Second, third, and fourth grades

In September 1956 I started the second grade at Adrian grade school. Mrs. Morgan was our teacher. She had a reputation of being a mean teacher, whether or not she really was, and was not one of our favorites. When I started the second grade my little mind boggled at the thought that we would be learning to add entire columns of numbers and to add and subtract three- and four-digit numbers.

Near the end of my second grade year, sometime in the spring of 1957, our class took a big field trip. We rode in school busses from Adrian to Nyssa, then got on the train there to ride to Boise, the capital of Idaho and the biggest city in the entire area. We visited the state capitol building and the state historical museum, where a stuffed two-headed calf was on display, and the Julia Davis Park. It was an ex­citing, fun day for a bunch of seven- and eight-year-olds.

In September 1957 I started the third grade. I remember little about that school year except I enjoyed it more than the second grade. Our teacher was a Miss Weir, who sometime during the school year got married and changed her name.

The following fall, September 1958, I started the fourth grade. Sometime during the year we studied music, and I started to play a flutaphone, a little plastic instru­ment something like a recor­der. This experience gave me an invaluable founda­tion in how to read music when, several years later, I started to take piano lessons.

We also studied Oregon history that year, which may have started my life-long love affair with history and geography and travel. To my know­ledge, I had never been any father west in Oregon than Malheur County, but I thrilled to read of those early pioneers who more than a century earlier had settled the Willamette Valley and kept the Oregon country from going British, and I loved to learn about the Lewis and Clark expe­di­tion and their bold trek across an uncharted continent to the Pacific.

Nearing the end of my fourth-grade year, at the end of February 1959, our family moved from Oregon to Idaho. That year, 1959, was the centennial of Oregon's becoming a state.

Starting school

In September 1955 I started school at Adrian grade school. There were two first grade classes located at the west end of the building on the lower level. I was in Mrs. Comer's class, right in the north­west corner of the building. Mrs. Comer was an older woman—at least she seemed so to six year olds—and her grand­motherly ways made her a favorite with us.

I don't remember much else about that first year of school except we would have a nap and story time each after­noon after lunch and a snack later in the afternoon.

Once in the spring we took a field trip and walked the few blocks from the school to the post office to learn about how the mail works. I doubt there are many post offices in this whole country as small as the little one in Adrian, Oregon, but we were impressed in our little way by how the whole system worked.

The last day of school each year was a big field day with races and games and awards and food all up on the high school field and no regular classes except to get report cards. And then the busses would take everyone home early that day. I loved to ride the school bus. We lived about as far away from the school as we could get in our par­ti­cular direc­tion, so we were always nearly the last ones off the bus at night and nearly the first ones on in the morning.

Some of my older brothers—maybe all of them—had attended grade school at Big Bend, a little white country school about a mile and half or two miles west of where we lived. I can remember visiting at the school when some of the others had been going there, but for some reason, perhaps be­cause schools were being consolidated by the time I came along, I never went there but started in Adrian.

Once we went to the Big Bend school to get shots. I don't know if I had one on that particular occasion; I may have been along just to watch. But I do remember that Gene, who was supposed to get one, broke away and got out of the building and was off and run­ning through the fields to escape his shot. We finally chased him down in our car.

Grandpa Completes His Mission

A major winter storm hit the Moun­tain West the day we left Utah to drive to Idaho Falls for Grandpa Batt's funeral. We had been in Utah attending the funeral for my dad's brother Wayne, who had died the same week as Grandpa. The driving was treacherous, and in the blizzard we slid off the road and got stuck near the county line between Weber and Box Elder counties.

Grandpa's funeral was a full ten days after his death. He and Grand­ma had been serving a mission in New England. I don't speci­fi­cally remem­ber their mission call, but I would have been only seven then. Their mission president had asked them to extend their mission for a couple more months. They had just sent him the letter saying yes, they'd stay, they would be happy to serve an extra two months.

The Lord had other plans, however, and on the morning of the day they originally would have been re­leased, Grandpa passed away quietly in his sleep. No pain. No sickness. His mission was up, and he was trans­ferred to the other side. What a way to go, I thought, serving the Master he must have known and loved so well.

According to the revelations, Grandpa was trans­fer­red in­stead to labor in the spirit world. "I beheld," wrote President Joseph F. Smith in his vision of the redemption of the dead, "that the faithful elders of this dispensation, when they depart from mortal life, con­tinue their labors in the preaching of the gospel of repentance and redemption, through the sacrifice of the Only Begotten Son of God, among those who are in darkness and under the bondage of sin in the great world of the spirits of the dead" (D&C 138:57).

Grandma was left alone in a strange part of the country, and her son Bill had to get back to New England and make ar­range­ments and get her and the body back to Idaho—and all that took time. It must have been a long, lonely trip for Grandma from Rutland, Vermont, back to Ucon, Idaho.

The funeral was in Ucon in the ward from which they had left to go on their mission. One of Grandpa's favorite hymns (and since then one of my favorites) was sung that day:

Israel, Israel, God is calling,
Calling thee from lands of woe.
Babylon the great is falling;
God shall all her tow’rs o’erthrow.
Come to Zion, come to Zion
Ere his floods of anger flow.
Come to Zion, come to Zion
Ere his floods of anger flow.

Israel, Israel, God is speaking.
Hear your great Deliv'rer's voice!
Now a glorious morn is breaking
For the people of his choice.
Come to Zion, come to Zion,
And within her walls rejoice.
Come to Zion, come to Zion,
And within her walls rejoice.

