have a hearing problem. Mother
remembered that when he was a baby he had such a high fever one time when he
had the flu they thought they were going to lose him. They don’t know if this is what may have
caused his deafness or if it was caused by an accident he had on the Andrus
place when a wagon ran over him. Morris
remembers it went over his shoulders.
When Morris was 9 my parents decided to send him to the
state school in Gooding for the deaf and blind.
He went to school there for ten years.
“Mother
and Dad just took me to Gooding and dumped me off,” Morris said when he was
sharing his feelings with me after he became an adult. “I didn’t know sign language and the deaf
kids couldn’t hear or understand me. I
didn’t know what to do,” Morris continued.
“The teachers didn’t know where to put me. I could hear a little and talk. They didn’t know what to do with me. I wasn’t happy there at all.”
Mother
and Dad didn’t realize that Morris didn’t understand why they were leaving him
there and that he felt abandoned.
He
didn’t even get to come home on weekends, just once in a while. He came home for Thanksgiving and Christmas
and for summer vacation.
When
I asked him if he went to church there, he said they did have a church at the
school. I asked him what church it was
and he told me, “Seventh Day Adventist.”
That is the church that he and Hazel go to now.
He
also told me that when they took him to the canal to be baptized, Mother and
Dad didn’t know that Morris had not heard them when they had explained what
they were going to do. He had no idea
why he was being dunked in the water and he fought them. He thought they were trying to drown
him.
We
should have all learned sign language so we could communicate with him. Mother didn’t want him to sign in public
because it embarrassed her.
He’s
had a sad life. [Eileen's note: My Mom helped her deaf brother in many ways--financially, physically by helping clean and paint their houses, and cooking food many times for him and his deaf wife, Hazel.]
My second grade teacher, Mrs. Crutchfield was a good
teacher. I sat across the aisle from
Wayne Carlson and one day there was a puddle under his desk. I guess I must have been snickering because
Mrs. Crutchfield asked me what was the matter and I said, “There is a puddle of
water under Wayne’s desk.”
She replied, “Well, never you mind, get back to your
studies.”
That year, Homer Inlow was in our class and his mother,
who was also a teacher, took him out of school to tutor him herself. I remember feeling glad because we thought
Homer was a really dumb boy. We didn’t
realize that he was retarded.
In second grade I got fascinated with penmanship and
liked to practice it a lot when I wasn’t busy.
It was fun to see if I could make my spirals look like you could run a
pen through them.
“Let Verna write it, she has the prettiest hand writing,”
my classmates still say if something needs to be written at our class reunions.
When I was in second grade, I turned 8 in January, and I
was baptized in February. My Dad
baptized me in Jerome at the stake center where they had a baptismal font. My friends who were baptized the same day
were __________________________________
I Know It Was the Holy Ghost Telling Me “It Is True”
It was Easter Sunday of this year that I received my
life-long testimony that the Church is true.
It happened this way. Sister
Bessie Kassins was our Sunday School teacher.
Most of the time our class met on the stage but this day was warm enough
that she had us go outside for our lesson.
The guys and most of the girls sat on the grass. I didn’t want to get my Easter dress dirty, so I
kinda leaned down on my knees. I can
remember being by the bush that had red berries on it.
The lesson was about The First Vision when Joseph Smith was
14 years old and went to the grove of trees near his farm house to pray because
he had read in James 1:5 “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God,
that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given
him.” Joseph’s mother and brother
had just joined a church and Joseph wanted to know if it was the right one for
him to join.
I will quote five verses of his story from the Joseph
Smith History as Sister Kassins taught it to us that day, and tell the effect
it had on me.
Joseph
Smith explained “...I kneeled down and began to offer up the desires of my
heart to God. I had scarcely done so,
when immediately I was seized upon by some power which entirely overcame me,
and had such an astonishing influence over me as to bind my tongue so that I
could not speak. Thick darkness gathered
around me, and it seemed to me for a time as if I were doomed to sudden
destruction.
“But
exerting all my powers to call upon God to deliver me out of the power of this
enemy which had seized upon me, and at the very moment when I was ready to sink
into despair and abandon myself to destruction--not to an imaginary ruin, but
to the power of some actual being from the unseen world, who had such marvelous
power as I had never before felt in any being--just at this moment of great
alarm, I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of
the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me.
