Autobiography of Bion Tolman

Autobiography of Bion Tolman
Contributed By: SmithLindaKayT · 3 September 2013 ·
LIFE STORY OF BION TOLMAN
Tape recorded December 1976

I am Bion Tolman, son of Judson I. Tolman and Phoebe Emerett Bates, born Nov. 26, 1907 at Murtaugh, Idaho. The house in which I was born was a large two story brick home. The clay for the brick was dug about a mile and a half east of where the house was located, burned and used on a heavy lava rock foundation. It was the first brick home to be built on the entire Twin Falls tract. The house sat near a large canal which took irrigation water to several 100,000 acres down in the Twin Falls-Filer-Buel area. About ¼ of a mile east of the house was the equalization lake which was used to control the amount of water that was taken out by the canal and that came in by the canal from the Snake River which was diverted by a dam that was located in the little town of Melner. The original acreage upon which the house was built consisted of 110 acres which father bought from a man who had just filed on the land under the Homestead Act. But dad liked this land better than any he had seen so he bought it from this man before he had done any improving on the land itself and then homesteaded some additional acreage until finally years later the land belonging in the old home ranch consisted of about 450 acres. This was considered a large ranch in those days because all the work had to be done with horses in as much as tractors and motor power had not yet come into use.

The house sat right next to the road directly north of the large bridge that was built to cross the canal. It was a larger house for those days having two stories. All the upper story consisted of bedrooms, one where my sisters slept, one where I slept on the extreme east end of the hall and two rooms on the right used for guest rooms so that when the bishop or the stake president or any of the traveling salesmen that used to come through the area stopped at our place, they would occupy one of the guest rooms.

As a small boy, I can remember going on all fours up the stairs because it was rather a steep climb up to the second story. And of course we had no lights because there was no electricity in the area at that time and they wouldn’t trust us children to carry a kerosene lamp which was our source of light so we’d leave the bottom door open going into the living room and get as much light as we could up the stairway that would get us about 2/3 of the way up and then we had to go the rest of the way in the dark and feel our way down the hall clear to the east end of the house where we went to sleep. And I can remember that I was afraid that there was something up there that would grab onto me sometime.

I slept on a little cot that had steel springs on each side rather than a spring mattress like we’d know today and each one of those little springs had projections that might catch onto your pajamas or under-clothing and if I got caught onto one of those, I was sure that something had been under the bed and was going to grab me.

The lower floor of the house consisted of a kitchen with an ajoining pantry and back-screen porch. Just off the kitchen was the living room or main room in which the family lived. It was large and heated by a wood and coal-burning stove. Off one comer of the living room was a room called the parlor. It had a rather fancy rug with big rose patterns in it and we didn’t get to go in there except for special occasions. That was the place where mother would take turns reading to us. For some reason they didn’t think we would be interested in hearing them read church books so they read books by Harold Bell Wright, who wrote Chip of the Flying U, The Rider of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey, The Little Minister From Kingdom Come and we really thought that those books were interesting. Mother did read stories from the Old Testament as well and my two favorite were Joseph who was sold into Egypt and Daniel and the Lion’s Den.

Before the story time started, the real young children were put to bed and that left four of us to listen to the stories. That included myself, my older sister, Loa, and my two younger sisters, Roma & Inez. June was just a baby and so she was put to bed and my older brothers and sisters were married and gone from home. I only remember them as being married and Clifford always seemed too busy to play with us kids, but Ivan would come home and take us tramping through the sagebrush behind him while he was shooting rabbits. I’ll write more about my brothers and sisters later.

Now I would like to describe the grounds around our home. Right at the rear of the house as we came out of the kitchen was the cistern. This was our source of all water to be used in the house. It consisted of a deep hole that had been dug in the ground about 12 feet in diameter and about 15 feet deep so it held several thousand gallons of water. It was of course plastered on the inside and then once a year or as often as necessary, water would be diverted from the irrigation ditch and into a cement box about 4 ft. wide and 4 ft. deep which was filled with fine washed gravel and charcoal. The water would trickle through the box to become purified and then go into the cistern. And it must have worked because I remember that the water out of the cistern was nice and clear.

