Joseph Perry

              Crowder, Dr. David L. Oral History Project
Joseph Perry- Reminiscing Growing
Up
By Joseph Perry
November 22, 1982
Box 2 Folder 22
Oral Interview conducted by Mikal Perry
Transcribed by Sarah McCorristin March 2005
Brigham Young University- Idaho
MP: Where were you born?
JP: I was born in Springville, Utah, it what they call the Ratmill house, ( which isn’t in
existence at the present time). And then we moved from there when— my father was
building a new home at the time. He was a brick mason and carpenter. He built a new
home for the family, and when I was very young why we moved to a new home— which
is still standing. It’s used as a office for a concern now— I forgot what it is that they do
there, but the house is very substantial. It’s still standing, a very nice looking home still.
MP: As far as the Ratmill house goes, is that still…?
JP: No, it was an old adobe house and it was gone a long time ago.
MP: Did you remember it at all?
JP: Oh no, no. I was only a year and a half, two years old when we moved into the new
home because it was just a temporary house while we built the new one.
MP: Then did you start going to school in Springville?
JP: Yes, I started going to school in Springville, the first grade. But this was in about
1917 and by the time I was— before I was seven years of age, in fact, why the war had
broke out, and my father decided the best place for his boys would be on a farm. So he
traded the house in Springville there for a farm up in the Lost River country. And we
moved up there in the spring of the year— about four or five feet of snow. And as we
drove out to the place, we had on a load of furniture ands stuff you know, my brother
Wayne, my oldest brother Wayne, was driving; and another sleigh came along so he
thought he’d be very polite so he pulled off to the side of the road so the other sleigh
could pass, and our horses weren’t used to being in the snow, so the man passed. And
then he stopped to see if we got back on all right, and the horses couldn’t get back on; the
snow was too deep. So he had to stop, and they unhitched the horses and put them back
up on the road, and then they pulled the sleigh up on top there after that. But it goes to
show that you know that if you’re not living in the snow country— don’t go into the snow
because it’s disastrous. But they had a lot of snow that year at the Arco country.
And we farmed there for the first year. They went up and built a rip- rap dam so
we could get water out into our ditches there, all kinds of water. Hay was seventy- five to
a hundred dollars a ton, so my father planted wheat and seeded it down with hay so the
next year we had a lot of hay. And the next year, well that was in 1917 and 1918— I’d
say we’d been there two years. And then in 1919 we— and 1918 was a dry year, it was as
dry as the first year was wet. So we couldn’t make a go of it, and my father traded the
farm then for a place in town. And he was going to build houses in Arco there. Bought a
twenty acre piece there, with a house on, and was going to build houses on it there,
because he was a builder. But by 1919, of course, the war was practically over, and there
was no place for homes to be built, nothing to build with. Just the same as it was when
we had World War II, no materials and no demand. Because the economy was in pretty
bad condition by that time, too.
So we traded that place for a farm down in what they call Dixie, just outside of
Notus in west, I guess, yeah west or south of Caldwell. A dairy farm, and we had about
10 or 12 head of cows that we were milking there. But the price of milk was up real high
when we bought it— everything went down. The price of milk went down, and you just
couldn’t make it. So we had, we lost out there. Father couldn’t pay for the place,
couldn’t pay for anything that he had. And we had big auction sales and sold off
everything and moved into a little house in Caldwell.
One thing about this place out here at Dixie though, I was a boy of about ten, nine,
ten, eleven, somewhere in there. They had several sloughs around there, and they had
fish in there and frogs, big bullfrogs. My first experience with a bullfrog was everybody
telling how good they were for eating. So I went down there, and I noticed where one
jumped down in the water and swam up in under the bank. So I reached down under the
bank there and got a hold of this big bullfrog and looked out and looked him in the face
there, and it scared me half to death so I turned him loose. By then I decided, well, he’s
not going to hurt me any, so I went back in and caught him again. Took him home and
cut the legs off and nobody in our family wanted to have anything to do with those frog
legs, so I fried them myself and ate them, and they were delicious. So I got a lot of— I
caught a lot of frogs from then on.
MP: Did anybody ever end up trying them?