Israel, angels are descending
From celestial worlds on high,
And to man their pow’r extending,
That the Saints may homeward fly.
Come to Zion, come to Zion,
For your coming Lord is nigh.
Come to Zion, come to Zion,
For your coming Lord is nigh.

Israel! Israel! Canst thou linger
Still in error’s gloomy ways?
Mark how judgment's pointing finger
Justifies no vain delays.
Come to Zion, come to Zion!
Zion’s walls shall ring with praise.
Come to Zion, come to Zion!
Zion’s walls shall ring with praise.

It was a cold, grey day at the Ucon Cemetery. The finality of it all final­ly hit me as I watched the casket being lowered into that dark hole in the frozen ground, and I began to cry.

I loved my grandparents. We used to visit them in their farm home in eastern Idaho before their mission. The picture that comes hazily to mind is like a Currier and Ives winter scene, where inside a warm old farmhouse there was plenty of love, the kind little boys thrive on. I'm sure we went there other than during the winter, but that's what I remember: snow over everything, the fields and roads, the mail­boxes and fence ­posts, the houses and barns, with windows steamed and icy from cooking in the old big kitchen.

My first memories of death

The first week of February 1959 we received two long-distance phone calls: Grandpa Batt had died in the mission field in New England, and Uncle Wayne had died of cancer in Utah. In those days a long-distance call usually meant some­thing about that drastic had happened. To the day she died in 1982 my mother could never feel comfortable making a long-distance call just to chat casually with some­one.

Uncle Wayne was my dad's brother, who years earlier had lost his arm in a car accident. He had always been a con­venient object lesson for Mom when she'd tell us to keep our arms and heads inside a mov­ing car so we wouldn't lose them like Uncle Wayne had.

Apparently Wayne's death had been fairly sud­den. He was only thirty-nine years old and had learned just a few weeks earlier that he had cancer. By the time he died, he had lost a lot of weight and was a mere shadow of his former self.

When my own father died in 1988, his sister Donna told me a story about Wayne's death back in 1959 that I had never heard in the family before:

Donna's husband Dean dreamed one night that he saw a council being held in the spirit world. A number of people were present, including Wayne's parents (my grandparents, whom I had never known), and they were trying to decide which family member to call home. Alvin was the obvious choice because he had just had a stroke, and people were expecting him to die, but as the council deli­berated further, they felt that more good could be accomp­lished for the family here and more of them acti­vated in the Church if Wayne were called back. Such was the council's decision, and a week later Wayne found out he had cancer.

Donna also told me that at about the same time the dream oc­cur­red she or some­one in the family met some long-time friends of the family who inquired about Wayne.

"Why do you ask?" she wondered.

And they said, "We were working in the Logan Temple, and your parents visited us there and said that Wayne would be joining them soon." Her parents, my grandparents [Henry William Cleverly and Olive Ellen Ritchie], had been dead for four years and fourteen years respectively.

We drove to Utah for Wayne's funeral, and the following Sunday my dad, who himself was not always active during this period, took his brother Marvin to church. On Sunday, February 8, 1959, my mother recorded in her diary: "Ivard talked Marv into going to Priesthood, first time since he was a little kid, so he went at 8:45 & took him to Orchard [Ward]."

That simple act resulted in profound changes in Marvin and Lorraine's family, just as the family council in the spirit world had intended. By the follow­ing year Uncle Marv and Aunt Lorraine had returned to acti­vity and were sealed in the temple. Not only he but his entire family was rescued. Years later one of Marv and Lorraine's sons, Brent Cleverly, served as a stake president in Woods Cross. One of their daughters, Lee Ann Sargent, was married to a bishop who served in our stake in Bountiful. Who knows the end of good that came from the simple decision in an hour of mourning to invite someone back to church.

Uncle Alvin, who had suf­fered a stroke, lived for another twenty years or so. Aunt Stella also became active about this time.

My love of reading

For as long as I can remember I have always loved to read. In fact, when I was a preschooler, from even before I remember, my mother said I used to be full of questions, and she would send me to look in encyclopedias or other books to find the answers. She said I might sit for long moments pondering an upside-down page in a book trying to figure out the mysteries of life.

I had a little picture book that I do remember. It was a prized possession from before I could read, I think. It was the story of when Jesus fed the five thousand people from the few loaves and fishes. As a child, I loved the stories of Jesus.

When I started school at Adrian in 1955 we read the Dick and Jane books. There were also books about Alice and Jerry. Years later I came across what Robert Fulgham wrote about Dick and Jane in a little piece I used to read to our children every August before they started another school year: "And then remember the book about Dick and Jane and the first word you learned, the biggest word of all: LOOK. Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation. Ecology and politics and sane living" ("All I Ever Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten," from the Kansas City Times, Sept. 17, 1986).

I didn't go to Kindergarten. I started with the first grade. I got a late start. But not really. Most of what I needed to learn was there in the books. And in the lives of the numerous people that have influenced me along the way.

When I was twelve years old, sometime in 1961 or 1962, thanks to encouragement and inspiration from my Grandma Batt, I read the Book of Mormon all the way through. That was a first reading in what I would now have to list as the one single book that has most influenced my life. It was the early start of what has blossomed into a life-long love affair with the holy scriptures.