We had a little different kind of a pump than you would normally think of. As you’d turn the crank on the pump that was located on top of the cistern, a series of cups on chains went down and dipped into the water and came up full of water and as they came up to the top, fell over into a container and came out a spout into the bucket.

Just a short distance from the cistern was the meat house. It consisted of two parts. It was made of brick and cement. The cement part was an underground cellar with shelves and bins and an isle down the center. This is where the apples, potatoes and vegetables were stored in the fall so there would be garden food all winter long. The upper brick part was literally the meat house. There hung hams from pigs. The pigs would be slaughtered and meat cured with liquid smoke and various other things that were injected into the meat so that it could just hang on a nail and be used as we needed for bacon, or a roast ham or whatever. The meat was not frozen or refrigerated in those days, but this was the natural refrigeration it got by hanging in the meat house. In addition to the meat described, in the summertime and spring and fall we had plenty of chickens, both roosters and hens. The hens we kept of course for the eggs they laid and the roosters were killed as they reached good size for cooking. They were killed by chopping their heads off on the chopping block and it was always a bit of excitement to see how they could jump and flop around after their heads were chopped off.

Another thing that I remember because as I grew older I saw that it didn’t have to be this way, but when I was small we didn’t realize that there was such a thing as insecticides for pests on animals so the chickens got just covered with chicken lice. It didn’t take long to find out that if you tried to pick the feathers off a chicken that had just been killed but still had the lice on it, that you soon had lice all over yourself. So one of the things you did when you killed a chicken was hold it by its legs and dip it down in a bucket of boiling water five or six times. This accomplished two things. It killed all the lice and also made it so the feathers pulled out easily. Later representatives of insecticide companies came and showed us how easy it was to kill all the lice on the chickens with a suave-like ointment. Then later we learned that you could paint the roosters that the chickens sat on at night with nicotine-sulfate and that would also kill the lice.

Right behind the meat house another deep hole had been dug and covered with logs for a roof and fine netting wire and straw and soil on top of that for the icehouse. In the wintertime when the ice was frozen to a depth of about 12-15 inches on the lake, they’d go up to the lake and saw big blocks of ice out about 2′ by 3′ and then stack these in the ice house and cover them with thick layers of straw and we would have ice all winter long and into the next summer. The ice was used for chilling things or cold drinks, but one of the things I remember we used it the most for, was to make homemade ice cream. We’d take a hatchet and chop off some ice and pound it up in a burlap bag until it was fine and pack it around the freezer containing the ice cream mixture mom had made. We turned the handle on the freezer and I remember getting in trouble once or twice for turning the wrong way when I turned the handle because my right arm got tired. But when you turned with the left hand the paddles didn’t turn right and outside turned into ice cream, but the inside was still just soup. Mom would give me a paddle and tell me that I knew better than that.

One of the striking things about the house was the big Lombardy Poplars. They grow almost straight up and don’t spread very much and we had a complete circle of those around the house. They were about 30 ft. high and the trunks were about 18 inches through. When they finally got so big that the roots started interfering with the foundation of the house, I got the job of chopping the bark off on a circle about a foot wide clear around the tree and of course when you do that the tree starves to death in about a two year period. They were then sawed off and used for wood.

One thing that the pioneers brought that you can still find all over Utah and Idaho is the Harrison Yellow Rose. These were a shrub rose that grew to be about 6-7′ tall and the branches then branched out and bloomed with roses thick during blossoming season. I have one Harrison Yellow rose bush in my backyard at the present time as a reminder of the ones we used to have. But they’d grow without any care whatsoever. The path going out from the kitchen to the outhouse was lined with Harrison Yellow rose bushes and they got no special care as far as watering, pruning, spraying or anything. They were tough enough that they would bloom consistently even under those conditions of neglect.

It might be interesting to note that the outhouse served other purposes than that for which it was built. I can remember that when a Sears catalog got to be older than a year, my older sister, Loa and I would cut up all the pictures of the men and women in there and when we had a box full of pictures we’d make a flour paste and put the pictures all over the inside of the outhouse.