JP: Oh yes. They all tried them after that. They all liked them because they’re really a
delicacy. But we had a lot of them, and I caught a lot of them. And we had carp in there,
in the creek there, and some bass, but not many. But I could fish for those carp off the
bank there, and some bass, but not many. But I could fish for those carp off the bank
there, and I really had a ball. And ice was on the sloughs in the wintertime. When the
ice would go over I’d borrow a pair of skates from my sister’s husband’s brothers. And I
had a ball skating. So it was really a fun place to live, as far as I was concerned.
We were right on, set right on the side of a little creek there that went down
through. They called it a slough, actually it was a creek if you’d have called it in this
country; but it was a slough down there because a drainage ditch is what it was. But then
I’ve been back there since and they’ve dug the ditch, the slough, down deeper so that they
could drain the land. And they’ve dug drain ditches in through and leveled the ground up,
you know, so that it’s really good. And there’s some really good farm ground now, but
when we were there it was— oh we farmed about 20 acres of it in corn for silage for the
cattle and the rest was pasture, salt grass mostly, which isn’t a very good pasture. But we
had a lot of good pasture there too. It was a fun place to live. I had a lot of good friends
that would come out. And we had a big lawn. We had a wrestling match just about
every day. Three or four of them— there was one, two boys that I especially played with.
The one boy was a little bit taller than I, and he’d be a little bit bigger, a year older. But I
could throw him, and the other kid he could throw him, but yet that kid could throw me.
So we could just go round and around and around.
But then we moved from there; when we sold out we moved into Caldwell. I
went to school there for a year. It was a good place to be too, for all that matter. By
spring my father had gone down to Utah for the winter to see if he couldn’t find work
down there. By spring my father had gone down to Utah for the winter to see if he
couldn’t find work down there. By spring he had found himself a job as a watchman there
to the new steel plant, just between Provo and Springville. So we moved back down
there. And then we bought a place at Provo. We lived there, and I went to school there.
Lived there for about two years, until my father died; he was, got to be where he was in
pretty poor health. Couldn’t find much work either, because there wasn’t much building
a doing. But the summer before he died, he had the job of building chimneys in a bunch
of new homes that they were building out of lumber, which was strictly against his
wishes because he was really a brick home man. And I helped him there to build those
flues. If he’d have lived, I’d probably have been a bricklayer because I would have
worked with him from then on; but he died and…
The next summer we, my sister married a man by the name of Hurst, and lived out
on what they called the Fish Creek Ranch, out of Carey. And they wanted me to come up
there— I think it was just a case of trying to get mother away from her environment there
so she could forget father.
And I worked there as a chore boy and ran a hay rig for the cutting of all the hay
that they had. My job was to rake the hay and help with the chores and help to cut the,
sharpen the sickles for the mowing machines. And then the fun job was keeping the
family in wild chickens. I packed a .22 with me on the rig there, and I’d bring in three or
four chickens every day for dinner. And they were delicious, really something. And then
there was one trip there, one thing that was really interesting there was, I met a man that
was running a concession. And he had a bowling ball on a chain. And you were
supposed to push it out and then it’d come back and hit the pin. So I went up after I’d got
this all perfected. I won a couple of Kewpie dolls with it, and then they barred me from
working on it because they said I wasn’t playing fair. But I found out that they weren’t
playing fair either, for all that matter. But I went to work with this man. And we went
over to Hailey, to an American Legion celebration, convention, and I ran this ball on the
chain.
MP: Where did you start working for them?
JP: I just went there for a week; it was only about three or four days. But I hitchhiked
my way into town and hitchhiked my way over to Hailey and met the man over there.
And he had it all over there and he was in the hospital so his partner rigged it all up for
me and told me how to run it and everything. And it was a very good experience for me
because I found out that there were reasons why you couldn’t always beat the game.
MP: What kind of stuff did they do? I mean did they…?
JP: Well, for one thing the pin was cut on a bevel; it wasn’t square, it was just a little bit
off. And if you, when you turned it around why you, the pin came here that you put here
and when the ball came it came way over the other side there. Or you could put it on the
pin there and you could slide it just a little bit further that way. If you wanted somebody
to win why then you set it up straight, and invariably they win something there. And
you’d let somebody win every once in awhile. But it was a good experience there.
I came back and went to work. They hadn’t done too much— it’d been stormy
while I’d been gone anyway, so they hadn’t cut too much.