By the time I was in high school I recognized my great love for history, particularly American history and Church history. I read B. H. Roberts's book The Missouri Persecutions, which chronicles the unjust treatment, the drivings and the mobbings, of the Latter-day Saints in Missouri during the 1830s, culminating in their expulsion from the state during the winter of 1838–39. The book had a remarkable influence on me.

In my teen-aged years, probably near the end of my senior year of high school, in the spring of 1967, I discovered A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh for the first time. I had done a lot of reading by then, from all the works that were required in my English classes in school to all the stuff I read on my own. It was a delightful discovery. This was still before Walt Disney's people acquired the rights to the Pooh Bear and began marketing them in cartoons and short children's books and such. The original stories came from the pen of a British author in the 1920s.

During my first year of college, 1967–1968, I read The Hobbit and the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien. Few books have so engaged me or had such a profound impact on me. I cried after I finished reading the final chapter. I felt homesick for a place and a people I had known only in imagination. Other than the scriptures, there are few books that I take the time to reread. There just isn't enough time in my lifetime to read everything out there I might want to read. But I have read the trilogy that comprises The Lord of the Rings three times since that initial reading.

Another book I read a second time was Herman Melville's Moby Dick. I did not appreciate it the first time I read it when I was a sophomore in high school, but so many people insisted it was the great American novel that I had to find out what I missed the first time through. So I read it again the following summer. I still didn't find it. I think if you edited out everything that detailed nineteenth century whaling, perhaps it might make a good short story.

My nomination for the great American novel would have to be Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Even though I love to read, I don't read as much as I might like. I have averaged over the past many years a little more than a book a month, usually twelve to fifteen a year.

Many years ago in a Sunday School class we were discussing the Lord’s admonition: “Seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith” (D&C 88:118). The teacher invited class members to mention books they had read, beyond the scriptures, that had profoundly influenced their lives. The responses were varied and interesting.

As I contemplate the works, beyond the scriptures, that have had a significant influence on me, or that I thoroughly enjoyed, or that gave me fresh insights into the world, I would have to list (in no particular order) at least the following pretty high on my list:

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
• The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• John Adams, by David McCullough
• 1776, by David McCullough
• Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, by Joseph J. Ellis
• Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, by Stephen E. Ambrose
• Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Doris Kearns Goodwin
• April 1865: The Month That Saved America, by Jay Winik
• FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression, by Jim Powell
• Truman, by David McCullough
• King Lear, by William Shakespeare
• Macbeth, by William Shakespeare
• Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkein
• The Chronicles of Narnia, by C. S. Lewis
• Approaching Zion, by Hugh Nibley (I pretty much like anything by Brother Nibley, but this represents what I consider the finest collection)
• Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, compiled by Joseph Fielding Smith
• To Draw Closer to God, by Henry B. Eyring
• The Missouri Persecutions, by B. H. Roberts
• Fire of the Covenant: A Novel of the Willie and Martin Handcart Companies, by Gerald N. Lund
• Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo
• Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
• Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte
• Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
• Anne of Green Gables, by L. M. Montgomery
• A Child's Garden of Verses, by Robert Louis Stevenson
• Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, by A. A. Milne

This list is undoutedly incomplete. I have probably forgotten as many worthy candidates as I have listed. Compiled at other times, in other seasons, there might well have been other titles added, or even some of these deleted.

In the end, it is worth remembering what the Good Book says: "And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh" (Ecclesiastes 12:12).

Tie a yellow ribbon

In Oregon we lived on an eighty-acre farm that had cows, pastures, hay fields, corn fields, rows of sugar beets, watermelon and cantaloupe patches, and such. I don't know how much profit, if any, Dad ever made from the farm, since his main job was work­ing for the railroad. We were always pretty poor. Looking back on it, I think he was really raising his eight sons more than he was raising crops.

When I was small we had a couple of draft horses that were used to pull the farm equipment. Later, probably about the time I was starting school, we bought a tractor—an orange, three-wheeled Min­neapolis Moline. I was still little enough not to be of much help with a lot of things—like lifting bales of hay onto a wagon—so I got to drive the tractor sometimes.

There was always plenty of work to do on a farm. We had dairy cows, and you can never take a vaca­tion from milking them every morn­ing and every night.

Once we went to a family reunion at Lava Hot Springs in southeastern Idaho, clear across the state from where we lived. Jerry stayed home to milk the cows. Unlike my brothers who milked regularly and knew the cows by their names, Jerry wasn't used to the job and couldn't keep them straight or remember which ones had been milked and which ones hadn't. When we came home, we found he had tied a different color of cloth on each cow's tail and kept track of the cows by their colors.

Our farmhouse in Oregon

My parents and their six sons moved from northern Utah to eastern Oregon in June of 1947, two years before I was born. They found an eighty-acre farm in the Big Bend area about six miles from Adrian.

The house and yard and barn were on the southeast corner of our farm. The small frame house we lived in was not at all modern. It had electricity but precious little plumbing. (I've written elsewhere about our lack of indoor plumbing and about our party-line telephone service.)

The house had only four rooms—a kitchen, two bed­rooms, and an all-purpose living-dining-sleep­ing room—plus an en­closed front porch that was used as an extra bedroom and a small back porch off the kitchen that served as a utility room and storage room. Joining the two bed­rooms to the front room was a teeny little hall, where I used to hide during thun­derstorms to be as far away as possible from any windows or doors.