Also in the back of the house was one acre that was devoted to a garden. We raised com, potatoes, radishes, carrots and turnips, and we could eat fresh from that garden all summer and then we’d put some down in the root cellar for winter. Along the north side of the garden was a row of gooseberry bushes. There must have been a total of 15 or 20 bushes and we started eating those gooseberries from the time they were small and sour enough to make you really screw up your face because they were more sour than a sour lemon. When they got more mature and got to be a real light rose color, they got to be quite sweet. As they gained full-size they were used for gooseberry pies and for bottling.

One time when I was real small, I disappeared and mom couldn’t find me anywhere. So she called father and he couldn’t find me and the hired men looked and search the lateral- a ditch full of water about 12 feet wide by the garden. They finally worried so much that they got the water master to turn the water out of the ditch, but I wasn’t in there. About that time I came wandering through the back door of the house and I’d been asleep under the gooseberry bushes!

I’ll be referring to the lateral later, but I might mention at this point that the lateral is where we swam, the place where we gathered in July to baptize everyone who had turned 8 since the previous July. For some reason we did this only once a year so a large number of families gathered at our place for this occasion. It was really a day of celebration! After the baptisms were over we’d play various games on the lawn such as pump-pump pull-away and “Here comes the jolly butcher boy” and of course foot races were always a part of the celebration and three-legged races were the most fun. We also would have ice cream and cake and it was really an exciting annual event.

Also I might point out the fact that we had large numbers of people visit for the 4th of July and 24th of July. We had games on the lawn and races out on the street. But we were never allowed to go across the bridge and over the big canal, which was better than 100 ft. wide and 12 ft. deep unless an adult accompanied us.

Across the lateral, which I have just described, we had about an acre of orchard, mainly apples. We raised Ben-Davis and Jonathan and a little apple called Johnny apples and I’ve never been able to find any since I became older. They were real sweet little apples but almost like a crab apple about an inch and a half in diameter. We used to climb up those trees and eat Johnny apples until we could hardly make it back to the house.

North of the house we had the barns and the granary. The granary was a large wooden structure set on large blocks of lava rock. The entrance was up about 3 feet off the ground. It was divided into large bins with a hole on 3 sides so as you thrashed grain into a wagon that was tight enough to hold grain, then you came to the granary and scooped the grain in the holes that went into these bins. The isle was wide enough that you could go in and take out grain for the grinder year round for the cows and horses.

We gave the animals grain as well as hay so they’d give more milk and be stronger for the work. On the large ranch we raised two crops – hay and grain, the reason being that we were in the livestock business. Father had about 12,000 head of sheep that were taken to graze in the mountains, all summer long and brought down in the fall to graze on the alfalfa stubble and grain stubble. One of the things I always enjoyed was when it got pretty cold the sheep would go in big lambing corals or sheds about a half-mile long and they were divided about every ten feet into compartments. They had a little opening out each side with a little corral outside about 10 x 15 ft. so they could go out on a sunny day. They had their lambs in Feb. so they had to have a shed to go in on cold, stormy days.

But I can remember how on a warm day those little lambs that were just 2 or 3 days old and stumbled when they walked would try to frisk around and play in the outside corral. When the spring came in early April, then all these sheep had to be taken back up to the mountains and driving the sheep and watching the sheep dogs herd the sheep up the road was an exciting experience. One of the exciting things was that the sheep would be followed by the sheep camp and that would be followed by a big wagon in which all us kids and mother would ride with all the kitchen utensils we’d need while we were up in the mountains where the shearing corrals were located. Professional shearers would come and shear the sheep. During the time the sheep were being sheared, mother would cook for the shearers in a cooking shack.

While we were in the mountains there were many things to do, but I especially remember one of the herders, Jimmy Canaras would put us on the back of his saddle horse and lead it around and we got to like Jimmy so well that even though he was Greek, we asked Father and Mother on many occasions why we couldn’t adopt Jimmy because we’d like to have him for a brother.

This large number of sheep was spread over the entire mountain and each sheepherder would be responsible for about 2000 head of sheep. He would see that they got sufficient feed and bring them to the watering place each day. It was necessary for Father to take supplies up to these various sheepherders and we had pack mules. He’d start out on a horse with about six of these pack mules tied together. Occasionally a mule would get stubborn and start to buck until he’d bucked all the provisions and supplies off his back. It might seem like a simple thing to keep the herders supplied, but there were about a dozen of them and each one wanted something different to eat. It was quite a chore.