And then I went from over there and worked in Arco for his brother- in- law in the
hay that fall. Came back home and my brother was a little bit older than I and he— I
thought I was pretty big because I’d been out working all summer long and had a little bit
of money in my pocket, so we didn’t get along very well. And my sister at Ashton,
Louise, had a baby about that time and sent for my mother to come and stay with her. So
she went up and stayed with her. And she wrote down and said that Uncle George
Chambers wanted somebody to come and stay with them that winter and go to school.
So, boy, I jumped at the chance. And I went back up to Ashton, went to school there.
And I got to play football and do the things that I couldn’t have done possibly if I’d have
stayed in Provo because it’s a much bigger school.
But in the meantime George had rented two more farms with another man and
they were going to farm them together. But this man got another, bigger farm, so he left
the two farms there. And he asked me if I thought my brother Howard an I would like to
come and farm, and I said yes. So I wrote to him and he said yes, that they’d come up.
So he quit his job at the steel plant. And he came up, and that’s where we started farming
in Ashton. And I bought the land we were farming, it belonged to the banker. And he
had some horses, three horses, and I bought the three horses for 125 dollars. And then I
got him to throw in a stack of pea straw to feed them with for the winter. And that was
what we went over there. And I had one more horse there; the man that was a postman
had a Morgan stallion; it was wind- broken, and they couldn’t drive him on there because
he couldn’t stand the pace. And they gave me this horse, the stud horses, and that was
the four horses that we worked with. These three 125 dollar horses and this giveaway
stallion, that’s what we farmed with the first year.
MP: Did you do all right?
JP: Yes, the first year we had in some potatoes and potatoes were at a real good price.
And we got enough money there to get started on pretty well to where we could buy a
little bit better horses. They even furnished the— George, my brother- in- law, furnished
their equipment or they did the potatoes. So we didn’t have to have any money because
we didn’t have any. And that’s the way we started out, with just 125 dollar horses. My
father still had a harness or two left, and then we used them along with another one we
purchased, an old beat up harness. We borrowed equipment and whatever we could to
farm the first year, and then we bought some more equipment of our own after that. But
that’s the way we started farming.
MP: Is that the same farm that Howard is still farming?
JP: It’s the farm that Howard had been farming, and he sold it here just this last couple of
years. But that’s the farm that we started farming on. We stayed there and went to high
school there.
Played football. We did pretty well the last two years of school. Our junior year
we were only beaten once and that was by Idaho Falls. We thought we were so cocky we
could beat anybody, so we challenged them to a game and they beat us 45 to nothing.
The next year why we had a return game when they came up to Aston there, and we beat
them 20 to nothing that year. And we went on and our senior year we competed for the
championship of Idaho. We were one of the four teams that were up in the top bracket.
We played Gooding and they beat us 19 to 6 or 7. And Boise beat Moscow, and they
beat them bad, and they turned around and beat Gooding too. So Boise was the
champion, Gooding was second, we were third and Moscow was fourth for the state.
And that’s pretty good for a little school like we had.
MP: At the time they didn’t divide the schools down into A- 1, A- 2, and A- 3 categories?
JP: No, that was just— everybody was just one school with no class A or class B or
anything. They just all competed as one. So actually we were competing with Boise
High School as school with less then 200 people, students.
But then I went on to Ricks, and while I was at Ricks why I got a scholarship with
a potato project, a seed potato project, for what they call the Carl Grey Award, the Union
Pacific Carl Grey Award. And then went to Moscow there for a half a year. And then
my brother got married and bought another farm. So it was quite imperative that I come
home and farm, so I came home and farmed there.
MP: How long did you go to Ricks then?
JP: Just a couple, two quarters.
MP: Is that like two semesters now?
JP: No, it was three months at a time. Three month quarters, they had four quarters there
at that time. They had the summer quarter, then they had the fall quarter, and then the
winter quarter and then the spring quarter.
MP: And you went to….?
JP: The fall and winter. Came back up home and went to Moscow, and that was quite a
thrill there. I went in on wrestling. Got my ribs broke and had to quit it. But I had to
come home after the first semester there, even though I had the scholarship, I had to come
home and run the farm there.
And we did pretty well the first year that I came home. We had a good pea crop.
We had raised quite a few turkeys the year when we had a lot of what they call army
worms; a worm that comes, inches along, and he reaches out and grabs and then he
comes back and then inches on. And these turkeys lived in our pea field there and kept
these bugs down. And we had one of the best pea crops in the county that year; I figured
because of the turkeys more then anything else.