We had a round dining table. I have no idea if it was big enough for everyone to sit around at the same time. By the time I came along and grew old enough to start remembering things, I have memories of sitting on top of a large metal can painted yellow with a blue lid. The can, as I remember, was used for storing cloth­ing and yardage. It was apparently tall enough for me to be able to reach the table.

In addition to the dining table, with its associated chairs and metal can, the all-purpose living room also contained a small oil stove that as far as I know provided the only heat in the house during colder months. I remember cuddling around the stove to dress on cold winter mornings.

The room also had a couch for sitting by day and that folded out as a bed for sleeping by night. I think when I was younger I slept on that hide-a-bed. When I was a little older I slept in the enclosed front porch, which was only big enough to hold the bed that was in there. And always, always I slept with at least two other brothers, which was fine except when any of us were still at ages when we wet the bed. That was not so fine.

I do not remember if there was any other furniture in that living room. The only other thing I remember was a television set. In 1953 television came to south­western Idaho and eastern Oregon. Our family must have been among the first families in the whole area to buy a television set. KTVB, Idaho's oldest television station, signed on the air July 12, as KIDO-TV. According to my mother's diary, she and my dad bought a televsion in Ontario two days later for $625. It was delivered on July 18, one day before my fourth birthday.

Our set was a big cabinet model that included a tele­vision, a radio, and a record player. It was an RCA because I still remember the picture of the old faithful dog listening at the gramophone to his master's voice. That was the RCA logo at the time. I was only three or four years old when we got a tele­vision, but I re­member being so excited about watching it that we would even watch the test patterns as the station got ready to start broad­casting each afternoon and as it would sign off early each evening.

During the last year we lived in Oregon, in the fall of 1958, we built a new barn out of cinder blocks that was actually nicer and probably bigger than the little frame house we lived in.

I visited the old place years later. The barn was still stand­ing, but the house was long gone.

Last summer [2008] I took my oldest son and his four oldest children to visit the farm and other haunts from my earliest childhood. The house and barn and trees and driveways were all gone. The foundation of where the house once stood was still visible from the stateline road where we had parked to take pictures. As we were taking those pictures that August morning, a pickup drove down the hill and stopped to ask if we were having car trouble. When they saw we had a camera, they concluded we were not.

"We're just taking pictures of where I used to live," I told the elderly couple in the pickup. "I lived in the house that used to be here until I was nine years old, almost ten."

"Oh, the Cleverlys," the lady replied. "We lived just up over the hill." I was so startled—it had been nearly fifty years since our family had moved from here in February 1959—that I failed to remember their names. She told me, but it was not a name that I could remember from the distant past of my childhood.

My baptism

I turned eight years old on Friday, July 19, 1957. Two weeks later, on Saturday evening, August 3, consistent with the revelation the Lord gave His latter-day church concerning the baptism of children, I was taken to our stake center in Nyssa, Oregon, where my brother Jerry, then a priest in the Aaronic Priesthood, baptized me.

I think I understood pretty well for an eight-year-old what baptism meant for me. I knew it was the gateway into the Church. I knew it involved a washing away of sins. I knew it meant I was promising to keep the commandments. I knew it was the way I took upon me the name of Jesus Christ. And I knew it was the right thing to be doing.

As we prepared in the dressing room, dressing ourselves all in white, a tingling sensation raced up my back and down, stretching from my head to my very toes. In later years I learned to recognize such feelings as one way the Spirit of the Lord worked on me in bearing witness to the truth.

The next day was fast Sunday. In fast and testimony meeting my father confirmed me a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and gave me the gift of the Holy Ghost. I do not remember any specific words from the blessing he gave me. But I pretty well understood that if I was worthy, if I kept the commandments, if I tried to follow Jesus, the Holy Ghost would be with me. And that has been an invaluable gift throughout all the years since then.

Childhood pets

During the years I was growing up in eastern Oregon, we had a family dog named Red. I do not know what breed he was. Like most dogs, however, he loved to chase after balls or sticks and bring them back to be thrown again. We could tell when it was about to rain because Red would eat grass before an approaching storm. By the time we moved to Idaho in 1959, Red was getting pretty old in dog years. On one of several trips to the new house, he jumped out of the back of the pickup and was never seen again.

I think we had other dogs in later years, but I do not particularly remember any of them.

I am not particularly a dog person. That stems, I suppose, from having been bit by dogs during my growing up years in the Nampa area. The two incidents I recall both stem from when I used to go door to door trying to sell greeting cards. One was from a yappy little dog that bit me on my heel. So much for my mother's oft-repeated adage that a barking dog doesn't bite. The other bite came from a large dog, a German shepherd I believe, that quietly slipped up behind me and bit my buttocks before I even knew he was there. Not a warning bark or growl. Nothing. Maybe these incidents also explain why I've never been interested in being a door-to-door salesman.

Once on my mission in Brazil I had also had an encounter with another small yapping dog that tried to bite me and would have succeeded had not the owner right at that precise moment yanked him by the tail away from me. The dog got my pants but fortunately not my leg.

Claudia's family, during the years she was growing up in southern California, had a beagle named Sunny Boy. Knowing that healthy dogs have wet noses, she felt his nose once and, finding it dry, poured water on it to make sure he would stay healthy.

Her family also had goldfish, which once upon a time she killed by pouring milk into the fish bowl. She reasoned that if milk were good for her it must also be good for fish. Wrong.

