Moving away

My earliest memory of national politics stems from the fall of 1960, when Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy were chal­lenging each other for the presi­dency of the United States to replace Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had been the popular Republican presi­dent during the previous eight years. Nixon was serving as Eisen­hower’s vice-president.

I favored Nixon, the Repub­lican candidate, but not as strongly as some of my fellow classmates, who vowed that they and their families would be moving to Canada if Kennedy were elected. The youthful Kennedy won the November elections by a slim margin and was inaugurated in January 1961, but I cannot remember anyone at school moving away during those early months of the new decade.

Unfortunately, our family did move again in the spring of 1961, not as far as Canada, but off the farm and six miles into town, which was sufficient disruption of my little world.

We moved to a smaller house on the south edge of Nampa, just a couple blocks from the high school. Our house, was located on a little acerage on the north side of Montana Avenue, which was later renamed Colorado Avenue. There was a pasture behind the house, and we still had a couple of cows that had to be milked every morning and night. The place was just south of the Northwest Nazarene College. [Today the Northwest Nazarene University has taken over the area where our house once stood.]

The move seemed to come up suddenly and I suspect involved a default on the farm payments. Eleven-year-old boys weren't privy to such bits of information.

I just know I was pretty brokenhearted at the prospects of leaving Scism School and my many friends there. And it was pretty tough starting at Roosevelt Elementary during the last month or so of my sixth-grade year. For­tunately, we were still in the same ward, so at least I did not have to deal with changing friends at church too.