And I thought I’d go back to school, but never did get the way to go back. And I
married Alice Bigler. And we farmed there for another year and then we bought a farm
down in Delco. We lived down there for about 12 or 13 years, and that’s where most of
our family was born. First one was Mark, and then Jon and then Jim and then Jorj. And
Mayme was born in September. And the next spring we had bought a second place by
the little place we first bought.
A man by the name of Newcomb wanted me to go up into the Ashton and St.
Anthony country and buy potatoes, and I did go up there. So he wanted me to go up
there, and he’d build a warehouse for me so that I could be there and buy potatoes for
him. But this was in the World War II deal, and everything was rosy at the time. By the
time we got back up there why the war had ended and the demand for potatoes, and
especially processed potatoes, had fallen away; so the warehouse was never built. But he
farmed up there and raised seed potatoes. I went into the seed potato business on my own,
buying and selling— and commercials too.
MP: Didn’t you also work in a cannery when you were in Springville or Caldwell?
JP: Yes, I did, and that was an interesting job there. There was a bunch of us boys there
together. We would unload; one of our main jobs was unloading the cars that came in
with tin cans. And we had a stick, a piece of board, maybe five or six feet long or a bit
longer, but just about right. These cans were all stacked in here just one row after
another with the opening towards you. But they’d take these sticks with these wires on
about three or four inches long and just shove them in the cans and lift them up and set
them on a tray, and then just roll them up into the warehouse. And one of our jobs, one
of my jobs was to put the cans on a long, well it was actually just a track, and they would
roll right on down into the canners. You would have to keep that filled up. And then we
labeled and we stacked cans back into the warehouse. We had a lot of jobs that us kids
10, 12, 13 years old, ( I think the oldest was about 14 years old), did.
MP: What all did they can there?
JP: Peas, beans, and tomatoes.
MP: Did you ever see any strange things get into the cans?
JP: No, no we never did. We, one of my jobs there was to keep the knives sharp for the
ladies when they were snipping the beans. And see that they had the beans to where they
could get to the assembly. The tomatoes we, on those we worked on the cans more then
anything else. They came in and were washed, and then put in a vat of scalding water
and set there for a minute, and then they were rolled out and they went on a belt. And the
ladies took them off the belt, pulled the skins off, and then took the stem end out. And
then they went from there on into the cans. And as far as I’m concerned I couldn’t see
anyplace along the line where anybody could’ve had anything that could get fouled up;
very clean.
There was a little bit of, well a man by the name of Crandall owned it. And he
was a very good friend of my father. And I worked for him through the summer time
when we weren’t in the cannery there. One of my jobs was, he had a patch of celery, and
one of my jobs was to take rubber bands and to tie them up around those celery plants as
they were growing up so they’d stay straight up; instead of branching out they’d stay
straight up and hold them in the bunches that you see today.
And then they had a patch of strawberries too. Packed crates in and out of that for
the pickers. He built a cement abutment down around the, the house was a three story
house. And the second story was on the ground level on top, and then as the road went
on down the bottom part of the house was on the same level as the ground below, and he
put a cement abutment around there. I wasn’t asked to do that, and that’s why— I’d seen
my father work before— so I worked that cement down and smoothed it up for them. It
isn’t there now because the highway has gone through there; but it was there, that cement
abutment, for a good many years until the highway went through.
MP: You say you were only about 12?
JP: About 12 years old, 12 or 13. And then we moved from there over to Provo.
MP: What do you remember about your parents, grandpa?
HP: My father was quite old when I was born. He was 53 years old when I was born.
And my mother was 40. I was the last of the children that lived. So my parents were old.
At that time 50 years was considered quite old. My father was quite a man. He was a
hard worker. In fact, he worked himself to death, you might say, because he wanted
to… I can remember him, he was a very early riser. He was a very early riser, but he
wanted to go to bed early. And of course at that time we had a little privy outside, you
know. And he would take his thunder mug with him when he came back in. And he’d
come in always had one suspender down— he always had one suspender down, always
had his suspenders with one suspender. And he’d come through the house there, whether
there was company or what, thunder mug in one hand and suspenders up there and up to
bed he’d go.
MP: What‘ s a thunder mug?