“It
no sooner appeared than I found myself delivered from the enemy which held me
bound. When the light rested upon me I
saw two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing
above me in the air. One of them spake
unto me, calling me by name and said, pointing to the other-- This is My
Beloved Son. Hear Him!
“My
object in going to inquire of the Lord was to know which of all the sects was
right, that I might know which to join.
No sooner, therefore, did I get possession of myself, so as to be able
to speak, than I asked the Personages who stood above me in the light, which of
all the sects was right (for at this time it had never entered into my heart
that all were wrong)--and which I should join.
“I
was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the
Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in
his sight; that those professors were all corrupt; that: ‘they draw near to me
with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the
commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power
thereof.’
“He
again forbade me to join with any of them; and many other things did he say
unto me, which I cannot write at this time.
When I came to myself again, I found myself lying on my back, looking up
into heaven. When the light had departed,
I had no strength; but soon recovering in some degree, I went home...”
--Joseph
Smith-History1:15-20
Our whole class was listening intently. Sister Kassins had a spirit about her that
made us want to listen.
In the part when she was telling about Heavenly Father
and Jesus Christ coming down, something said to my mind, “That’s true!” And I have never doubted it since. I know it was the Holy Ghost telling
me it was true.
It’s a good thing that I got that testimony then because
to the group of kids my age, Church wasn’t all that important as they got
older. The boys in my primary and Sunday
School classes didn’t have a desire to go on a mission. It wasn’t even a consideration to go on a
mission to them when they were twenty--which was the necessary age. Ray Christensen is the only one I remember
who went on a mission. I never heard my
brothers and their friends even talk about going on a mission.
We went to Church because that is what our parents wanted
us to do. We didn’t have manuals for
lessons, and the kids didn’t read their scriptures like my grandkids do
now-a-days. We were raised to be
quiet. If the teacher was good, we’d pay
attention in class. But if not, when we
were teenagers, we’d talk to our friends about who went to the Saturday night
dance. It was more a social time than a
spiritual time for us. It’s a wonder
Marie and I stayed in the Church when most of the other girls our age stopped
going.
It seemed like the older kids in the ward were more
religious than my age group of friends.
The ones I remember were Farren Chandler, Tom Prescott, Merlin
Christensen, Evan Willard, Alvin Chandler, Clifford Hawkes, Hilbert Dille, Cleo
Prince, along with Rosanna Anderson, and Ivy Christensen.
It seems like sometime between the ages of 7 and 8 I
realized the truth about Santa Claus. We
had gone to town with Dad and he left us in the car while he went
shopping. He came and put some sacks in
the car and went to shop for a few more things.
I looked in the sacks and saw some nuts and candy. Those were only things that we got in our
sock that we hung up for Santa. We
didn’t get them any other time of the year.
Also at age 8 I remember having a beautiful red wool
dress with black buttons that my Mother made for me.
1928
- Third Grade - Age 8
1928—
Herbert Hoover, President of the United States
Penicillin
discovered
First
Mickey Mouse films
First
regularly scheduled television programs began in New York
[but
no one in Idaho had television sets until the 1950’s]
Popular
songs: “Am I Blue,” “Makin’ Whoopee”
Richard
Byrd flies over South Pole
Ernest
Hemmingway wrote “A Farewell to Arms”
1928--President
Heber J. Grant--11th year as LDS Prophet
Purchase
of Hill Cumorah completed
Missionaries
began proselytizing in Brazil.
The
YMMIA introduced a Vanguard program for 15- and 16-year-old boys.
After
the National Boy Scout organization created the Explorer program in 1933,
patterned
in part after the Vanguards, the Church adopted Explorer Scouting.
Miss
Helen Gifford was our teacher in third grade.
Our room was on the northeast corner of the first floor. I remember her reading the Bible every
morning, having prayer and then the pledge of allegiance to the flag. She also read a chapter of a book each
day. The only book I can remember her
reading was Billy Goat _______(not
Billy Goat Gruff). It was
about the goat eating everything and getting into everything.