In later years the Langes also had a German shepherd named Gunther. He was the family's dog at the time Claudia and I were married in November 1972. Just a month after we were married, we drove to southern California to spend our first Christmas with the Langes in San Gabriel. Claudia's younger brother upstaged Christmas morning as we were first gathering around the Christmas tree. David came into the living room, staff in hand, dressed in a robe, with Gunther at his side playing the part of a humble sheep, as David proclaimed in comedic voice, "And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night" (Luke 2:8). The comic moment was unforgettable, classic David, the stuff of happy memories.

Scism School

I was a fourth grader when we moved from Oregon to Idaho, and March has to be a terrible time of year to transfer to a new school. But the other kids were excited to see a new face so late in the school year and quickly befriended me. So, even though I was pretty shy about being the new kid on the block, I soon felt like I fit in. And I was able to head into summer vacation already having friends throughout the area.

Scism School was a three-room country school a couple miles north and west from our farm. Grades 1, 2, and 3 were in the same room. Grades 4, 5, and 6 in a second room. And grades 7 and 8 in a third room. After that a student had to travel into Nampa to attend the ninth grade in one of the junior high schools before going on to high school.

I came to Scism in the final months of my fourth-grade year. Sylvia Jones was the teacher. The next school year (1959–60) I was in the fifth grade and got to move over into the middle two rows of the same room. Mrs. Jones was still my teacher. The next school year (1960–61) I was in the sixth grade and got to move over into the two rows closest to the windows. Mrs. Jones was still my teacher.

Had we not moved in the spring of my sixth-grade year, I would have gone into the next room for the seventh and eighth grades, where Herman Jones (Mrs. Jones's husband) would have been my teacher. He later transferred to teach at one of the junior highs in Nampa, and I happened to be in one of his classes my eighth- or ninth-grade year at Central Junior High School.

Looking back now, decades later, I am con­vinced that those years I spent in that little classroom with Mrs. Jones were among the best of my entire educational experience. She was a master teacher who cared deeply for her students and inspired in us a love for learning.

She was also a deeply religious person, a Seventh-day Adventist, who loved the Lord deeply. In those days, before the Supreme Court ruled that prayer in public schools violated the First Amend­ment, an unfortunate ruling to be sure, schools in Idaho would begin each day after the Pledge of Allegiance with scripture reading from the Bible. It was probably supposed to stop there, but Mrs. Jones would often go on to expound on what she read and to share her beliefs and feel­ings. I often recognized, as a fifth or sixth grader, that her interpretations didn't always coincide with my own Mormon beliefs, but never once did it occur to me that anyone could be offended or harmed in any way by what she taught us.

The rever­ence she gave the Bible and other sacred things, including the names of Deity, are an inspiration to me to this day. A simple illustration was her observation one morning that the scriptures were so sacred to her that she would never let them fall to the floor or ever place other books on top of them.

My first bike

I remember getting my first bicycle. It was on Thursday, June 11, 1959, my brother Jerry's twenty-first birthday. He was off serving a mission in Canada at the time. I had been earning and saving money, selling greeting cards, thinning sugar beets, and other such stuff a nine-year-old boy was able to do.

On our farm we used to get paid for thinning or hoeing sugar beets, something like 25 cents a row, as I remember. And they were long, long rows. I don't think we were paid for anything else around the farm. Except grades. I think in an effort to en­courage Ray and Dale to get better grades at school, my parents used to pay for each A on the report card. I didn't need the encouragement, since my report card was typically filled with A's, but I reaped the benefit since they had to be fair about it.

Finally, after a lot of time and effort, I had accumulated the $50 I needed. Well, I actually had $28, and my brother Gene loaned me $22. We went to the bike store in Nampa to pick out my bike. I chose a blue Schwinn. A one-speed.

And then, to my wounded sense of fair play and justice, my parents pro­ceeded to pick one out for Dale, who was seven. His was a red one. A little smaller than mine. He hadn't earned a penny toward his, and here they thought if I had one he should too. Because he was littler than I was. How unfair can life be?

I didn't appreciate it at the time, but my bike was far more fun to have because Dale had one too.

I don't remember particularly when or where I first learned to ride a bike. But I remember clearly that first day we were home with them, and we started circling the open yard where the cars and pickups and tractors and other stuff parked, and seven-year-old Dale was headed straight toward the side of the barn yelling, "How do I stop this thing?"

For­tu­nately, neither boy nor bike was too seriously injured as a result of his collision with the barn.

And here we have Idaho

I learned the Idaho state song during the spring of 1959. We had moved from Oregon to Idaho in the end of February, and I was a fourth grader at Scism School, a three-room country school south of Nampa. The fourth, fifth, and sixth grades were all in the same classroom with the same teacher. I learned the song in this classroom as we studied the history of Idaho.

And here we have Idaho
Winning her way to fame.
Silver and gold in the sunlight blaze,
And romance lies in her name.
Singing, we're singing of you,
Ah, proudly too,
All our lives through, we'll go
Singing, singing of you,
Singing of Idaho.

That is the chorus of the song. I never lived in the Gem State after I became an adult, but like a true Idahoan, I always sang the chorus as we crossed the state line into Idaho on various visits through the years. As I sang it, the words gradually morphed into this slightly alternative version:

And here we have Idaho
Wending her way to fame.
Silver and gold in the sunlit plain,
And romance lies in her name.
Singing, singing of you,
All proudly too,
All our lives through, we'll go
Singing, singing of you,
Singing of Idaho.