JP: Well that‘ s what they call the pot. And it was quite embarrassment to my sisters
when their beaux were around. But I can remember that. It was a fun time in Arco or in
Lost River too, because it was, with the streams along there, awfully good fishing. And
we’d walk down the road there about a mile and a half to fish in there. And Howard
would be leading out and then Melvin and then me. Dragging our pole along with us and
our fish behind us as we came back home. And we fished with a big cane pole, when we
could get the cane poles, otherwise we’d just use a pole. And worms, that’s the only
thing we ever knew how to fish with was just worms. But that was all that was necessary
because the fish were there and all you had to do was put it into where they were and
you’d catch fish. I remember this one time, we had been down on there, and there had
been a lot of traffic through the creek so the water was very muddy, probably a rainstorm
or something. And we caught fish just as fast as we could put them in. So the next time
we went fishing why I headed on down there where we’d been fishing that day, and
thought I could still catch some more fish. Instead of that I met a big buck sheep. So he
didn’t particularly want to get out of my way, so I cracked him in the side of the head
with my fishing pole. About that time he put me down, and I decided I didn’t want to go
down there; I got up and got out.
MP: It was just a tame one?
JP: No, it was a regular buck, a big black faced buck. Sometimes they get a little bit
mean. I think it’d probably been teased a lot, so that he knew what he was doing all right.
MP: Would your dad go out much with you? Was he much of an outdoors man?
JP: No, he was a hard working man. He had, I never did know of him going out, well
once. We went up to Mackey and camped out over night, and I think that he did fish that
time. But the three of us boys did a lot of fishing. But it seemed like father and my
oldest brother didn’t do much.
MP: Another thing why he left that country too was my oldest brother was drafted into
the army?
JP: World War I?
JP: World War I. And he left Arco on the train. By the time he got as far as Blackfoot
the armistice was signed. But he didn’t stop, he kept right on going down to Salt Lake
and went out to the smelters out through Salt Lake at Garfield and got a job there with the
smelters. And that’s where he worked all his life until he retired. In fact, my brother
Howard went down too, and got a job too.
MP: Did you ever do much hunting?
JP: No. The first time I ever did any hunting was out to Fish Creek, shooting those
chickens. We had chickens there, but I was a little too young. I remember the first duck
I ever shot. We had a double barrel shotgun. And a big mallard drake came in on the
water, in there where we were watering. So I snuck up in there behind a bush, but I got
right close, and I pulled down on him. Shot him and the duck went down that way and I
went back that way. Kicked me clear over on my rear bottom.
MP: You shot him while he was still on…?
JP: Oh yeah, I shot him. Oh no, I wouldn’t let him get off the ground there. I wasn’t
going to take that chance. But we did do a lot; my brother did a lot of trapping while we
were down in this Dixie country there. And he did a lot of hunting too, for all that matter.
But I packed rats all over the country; I followed him around trapping. And through
those sloughs there were a lot of them.
MP: Did the skins sell for much?
JP: They sold for a pretty good price, what we figured was a good price at that time. We
got all the way from 60 cents to about as high as 1dollar 25 cents. That was good money
for us. They sell them for 4 or 5 dollars now. He did pretty good; he was a good trapper.
And I never did catch but one rat. He was wedged in is den up there, and I tried to pull
him out, and all I got was the foot off him. And the next year, the next summer, and all
of the fat came out of that hole into the creek. So I kind of dug down in there and found
my rat still there. Didn’t kill him, I drowned him though. But we had rats, and lots of
ducks down there. And I did shoot more ducks after that. But that was my biggest thrill
of all, shooting my first duck.
Another thing we did while we were down there that was really interesting, and
my boys asked me to talk about this too. The circus came, was coming to town. So my
sister’s brothers, that I’d borrowed the skates from, invited me to come in and stay with
them. And the train would come in about 4: 00 o’clock in the morning; and they would
hire all the boys they could get to help unroll the canvas and set the tent up. And then
we’d get to go into the tent free. So they had a little bit of an old place down there where
they’d been doing some dry cleaning. We were supposed to have stayed in there, the
three smaller boys, one boy my age and then one boy just younger. And we went down
there and thought we were going to be alone, but here the bigger brother came with all his
kids so there were about eight or ten of us kids in that little shack there. And we didn’t
sleep there that night at all. When that train came in about 4: 00 o’clock why we were all
there waiting for that. We watched them unload. Those elephants there would push
those carts around, wagons and pull them and everything. They are really an animal that
can be worked a lot with, and they worked a lot.
MP: Did you join up with the circus then?