The lambs grew rapidly as they had the milk from their mothers and the grass and shrubs that they ate. By the middle of July they were about 80 lbs. At this point they reached the size that was needed to sell them on the market. So down came the lambs to the big corrals by the railroad tracks and out of these corrals they went up a shoot and into livestock cars that the railroad furnished. They would be put in layers in the cars with steel platforms separating them — 3 layers per car and maybe 15 carloads of lambs and at the end would be the caboose. Father always went with the lambs to market so that he could see that the railroad stopped and the lambs were given food and water as they should be because they had to go clear to Omaha to be marketed.

In about 1918 Dad sold his sheep and bought an additional large farm. On the comer of this large farm he built a new brick home. In this new brick home we had our own electric light system so that we were one of the first homes in Twin Falls that had electrical appliances. I can remember the large storage batteries sitting on shelves on one side of the basement wall and the kerosene generating engine that had to be run about once a week to keep these storage batteries charged so that we could have electricity to run lights, stove, washing machine, etc. As the house was being built, father installed a large steel tank in one end of the basement and that was connected to a well that had been dug just outside the house. The motor and pump could be started up to keep the water pressure in this large steel tank so we could have running water in the kitchen and bathroom and for two faucets outside so that we could water the lawn and flowers in the yard.

It was while we were living in this home, that Father bought an Edison phonograph. Each record was 1/4 of an inch thick but flat like today. We sat and played records by the hour because there was no such thing as radio at that time and I still remember songs from the Uncle Josh records that we had: “Don’t Bite the Hand That’s Feeding You” was a war song aimed at the draft dodgers and then there were tear jerkers like “We Have No One to Care For Us Now,” and other favorites such as “California Here I Come,” “Dixie,” and “Get Aboard the Good Ship Sunshine.” It is remarkable that I can remember as many of those songs from way back 1916-1918 before we bought a Crosley radio.

In the fall of 1917 Dad loaded us all in our seven passenger Cadillac that he had just purchased and we all went to Long Beach, Calif We had a rather difficult time finding a place that would allow the number of children we had in the family at that time. In fact most people who had houses or apts. to rent would not rent if there were children in the family. As a consequence of this, it took us some 3 weeks of hunting to find a place to live. We were lucky when we found a man who had a home who said that he would be glad to rent it to us even with 5 children in the family. This home was down near the beach about 2 blocks away. We went swimming many times and attended the movie houses that were along the beach where you could go into a movie for about five or ten cents.

Due to the fact that we had spent 3 weeks finding a place to live we were a little late getting started in school. I’ll never forget the first morning we went to school and I got registered and was ushered into the 5th grade classroom by someone from the principal’s office, they were having an art class. Now this was a real shock to me because in Murtaugh I attended a school where the first four grades met together and as a consequence we had nothing but reading, writing and arithmetic. One of the other things that was really different was the fact that in Long Beach the boys and girls were completely separated by a high board fence during recess and noon hour. There was no mingling of boys and girls on the playground.

In the spring we returned to Murtaugh and Father farmed for another year while I attended the 6th grade. In 1919 Father and the whole family moved to Orland, California and several other families from Murtaugh moved with us – Clifford and his family, the Black family, my uncle Belcher and Aunt Alveretta, and their families all moved to California and settled in Orland which was in the northern part of the Sacramento Valley close to the town of Chico. We had a lovely home with a large orchard containing apples, plums, cherries, peaches, apricots and olives. We had a large Queen Olive tree from which we harvested olives each year and prepared them to be fit for use on the table. Olives as they come from the tree are very bitter. They had to be soaked for a week to 10 days in concentrated lye water and then rinsed in clean water and placed in a brine of vinegar and salt.

Among the other trees on the place was gigantic fig tree, which-was at least 40 ft. in diameter from where the limbs came down on one side to where they touched the ground on the other side. The trunk must have been at least 2 ft. in diameter and 6 ft. in circumference. We ate fresh figs and dried figs that we dried on screens and ate all winter.