My wife and my children heard me sing my garbled version of the song enough times, almost as a rite of passage into the state, as it were, that some of them can sing some of the lines. I'm sorry that I taught them the wrong words.

I vaguely remember the lyrics of the first verse, although my singing the song as we entered the state did not include the verse:

You've heard of the wonders our land does possess,
Its beautiful valleys and hills,
The majestic forests where nature abounds,
We love every nook and rill.

I did not even remember, if ever I knew, that it had a second verse:

There's truly one state in this great land of ours
Where ideals can be realized.
The pioneers made it so for you and me,
A legacy we'll always prize.

Interestingly, I never learned the Oregon state song during the nearly four years of school I attended in the Beaver State.

An early injury

When I was a boy in Oregon we lived eighteen miles from church. During the summer, when school was out, we went to Primary on a weekday morning. We would normally catch a ride with neighbors who were headed that way. It may not have always been the same, but the one I remember is Sister House, who lived with her family at least two and probably even three miles from us.

One summer morning Dale and I had been to Primary. We had ridden home with Sister House and were then walking the rest of the way home from her place.

It was a beautiful day, probably early in the summer, because it didn't seem to be too hot yet. We were coming down the hill about a mile west of our house, where the road curved from south to east. We may have been running down the hill, I don't really remember, but I tripped and fell onto the asphalt pavement. I instinctively stretched out my hands to break my fall and ended up with a nasty gash in the palm of my right hand. There was a lot of pain and a lot of blood, and I probably bawled the rest of the way home.

I simply do not remember whether we bandaged me up at home or went to the doctor in Parma to have it stitched up. Probably the latter. It would have been a dirty cut and likely full of gravel.

Today, more than half a century later, I still have a scar in the palm of my hand where the injury occurred.

Unjustly accused

My younger brother Dale was born when I was two and a half years old. I cannot remember his being born. We were the seventh and eighth of what eventually were nine children.

As we both got a little older and Dale became big enough to be a play­mate, especially in those early years before either of us started school, we would spend hours and hours play­ing in the yard near our farmhouse. Because we lived on a farm, relatively isolated from other kids our ages, our neigh­bor­hood was our family, and our fun was home­made, fashioned out of whatever might be at hand. Our family was poor, and we had a few simple toys, undoubtedly a number of them hand-me-downs, nothing at all elaborate or fancy or expensive such as children might enjoy in more prosperous times.

On summer evenings I remem­ber play­ing games with our older brothers, games such as hide-and-go-seek, Annie-Annie-over, or cow­boys and Indians. Or in the winter there were snowball fights and fox-and-geese.

Sometimes Dale and I would climb up into the apple tree and pretend we could see the end of the world. Or we would go exploring among the weeds and cattails and other growth along the drain ditch bottom across the road from our house.

Just north of our house was an old abandoned silage pit that made a fun place to play with our little toy trucks and cars. Dale and I would build our roads and towns right on the edge and down the side of the pit.

We had a family dog named Red, who was fun to play with. He loved to chase after balls or sticks and bring them back to you to throw again. We could always tell when it was about to rain because Red would eat grass before an approaching storm. By the time we moved to Idaho in 1959, when I was nine years old, Red must have been getting pretty old in dog years. On one of our many trips to our new house, he jumped out of the back of the pick­up, and we never saw him again.

Once Dale and I were playing with some spears we had fashioned out of some tall, dried stalks of some kind. Dale threw one through the window in the back door and smashed the glass in the storm door. That meant big trouble for the one who had done it. Dale tore off to some hiding place, while I stood innocently around, my spear in hand, to get caught at the scene of the crime.

Ray, my next older brother, was four years older than me. He had witnessed the accident, he said, but claimed that he'd seen me throw the spear. Despite my earnest pleadings to the contrary, I was found guilty and got a good lick­ing from Mom.

The runaway manure spreader

A large irrigation ditch ran across the northern border of our farm in Oregon. A narrow path where the tractor or a pickup could drive ran along our side of the canal. Once, when we still had horses instead of a tractor, some of my older brothers were coming off this ditch bank road onto the main dirt road that ran in front of our place, the boundary road between Oregon and Idaho, with the horses pulling a manure spreader.

Some­thing spooked the horses, and they started run­ning down the hill toward the yard. The bottom of the spreader bed, which one of my brothers was stand­ing on, would move like a conveyer belt whenever the wheels were en­gaged, which they were on this occasion, and he was run­ning at break-neck speed on top of the spreader while hanging onto the reins trying to stop the horses.

Had he lost his foot­ing, he would have gone out the back of the spreader and been mangled or even killed. Some­how he managed to hold on, running in place as fast as he could, and sur­vived the sharp turn off the road into the yard, where the horses stop­ped short as soon as they reached the barn.

The scary canal

We lived on an eighty-acre farm in the Big Bend area of eastern Oregon when I was a child. It is the only portion of the state east of the Snake River.

A dirt road ran along the eastern edge of our farm and on up and over the hill that was to the north of us. That road was the state line between Oregon and Idaho. We had substantial ties to both states. My parents both worked in Idaho. We went to school in Oregon. Our mailing address was in Idaho. We went to church in Oregon. Our telephone number was in Idaho. But we lived in Oregon.

A paved road ran along the southern edge of our farm. That road headed west to Adrian, which was about six miles west and north from where we lived. Adrian is where I went to school. Going in the other direction, that same road turned by our house and headed south toward the Snake River, which was about a mile away, and then mostly east from there to Wilder and Greenleaf and Caldwell.