JP: No, I didn’t join up with them then. But we worked with them that day. We helped
them unroll the canvas and helped them string everything up. And then we agreed to
help them take it down so we went to the other performance. So we got in on all the
performances. And that night they kept our caps so we’d be sure and stay there to help
roll the canvass back up. But those elephants in there, they’d come along and they’d get
those big steel stakes that they’d driven in the ground; those elephants would hook on
there and pull them up, just one right after another. They let the tent down first. Then
we’d grab a hold of one end and just, ( there were probably 15 or 20 boys there), just run
over the top and fold it over, and then we’d take another side and run back the other way
until we got down to where it was so big. And then the elephants would pick it up and
put it onto the carts to take home. They’d load them back up onto the train and through
the night they’d drive on the next town, and get in there about 4: 00 o’clock, or some such
matter, and the same thing would happen all over again. But it was interesting. The first
circus I’d ever seen, and it was quite a thrill. Those were my boyhood days, now where
do you want to go?
MP: You didn’t say much about your mom.
JP: My mother was a small lady. A very good, kind- hearted, even tempered woman.
She was what you’d call an ideal wife to my father. She raised ten children for my father.
The first one died when she was about two and a half years old. And there were two boys,
Duane and then Ed. And when Edward was a baby my father was called on a mission.
He went to Kentucky without purse or script. And then while he was gone my sister
Effie was born. So they’d ask him about his family or whatever he’d say, “ Well, I have
three children and I haven’t seen one of them!” and that implied quite a thing, you see.
This is a Mormon Elder here, and he’s had three children and he hasn’t seen on of them.
But he meant that he hadn’t seen the last one. He just said it that way as a joke. But
somebody asked him about the people in Kentucky and the age that they are; most of
them had moonshine whiskey, you know, that they made and drank there. He said, “ Well,
actually, they’re pickled in alcohol and then smoked with tobacco. So they just about last
forever.”
MP: How long did he serve his mission?
JP: I think it was two years. But I have a letter someplace in my belongings, I hope I
still have it anyway, that they gave me and my sisters. It’s a letter from my mother to my
father while he was on his mission. She said, “ The Elders gave me 5 dollars, so I’m
sending it on to you so you can get yourself a new suit because I don’t want you to look
shabby when you’re on your mission.” And that was on of the things there, but otherwise
it was a very touching letter. He wrote— I had one of him, I don’t know whether I still
have it or not. But they expressed their love for each other. They got along real well
together.
MP: Did they talk much about when they were younger?
JP: No, I probably learned more about my parents from my cousin Ethel Madsen. She
lived up at Lorenzo and raised flowers, and that’s where I got started raising the flowers.
Of course I’d raised flowers before, for all that matter. But I got acquainted with her.
She used to stay with my father and mother whenever one of the babies came. My
mother was only a little over five feet and had flaming red hair. Well, I never knew her
as having red hair because her hair was white when I was born. I can’t remember it being
anything except just white hair.
My father was quite a large man, about six foot one inch, which was quite tall for
people at that time because it wasn’t common for people to be six feet or over like it is
today. And she said that they were a very beautiful couple. He was such a big man and a
handsome man too. He would wear a full moustache with all the curls on the end and
everything. And in his wedding picture— he was thirty when he was married— he was
really bald, except for what he could comb up over the top from the middle. And my
mother, I never did see a picture of her when she was younger. Of course at that time
even if they’d had a picture it wouldn’t have showed up— the red hair. They didn’t have
colored photography at that time.
And she had, you might say, ten children and raised nine of them.
MP: Do you know anything about how they met?
JP: No, I really don’t. She was born and raised down in Santaquin, and father was raised
around Mapleton and Springville. The home town for the people was at Mapleton— my
grandfather Perry, who was the father of my father, and the one lady who had married my
grandfather in polygamy as a third wife. And she didn’t think she was getting quite the
needs and her share, so she divorced my grandfather and married another man who I
learned just last year was what they called the winter husband. He married, came in from
out in the country where he was working and everything in the late fall, next to winter,
and married my grandmother. Lived with her through that winter; when spring came he
left, and they never hear any more of him. And so they called him the winter husband.
And I had never heard that from my father or my mother, either one. One of my cousins
up here, who was a daughter of his only full sister, told me that that’s what they call him,
the winter husband. And then she married a man by the name of Van Leuven, it was a
Dutch name; she had several children by him. So all told, my father was a member of a
family of twenty- eight children. I usually say that my grandfather had three wives and
my grandmother had three husbands, so it was a double polygamy family.