We also had a music teacher come in to teach music. Her name was Miss (or Mrs.) Farris. We went down to the basement to the lunch
room for music class. The large lunch
room was where we ate the lunches we brought from home. It was next to the restrooms which had four
or five toilets and wash basins. Since
we only had an outdoor toilet at the homes I lived in when I was growing up, it
was wonderful to use the indoor school restrooms.
We all received a Weekly Reader in school. I remember reading about Charles Lindbergh’s
flying across the ocean from New York to Paris [May20-21, 1927]. I wish I had kept some of those weekly
readers.
Our favorite recess activities seemed to change each
year, in first grade it was the slippery slide, in second grade it was the
teeter totter, in third grade the giant strides. Somewhere along the way we started liking to
play house in the roots of the huge cotton-wood trees that lined the
playground all along the north side. We
pretended one section of roots divided the living room from the kitchen and so
forth. It’s interesting that twenty
years later, my daughter, Eileen, came home from that same school and told me
that one of her favorite things to do at recess was to play house in those big
roots of the cottonwood trees at school.
On primary day we would walk from the school to the
church, then go home with mother when primary was over. I can’t remember for sure which day of the
week it was--maybe Tuesday. There were
several of us girls that went to primary together including Lorraine Anderson,
Margaret Hawkes, Lucille Williams, Roma Ormond, Elma Jean Nielson, Tess
Prescott, Norma McClure and me.
At school we still liked to go down the slippery slide
but we also liked to teeter totter.
There were only two teeter totters so only four of us could go at one
time. We had to take turns every little
while. We still liked to skip rope and
it would take up the whole recess time.
On October 1st my brother, Don, was born. It was fun having a baby brother, but it was
not fun to change diapers and rinse them out in a bucket of water, or go out to
the ditch and rinse them out.
Don was such a cute little boy. I really liked having him for my little
brother.
David and Morris played
pretty good together. They would
wrestle. Dad would let them wrestle in
the house. They got along good when they
were kids. We didn’t realize there was anything
different about Morris then. We didn’t
even know he couldn’t hear. I think that
sometimes we probably talked loud enough so he could hear us well enough to
blend in.
They had a lot of socials at the church in those
days. Seems like they had some kind of a
social once or twice a month, like dances, dinners or the bazaars where
home-made articles were sold to earn money for the ward budget.
Later on the Willard Brothers--Chancy, Stern and
Evan--would bring their record players and amplifiers to play the music when
they would call the squares for square dancing every Saturday night.
I can remember sitting there and admiring Ada Hawkes,
Rosanna Anderson (Prince), Jane Prescott (Petersen), and all those girls who
were teenagers when I was a little kid.
When you’re about seven or eight you can’t wait to be that age so you
can dance and do those fun things. They
were icons, those gals--especially Arta Dixon was a movie-star pretty. She was.
She was just beautiful. She was
the prettiest girl in the ward, in the whole town.
They always had a great big celebration on the 24th of
July. In one part of the field that we
cut through to go to town they had some bleachers because they’d have baseball
games there. On the 24th of July that
year, Arta was the queen, and they put her on the front of the car and drove
her around.
That day they had a two-wing airplane that did
stunts. We sit there in the bleachers
and watched. One man even walked on the
wing.
Then they had the royalty ride around in their ball
gowns. I remember Arta looking so
beautiful. She was our bishop’s
daughter. She was a sister to Villis,
John, Forest, Virgie, and Harkness.
Harkness was attractive, too, but nothing like Arta.
Arta knew she was beautiful. I guess so many people had told her that she
couldn’t help but know. She was nice,
she wasn’t stuck up but she was a little prissy. My friends and I thought she was a movie star
almost.
She didn’t marry a member of the Church and people said
she wasn’t really happy in her marriage.
She had some kind of a tragedy after she got married. In her later years she wasn’t beautiful like
she had been as a teenager. I have her
obituary in one of my scrapbooks.
Ada Hawkes was my icon, my ideal. That was Margaret’s older sister. She was pretty, too. She was our teacher when we were junior girls
in mutual. When I was younger she was
mother’s hired girl for a while.
Then a little later Ada worked at the C.C. Anderson store
in Wendell. She was a clerk. I loved to go in there and have her wait on
me. She was as pretty as Arta in a
different way. Arta was dark, Arta was
like Dorothy Lamour or Ava Gardner--that type of brunette beauty. Ada was more like Maureen O’Hara and Olivia
DeHaviland. She married an LDS boy. Later in life she got Parkinson’s disease.