Someone else's farm was to the west of ours.

A large irrigation ditch, a canal really, ran across the northern border of our property. A sagebrush-covered ridge that was too rocky and steep for farming was on the other side of the canal. A narrow path where the tractor or a pickup could drive ran along our side of the canal. And that was what was scary. I used to panic when I was riding in the truck with my dad and he'd turn around, repeatedly back­ing and pull­ing forward enough times to turn the thing around in an area that was way too small for such turns, and with my knowing that some day he was going to back right into the ditch, and we'd drown, and that would be the end of that.

But he never did.

Party line

I don't know if we always had a telephone when I was little. We did some of the time because my father worked for the railroad, and they had to be able to reach him, and he had to be able to reach them.

The earliest telephone I remember was one of the old boxes that hung on the wall. It had a handle on the side that we cranked to get the operator. She would connect us to the party we wanted, unless she happened to know they had gone to town or some such place and would tell us so. Telephone numbers in our rural exchange were only three or four digits, and I don't think we actually referred to numbers but to the names of people we wanted the operator to connect us to.

We were on a party line with a number of other families, and if any of them were on the line, we had to wait until they were through before we could place or receive a call. If we wanted to be snoopy or catch up on the latest neighborhood gossip, we could quietly listen in, hopefully without the other parties knowing we were there. If our call were urgent enough, we could speak up and ask them to get off the line so we could place a call.

Each party on the line had a distinctive ring. We had to tell by the ring whether an incoming call was for us or one of the neighbors. A long and two short rings might be ours, while two longs might be the neighbors a quarter of a mile up the lane. And so on.

Occasionally, strangers would knock on our door during the night or early morning hours to see if we had a telephone they could use. Their cars were traveling too fast to negotiate the sharp curve right by our house, and they would invariably end up in the drain ditch just beyond.

Long-distance telephone calls were almost unthinkable. And they were never dialed directly. They had to be placed through an operator. They usually came when someone had died.

We got two such calls in the same week in early 1959. On February 2 my Aunt Stella called from Utah to say that Uncle Wayne, my dad's younger brother, had died from an operation he had had two weeks earlier. On February 4 my Uncle Bill called from Washington to say that Grandpa Batt, my mother's father, had died in his sleep in the mission field in Vermont. Both deaths were entirely unexpected and set in motion a 17-day family trip, first to northern Utah for Uncle Wayne's funeral and then to eastern Idaho for Grandpa's funeral.

Less than a month later, after we had attended those two funerals, our family moved from Oregon to Idaho. On our new farm south of Nampa we actually had a telephone with a rotary dial and a five-digit telephone number. But we were still on a party line.

Indoor plumbing

Our Oregon farmhouse had electricity but no indoor plumbing. Well, technically, we had running water and a sink and a drain in the kitchen. That qualifies as indoor plumbing, I guess.

At first we had a hand pump to get water into the house. Later I think there was an actual faucet at the kitchen sink.

I recall Saturday night baths in a big metal tub on the kitchen floor with water heated in pans on the stove. Being one of the younger ones, I assume I normally bathed in used water near the end of the process. No problem then. Hey, I was a little boy. But I hate to think now of what that really meant—water that was no longer as warm as when it started out, water that was less than clean, water that was . . . .

Since there was no toilet in the house, we used an outhouse that moved from time to time to different spots around the yard. When one pit became filled, a new hole had to be dug, the old one covered up, and the outhouse placed over the new hole.

I can't imagine such an arrangement encouraged potty training in little boys. And wintertime trips to the outhouse were less than exciting, if we even bothered to trek all the way across the yard to the outhouse.

I was nine years old, nearly ten, before we moved to Idaho and to a house that had a bathroom with a toilet, a tub, and a sink. The modern era had begun.

Not a good hiding place

Halloween is an odd sort of holiday to celebrate. It was, however, a favorite time for us little kids—with its dress up and make believe and candy and other treats. And, at our house, a big kettle of Mama's homemade chili. She made it for Halloween, as far as I know, every single year. And often served it with cider or pumpkin pie.

Our costumes were simple ones, made from whatever was at hand—ghosts made out of old bed sheets, or hobos out of patched clothes, or cowboys out of bandannas and holsters and cap guns that we might use any other day of the year to play cowboy. And that was fine for wearing to school on Halloween day, but it was always cold on Halloween night, so we had to wear coats over our costumes when we went out trick-or-treating.

We received a really nice treat the Halloween I was seven. My only sister, the ninth of my parents' nine children, was born on Halloween. Her name was Jackie. I do not remember why my parents chose that name for her—it seemed like forever after she was born before they settled on her name—but I rather doubt it had anything to do with Jack-o-lanterns.

Growing up on a farm, there were not a lot of neighbors close by, especially within walking distance, so someone older in the family, a parent or an older brother, would drive us in the car to go trick-or-treating to the few nearby neighbors. We used to get very nice treats from them, home-made doughnuts or full-sized candy bars or colored popcorn balls or other goodies, not the little snack-sized things common today.

One year, while we still lived on the farm in Oregon, when I would have been perhaps eight or nine, I hid my paper sack of goodies inside the oven, thinking that would be a good place to store my cache away from the searching eyes and fingers of others who might want to share my loot. It never occurred to me that someone might heat up the oven without checking inside first. And, of course, that's exactly what happened, and I was one sad little boy.