MP: Do you know anybody else in the family that was living in Polygamy?
JP: I’ve been very well acquainted with some of my mother’s sister’s family. She
married a Whiting and they had seventeen children. He died when the seventeenth child
was born, so she raised the seventeen children. And there were a lot of good people. The
Tibbitts up here in Lorenzo, my cousin Ethel, and another sister married a Waddoups,
Ralph Waddoups, who was a patriarch. Her father was a patriarch down in Mexico.
They were a really good family. Very stanch in the church; some of them weren’t, but
most of them were.
MP: About where did the Depression catch you?
JP: The Depression started when I was at school in Moscow. That was in ’ 29, I went up
there for the one quarter in 1929, and that’s when the Depression hit. So we farmed at
Ashton for a couple or three years. And then after I was married, of course a young
couple wants to be away by themselves for awhile, so we bought a farm down in Declo,
and farmed down there. And we bought that in ’ 33 and moved down there in the spring
of ’ 34. And the Depression was really there up until ’ 36. And that was about the first
crop that we got when we really had enough money to where we could say we had a
couple of dollars in our pockets. But I had about four acres of red potatoes, and they
brought three hundred sacks to the acre. And we raised them and we got $ 2.50 a hundred
for them just sacked up out of the field. They were actually sold for $ 3, but the soil was
quite heavy, and we couldn’t get them to come out clean. So we just sacked them up, dirt
and all, and I got $ 2.50 for them, which I thought was a pretty good deal. Otherwise
they’d have had to have been graded as they were put in the sack. And we had enough
then where we could buy a car. And bought another horse because I’d lost two horses to
what they called spring sickness, when the horses died in the spring. And the hail had hit
us once. We had quite a time of it. There just wasn’t anything rosy about it at all. We
didn’t pay much for the farm, but we didn’t get much out of it either. It was just the
conditions then. But then we sold that and bought another one down in Delco there, a
bigger place. It was much more productive. Most of it was pretty good soil, but there
were some parts that weren’t. We had about twenty head of cows that we were milking
there through the war. And I worked with the potatoes in the winter time to bring in a
little bit of cash so that we would have something there to live on. But that’s where our
family was raised, and they went to school there.
MP: How did you meet grandma then?
JP: Oh, it was a blind date.
MP: Really?
JP: Yes, a friend of mine that went to Moscow with me was going with a girl down in St.
Anthony. He didn’t have a car and we did, so he wanted me to take him to St. Anthony.
He promised me a blind date down there; and Alice was the blind date. And we kept
going on from there, and we finally married. But we had several dates together with the
four of us. And he married the girl that he was going with, and I married Alice.
MP: What sort of stuff did you do on your dates?
JP: Well mostly it was dancing. We liked the dance hall up at Warm River there, the
Rendezvous. Dances every Saturday night, and man there was a crowd up there every
Saturday.
MP: It was kind of a long ways to go through, it seems like.
JP: Oh yes, but then that was the way you wanted it. You wanted to get out of town at
least. And then we had people from St. Anthony, and Ashton, and Chester, and
everybody up there. There were a lot of people that met a lot of different people up there.
If you didn’t go on a formal date you went up there. And a bunch of boys would go
together, and a bunch of girls would probably go together and before the end was over
why you’d go home together. It wasn’t formal at the time, you could go and ask most
any girl on the floor because she wasn’t attached to anybody, you know. If she wanted to
dance with you she would; if she didn’t, she didn’t.
MP: Other than that, did they have a couple of show houses in Ashton?
JP: Yes, we had a show house, but I wasn’t much of a show hound. We would go to
church. As a rule, of course they didn’t say too much about it then, now they do. But
about three of four of us boys would go together, my brother and I and a man by the
name of Gene Clark would go to church enough, and then we’d go to the show
afterwards. And that’s about the only time I ever went to a show, like that.
MP: Most of your transportation then was in a buggy?
JP: No. While we were at Ashton there we had, we bought one of the first touring cars,
Ford touring cars, that came into Fremont County— a model A. And so we had pretty
good transportation— except in the wintertime, and then we used bobsleighs. We
traveled back and forth to school most of the year in the sleighs because they had a little
bit heavier winters than they have now, I think. It seemed like they came early and lasted
late. When I came home from Moscow they had a real heavy snowfall that year. And
it’d melted and formed a crust over the top of it. And you could just head out through the
field anyplace you wanted to go. Fences and all, you could go right over the top of them
because you couldn’t see most of the fences. You might see a few posts sticking up, but
you couldn’t see any fence at all.