We also had black walnuts and we saved several sacks of walnuts so that each Saturday afternoon, Loa and I would have to pick walnuts out of the shells, which was quite a tedious job so that we could have walnuts to mix with the figs for the coming week. I went to both the 7th and 8th grades in Orland and got a diploma upon my graduation from 8th grade. My sister just younger than I was named Roma. She had very poor health inasmuch as she had “Brights disease” which is an after-affect of scarlet fever, which she had when she was younger. Inasmuch as she had such poor health in our home in California the folks decided to move to Salt Lake City to see if a change in climate and doctors might help her. So we traded houses with a doctor who wanted to move to California.

The home in Salt Lake was located at 1329 Emerson Ave. It was a nice brick home with fruit trees and a large garden. In Salt Lake I attended 9th grade at Irving Jr. High in Sugar House and I attended LDS High School as a sophomore and decided that I wanted to go to West High as a junior where I could take shop classes. It was at this time that my younger sister Roma died. Her Brights disease affected her kidneys. She was buried in Wasatch Lawn Cemetery. Even though she was a young girl, she really left a hole in our family.

At the end of my sophomore year the folks moved back to Murtaugh, to live in the new brick home we had built before we went to California. I stayed in SLC and lived with my Uncle Belcher and Aunt Alvaretta, who was father’s oldest sister during my junior year. Then after my junior year I went back to the farm home in Murtaugh, and since there was no high school there I went to Twin Falls to go to high school during my senior year. I lived with my mother’s brother whose name was Arlin Bates and his wife and four children. I graduated from high school in the spring of 1925.

It might be interesting at this point to mention some of the childhood jobs and experiences that I had. I have already mentioned that during the summer months I went with Father up to the mountains. Father also spent time during the summers improving land that he was homesteading which was adjacent to the shearing corrals. I can remember that on several occasions as we were driving up with the wagon or on horseback, the horses would start to shy and snort and rear back and there in the middle of the road was one or more rattle snakes coiled up. We would have to get off our horses and either kill the snakes with rocks or at least scare them off the road before the horses would proceed.

During the summers while I was in the third and fourth grades, I herded our dairy cows in the roads to feed on the sweet clover along the sides of the roads. Some of the other boys my age did the same thing so as we got to where there were swimming holes where the water accumulated under the railroad & highway bridges, we would go swimming and swim by the hour while our cows grazed along the roadsides.Occasionally they got through a farmer’s fence and into his field and the farmer said that we weren’t taking good care of our cows.

As I grew to be older along with Clifford and his oldest boy, Rex, we hoed beets during the growing season. We always had Japanese or Mexicans do the thinning in the spring, but we did the hoeing. We also had to hoe potatoes and beans.
One of the jobs I had each summer was to drive the team that lifted the hay from the hay slips and raised it up to the top of the stack where my elder brother, Clifford always did the stacking of the hay.

In the winter months during vacation periods and in early morning before school I helped with sorting of potatoes in the potato cellars where they had been stored awaiting to be sorted and readied for market. The thrashing of grain was also an interesting experience. Farmers traded help instead of hiring help and so as the threshing of grain started I always took a team and a beet rack which we used for a bundle wagon and I got very proficient in running a bundle wagon and stacking them as fast as they could be pitched up by two men from the ground. As a result, when it came time for the threshing machine to come to our home, I had already worked enough hours for neighboring farmers so that we had a full threshing crew.
During the summer following my graduation from high school in 1925, I took over the job of irrigating 40 acres of beans. I took great pride in being able to divide the water evenly enough so that the rows would all be through and ready to set on a new change by 8 o’clock the following morning.

We worked in the fields all the daylight hours. Cows were milked in the morning before it was light by turning on electric lights in the barn. They were also milked at night when it became too dark to work in the field. This made our working hours long and most generally, as soon as I was done eating supper, I rolled into bed and in a few moments was asleep. I was quite proud of the fact that I was husky enough to do a man’s work when we were threshing grain and putting up hay or when we were harvesting beans and loading them on railroad cars to be shipped to market. I could do a man’s work and so you can imagine that I was upset when my father said to me one Saturday, “Bion when are you going to become a man?” I quickly replied that I was a man and that I could pitch hay with a man and work the threshing machine as well as a man. Then he told me to think it over that afternoon and that we would talk about it some more the next day after Sunday School.