My first road trip

This is an account of a family trip to northern California to visit my oldest brother and his family in Sacramento. It is the first road trip I remember taking. We left late Thursday, December 26, 1957, and returned home late Thursday, January 2, 1958. Although I distinctly remember the trip, I am indebted to my mother’s diary for some of the specific details.

I have always loved to travel. Especially if it involves a road trip. Few things are more thrilling than the prospect of the open road stretching out there before me.

My earliest memory of a vacation, other than visits to relatives somewhere in northern Utah or eastern Idaho, was a car trip to California during the holidays when I was eight years old. I guess this was technically a trip to visit relatives because we drove to Sacramento to visit my oldest brother Lyle, who was in the Air Force, and his wife Barbara and their two sons. Stanley was three years old. And Terry was about twenty months old. I did not remember that Barbara was so very pregnant, but a little more than three weeks after our visit she gave birth to their third son, David.

But the trip counts in my book as a bona fide vacation because it was to a part of the country we had never been to before.

We left in the middle of the night the day after Christmas. My parents and the five youngest children (thirteen-year-old Gene, twelve-year-old Ray, eight-year-old me, five-year-old Dale, and fourteen-month-old Jackie) made the trip. Jerry and Kay stayed home to tend the farm, milk the cows, and who knows what else.

We drove though the night down through eastern Oregon into Nevada. Ray, Dale, Jackie, and I were bedded down in the back seat. Mom wrote in her diary that she drove from Lovelock to Reno and noted that the roads were good all the way except a few icy spots at McDermitt, a tiny little town on the Nevada–Oregon border.

In Reno, where we probably did breakfast, I remember a sign arching across the street proclaim­ing Reno as “The Biggest Little City in the World.” We continued from there up and through the Sierra Nevada Mountains, over Donner Pass, and down the other side toward Sacramento. There was a lot of snow, a lot more than I was ever used to seeing.

As we approached Sacramento we were on a freeway, the first time I had ever actually seen one, and I thought it was pretty awesome. I found the freeway exits a novel bit of ingenuity and can even remember to this day, fifty years later, that we took the Watt Avenue exit off the freeway to find Lyle and Barbara’s place somewhere near McClellan Air Force Base.

We arrived at Lyle and Barbara’s place midmorning on Friday, December 27, and pretty much just chilled out for the rest of that day. Lyle was out on a flight when we arrived and came home a few hours later. If my memory serves correctly, it seems it was always grey while we were there, either grey and foggy or grey and overcast, but a lot of grey.

Over the next few days we visited various sites around the Sacramento area. One day we went to the zoo and saw all kinds of animals and birds. I probably had never been to a zoo before. Another day we visited the state capitol. Another day we went out into the surrounding countryside and saw orange, lemon, and grapefruit trees just loaded with fruit. And I think we actually saw the sun that day. We went to a dam and saw a prison and stopped by the air force base and watched jets take off. These were all marvels to an eight-year-old boy.

On the last day of 1957 we drove to San Francisco. My mom’s diary account detailed the events of the day (with her spellings and punctuation a bit standardized):

“We headed for San Francisco on highway 40 through Vallejo, San Pablo, El Cerrito, Albany, Berkley, and down by Alameda and the outskirts of Oakland then back across the Bay Bridge (toll for 25¢), 8 miles long, to San Francisco, and drove up Nob Hill and went to the naval maritime museum then parked on the bay and saw some big ships come in and leave and saw Alcatraz, then we drove along the docks and Fisherman’s Wharf, through Chinatown, past the Keizer Stadi­um, saw the mint, rode through residential area and business district, then we to Golden Gate Park and went through the Steinhart Aquari­um, then we went down and parked on the Ocean and watched the tide and the kids got some seashells and put their hand in the Ocean, then about dark we went across the Golden Gate Bridge, 25¢ toll, and went up high­way 101 to San Rafael and had a ham­burger and milkshake and fries and do­nuts at a drive inn, then we got lost and went to San Anselmo and Fair­fax then came back to San Rafael and down around San Quentin and across the new Richmond Bridge (75¢ toll) and back up highway 40 home.” That one long sentence was indicative of what the long, busy day was like.

That New Year’s Eve was my first sight of the Pacific Ocean. I had never seen an ocean before, and I remember playing along the cold, damp, gray beach, and sticking my hand into the cold water and chasing the waves and looking for sand dollars and seashells. It was a glorious outing.

We ushered in 1958 by spending New Year’s Day resting up from the previous day’s adventures and watching the Rose Parade and bowl games and eating and visiting and playing games.


The next morning we piled back into our car, our 1957 red and white Dodge, and headed for home. Mom mentioned in her diary that we stopped and bought a bag of oranges and 12 pounds of bananas for just a dollar. We left Lyle and Barbara’s place just a little before 10:00 in the morning (Pacific time zone) and got back to our house in eastern Oregon about 10:30 that night (Mountain time zone).

There was a lot more snow going home. As we started up toward Donner Pass, we had to stop to put chains on the car, although in the end we didn’t really need them. As my predominant memory of Sacramento and San Francisco was grey, my memory of the ride home was white from all the snow on the ground and in the air.

It had been a fun, vision-expanding trip for an eight-year-old farm boy. I had seen and experienced all kinds of things previously beyond what I knew about my limited corner of the world. And it undoubtedly fueled my later desires to explore the big broad world out there at the end of some road.