MP: And the horses would go over the top of them?
JP: Right over the top; there was that much snow and it was that hard on top. Of course
it didn’t last very long because pretty quick we had the spring thaws, and then you
couldn’t go anyplace with a team or a horse or anything else, because the snow was just
so soft that you’d just sink right down and slide off to the side. I don’t know whether
you’ve ever been on snow roads at all when they’ve been really high. But we just built
the roads up. Quite often we’d take a block of wood about 14” or 16” high and cut it off
where it was square and then put it behind the sleigh on one runner. When we were
going one way we’d roll that one down and when we’d come back we’d roll the other
side down. And then we built the road up to where you were right up on top, you were
only about two or three inches below the top of the snow with your road. And if you had
a good snow horse why you could just trot along there just as fast as you wanted to, but
some of the horses didn’t. I took one horse down and tried to come back over and it got
off the road and we got into a bunch of brush and everything. He killed himself right
here; he couldn’t get up out of it.
MP: You couldn’t help him?
JP: Couldn’t help him in any way, shape, or form. There wasn’t a load on the outfit at
all, he just couldn’t— he just had a heart attack or something in the snow and died. So
you had to be careful which horses you used in the wintertime. And we usually used a
team that was young and quit fleet- footed, you know, for two reasons. We liked to race
with them quite a bit. We went to Ashton and there they had the flagpole right square in
the middle of town. And you’d go up to that and you’d just go around and around, and
you’d just hold your team just as close to that pole as you could and the sleigh just swang
way out and around; just go around and around until the cop came along and then you
had to move out. By the time he got away to someplace else why then another team
would go in there.
MP: What’d he chase you in?
JP: It was against the rules and regulations for you to do that.
MP: But did he have a horse and a sleigh, or did he walk?
JP: No, he lived right in town there. But there weren’t any cars or anything running in
town during winter times. From the first of December on you didn’t see a car until the
spring of the year when the roads dried up. So you actually used your sleigh pretty near
as many months. And the roads between Ashton and St. Anthony, when I was courting
there, there was but one time that I went down the railroad tracks because that was the
only place open. With my team in it I’d have been sunk if the train would’ve come
because I couldn’t have gotten out of there at all.
MP: Was it a little bit spooky going down?
JP: Oh, you bet. We went down pretty fast to get out of there.
MP: How many miles was that?
JP: We had to go down about four or five miles before we could get out off the railroad
tracks. By the time we came back— we went down to a M- man basketball tournament—
the roads had been opened up to where we could get onto the highway.
MP: How long did you court grandma before….?
JP: About a year. She came up and worked in the harvest house for my neighbor during
the harvest time; and we had a few dates then too. And then we went down to this
basketball tournament and were down there for four or five days. I stayed at her mother’s
place while we were down there. Melvin and I and my brother went down there. We
kind of decided then that we’d do something about it. And then she came up and stayed
with this neighbor that she’d worked for; during the dog race days I took her to the dog
races. And then she went up and stayed with my brother Howard and his wife while they
had a baby. So then the next April why we went down to Salt Lake and were married
down there in the temple.
MP: Were you engaged very long?
JP: About three or four months.
MP: Just out of curiosity, the wedding ring that you gave her was made out of two stones,
wasn’t it?
JP: No. The first wedding ring I gave here was a little band, a white gold band, it cost 5
dollars. But then she out grew that, so I gave her another one. The second one I got here
was a set. That’s when we were married twenty- five years. For the twenty- fifth
anniversary why I had arrangements to get this ring made special; one third of a carat
diamond and then a white gold band— pretty nice outfit.
Jess and I went in and got it and brought it so we’d have it there. He was the only
one that knew that I had it, but he wouldn’t tell his mother a thing about it. I never had to
ask him not to tell her so I think that he just knew that he wasn’t supposed to. It was
quite a surprise to Alice. But we lost the set out of it about ten years afterwards. Don’t
know where she lost it at all. We went to a class reunion up at Ashton there, and I think
someplace along the line we lost it that night because she noticed it when we got home
that night. So it was someplace up around in the Ashton country there. But we barged
around several places there to see if we could find it, but we never did locate it at all.