On the following day when we returned from Sunday School, we sat down and Father said, “Now let’s talk about when you are going to become a man.” He continued, “I know you are proud of the things that you can do, but you only do things as you are assigned to do them. You are assigned certain chores and you don’t plan things for yourself. Have you ever stopped to realize that before you put water on the 40 acres of beans that someone had to think far enough ahead to see that the ditches were clean so that the water would go down to the bean patch? That means shoveling dirt and grass out of the ditch and getting in touch with the ditch rider so the water would be ordered and in the ditches at the proper time. That is always taken care of by your father or your older brother. Now when you become a man you will see what the whole job consists of and you’ll be able to plan ahead and have the water ordered, ditches clean and then be ready to irrigate.” Then he got out the D&C and read to me where the Lord said that all men should be engaged in a good work and he also read from the D&C where it said that if we had to be instructed in all things then we were slothful servants and not entitled to a reward. This was a lesson in planning that I have never forgotten both for jobs on the farm and jobs in church.

Now I would like to tell about some of the childhood pleasures that I had because it wouldn’t be fair to leave the impression that everything was work. As stated before, our home was right close to a large canal about 100 ft. wide and 10 to 12 ft. deep, bigger than many rivers in the western part of the United States. About one fourth of a mile east of our home were the big gates that regulated the flow of water out of the lake and into the canal. Just below these head gates as we crossed the canal, there was rather excellent fishing. Not that we caught fancy fish, but to me as I grew up I thought chubs were real choice fish so far as eating was concerned. Today chubs are considered a trash fish and are poisoned by the fish and game departments so that trout can grow to maturity.

When we were too small to cross the head gates alone, my oldest brother Ivan generally found time to take Loa and I up to the canal and across the head gates holding hands tightly and then we would sit and fish with angle worms. Generally we took a string of fish home, 12-15 in number. We would scale and clean the fish ready for mother to fry them for dinner or even an evening meal. At least once each summer, father would load us in the car and take us to the Sun Valley area near Carrie, Idaho. We would fish there on the Wood River for trout and salmon. While it was a little bit brushy for us, kids and a little bit difficult, we always enjoyed these trips. We always went to Uncle Will Stanfield’s home while we were there and he had eight boys. That meant that there were some boys in the family older than me and some my age and some younger and we always had a marvelous time together.

In the wintertime there was a abundance of area available for ice skating. The large laterals that I have referred to would freeze over and we could skate on the lateral. Later in the season as the ice got thicker on the lake we could go with our older brothers and skate on the lake. One of the things that Ivan did in connection with skating was to skate around the edge of the lake where the cattails grew. There were an abundance of muskrats in this area and in the wintertime when the lake was frozen over, they would come up out of their burrows and put their mouths into the pockets of air that could be found between the ice and the water because they had to have air to breathe. As we skated along, Ivan would carry an ax with him and as he saw a muskrat just under the ice, he would strike the ice with a blow and this would stun the muskrat. Then he would chop up the ice and get the muskrat out and kill it and take it home and skin it. By the end of the winter one whole screen porch was stacked with muskrat skins, which had been carefully taken care of and then sold to the commercial market to be made into coats, caps, gloves, etc.

There was also a lot of area above the canal that was still in sagebrush. In this area was good rabbit hunting and again it was Ivan who had the patience to take Loa and me with him when he went hunting. We had to follow behind him so there would be no danger of being shot and as rabbits were killed we would help carry them home where they were fed to the sheep dogs. When I was driving a team of horses on the derrick as we stacked hay, I always had the team of gray. The female horse of this team was Julia and the male horse was Star. They were as good a team of horses as could be found. Now in connection with horses possibly I should mention the fact that Old Balley was our riding horse when we were going to ride either bare-back or with a saddle and Old Frisky was the horse we used when we drove the one-horse buggy in going to school. We used the one-horse buggy when we were in the first and second grades and Old Frisky, who was about 30 years old was the horse that we used. He had one bad habit. When you were hooking him up and fastening the straps to the harness that he wore, he would reach around and bite you on the back or arm if you weren’t very careful. But in the third and fourth grade, we rode Old BaIley, who was a bay Horse and Loa and I generally rode him double. But Old BaIley was a good, reliable horse and I also used him for herding cows in the summertime.