1929-1930 - Fourth Grade, Ages 9-10
1929--Oct.
29 “U.S. Stock Market collapses in frantic trading,
a dramatic beginning of The Great Depression”
quoted
from: Church Almanac 1999-2000, p. 500
First
Academy Awards presented to Emil Jannings, Janet Gaynor and Wings
Popular
songs: “Stardust,” “Singing in the Rain”
1929--President
Heber J. Grant--12th year as LDS Prophet
The
Tabernacle Choir started a weekly network radio broadcast
When I was in fourth grade we had moved to the Simonton
place, about three miles east and a little south of Wendell. Our teacher was Miss Aberdeen. Her room was
on the northwest side of the first floor.
Eleanor Culp was a good friend that year. She had naturally curly hair and was the envy
of all the girls. This year Lola
Anderson was in our class. She had been
going to the McBurney country school but her father had died and her mother
moved into town. I remember thinking how
awful that would be to have your father die.
I felt sorry for her.
I liked Miss Aberdeen and felt like I was one of her pets
but one day she sent me up to the principal’s office for writing a note to
Ricky Anderson. He sat right in front of
me on the outside row of seats on the east side of the room. He sat in the second seat from the front and
I sat in the third seat. He was a cute
kid who had just moved to Wendell that year.
He was stuck on Eleanor but when she and her family went to California
for a couple of weeks, I became Ricky’s special girl.
Eleanor’s seat was in the third row and to the back of
the room. When she got back from
California, Ricky kept twisting around to look at her until I couldn’t stand it
any longer. I wrote a note and passed it
to him that said “If you love Eleanor so much, why don’t you go back and sit
with her.”
Miss Aberdeen saw me and said, “All right, Verna, go up
to the office and I’ll be up soon.”
I went up but Mr. Downey, the principal, was not in his
office so I sat down in his chair.
Pretty soon Miss Aberdeen came in.
She was so mad. She grabbed me by
the hair and pushed my head back so I was looking up into her face. I can’t remember what she said but she sure
must have been frustrated that day to get so worked up over something like
that. The worst part was going back down
to class and sitting in my seat. I
didn’t really like her very much after that.
I still liked Eleanor, though. I went out to her place one night and stayed
overnight with her. The next morning her
mother made waffles with an iron she heated on the kitchen wood-burning
stove. That was the first time I had
ever had waffles and I thought they were so wonderful.
The winter this year was really cold and there was lots
of snow. One morning in January the bus
which was driven by a Mr. Crouse got stuck on the north-south road coming out
of Wendell just a few feet from the corner and told all of us on the bus we
better get out and walk to school. It
would have been at least a mile or more from there to the school.
I did not have gloves on.
Mother had given David money to get me some at noon. I was walking along with Ila Stevens. I was carrying my book and lunch but my hands
got so cold that the books fell to the ground.
Ila picked them up and saw that my hands were white. She and the other girl took me in to a house
close by. The people’s name was Modlin.
The other kids left me there and went on to school. The Modlins were so nice to me. They put my hands in lukewarm water and a
warm washcloth on my nose. After about
an hour, they had me thawed out and by then the snowplow had cleared the
road. The Modlins took me on in to
school in their car.
I think the bus had gotten unstuck and had picked up the
other kids down the road a ways so they didn’t have to walk all the way to
school. We later learned that that was
the coldest day of the whole winter.
I was about an hour or so late but I was surely grateful
to them. I think the folks stopped by
later and told them how much they appreciated what they did for me. My hands and my nose still get cold quickly
in cold weather. David had gone downtown
at noon and bought me some gloves. They
were the brown jersey kind we can still buy.
On
the Dr. Simonton place, I slept with Lorraine.
It’s out east of Wendell near where Mike and Shirley Albertson live now,
which is about two miles east and a mile south of Wendell.
I
guess we were kinda poor but we kids didn’t know it. I remember Mother saying she wanted to get
just rich enough so she could have a glass of orange juice for breakfast every
morning. I’m happy that in her later
life she was able to have orange juice whenever she wanted it.
Divider
page
for
1930-1939
Blank page for photos
1930’s
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