One of the other things that we spent many hours doing was drowning out ground squirrels along the bank of the lateral. As the lateral came out of the big canal and came down along the edge of our farm, there was a long sloping bank down to the level ground. All along this slope the ground squirrels dug their holes and had their nests. The canal company was concerned about this because frequently they would dig so close to the inside edge of the bank that was holding the water back and the water would break through quickly, the hole would wash to a size that would make it rather costly to replace the bank and also made it so that water wasn’t available for the irrigating of crops. So they paid a small bounty for all the ground squirrel tails you could bring in. We would take buckets of water and pour down the holes and with the second or third bucket of water the ground squirrel would come out ringing wet. We would grab them in our hands and generally killed them on the spot. However, we kept some to play with and let lose on the big front screen porch.

Speaking of squirrels I’m reminded of the fact that when we went to the mountains to the shearing corals, we caught chipmunks. One summer we got five chipmunks and kept them in a box so we could take them back home with us.
This one particular year just as we were ready to leave, one of the sheep dogs came whining around the corner of the cook shack and put his paws up around my stomach and whined. I looked down and there was a chipmunk with his teeth secured in the dog’s nose. So I got that chipmunk without much effort on my part. All during the warm weather the chipmunks were very lively. We made a large box for them to go in with plenty of sheep’s wool so that they had a good warm place to go when the weather got cold. During the day they’d play on the front porch and these chipmunks got real tame. They would come and run up our pants leg and beg for peanuts. If we didn’t have any, they’d nose around in our pockets to try and find some.
The interesting thing is that if you fed them peanuts they’d shell the peanuts and put them in their mouth but they didn’t eat them and they’d fill pouches on each side until those pouches really stuck out. Then they’d go back into the boxes where they had their nest and spit out all the peanuts and come back to see if we’d give them some more. And it wasn’t until we quit giving them peanuts that they would actually start eating. They were real clever little fellows.

When winter came these chipmunks would hibernate for the winter. They’d curl up like a ball. If you reached in and took one out which we frequently did, they’d be stiff. You couldn’t move a paw or get them out of the curled up position. But we’d put them in the house in the warming oven that was under the one end of the big cook stove. After they’d been in there for about 2 hours, they’d come out of hibernation and we would play with them and then put them back in their box and in the morning they’d be hibernated again. I’ve often wondered what the chipmunks thought of the warm weather coming and going so quickly.

One of the things that we loved to do was go over to my cousin’s place where we rode calves and had sort of a rodeo. My cousins were the sons of Hyrum and Minnie Pickett and Aunt Minnie was my father’s youngest sister. One of the cousins, Rodney, was just older than I and the other one, Leon, was just younger. Almost every Sunday I’d go to dad after sacrament meeting and say, “mother said I could go to Pickett’s today if you don’t care,” and he’d say it was all right with him if it was all right with mother.

Then I’d go to mother and ask her the same question and she’d say if it was okay with your dad then go ahead. I’d have dinner there and then we’d go outside. Uncle Hyrum was in the cattle business so there were plenty of calves and we’d ride calves even though it was Sunday afternoon. I know that father and mother didn’t approve of this, but uncle Hyrum wasn’t very religious so it didn’t bother him at all. As indicated earlier, during the time we were herding cows, we went swimming a great deal in some nice pools under both bridges close by. I remember in 1919, early in the summer as the war had ended in Europe, we were swimming in the pool under the railroad bridge when the train went over. Well, we discovered that this was the train we had heard about that had souvenirs of the war. There were war weapons, papers, medals, etc. We quickly got out of the pool, got dressed and jumped on our horses heading for town. We got there in time to go through the train while it was stopped for about one hour.

One other item that brought us a lot of pleasure was the red sow that dad used to let run free because she didn’t do too much damage. We’d find her in various parts of the yard lying down and so we would climb on her and then the other person would prod her with a stick until she got up and ran. We could stay on for about 1000 feet or so and then we’d fall off Then we would wait until the sow lay down again and the other one would take a turn riding her. Finally Dad said one day, “You know there is something wrong with the sow. She’s getting sores on her back near her rear end.” Loa and I ducked our heads because we knew that that was where we had poked her with the sticks to make her get up.
We also had a big red rooster that really thought he was the “**** of the walk.” And many was the time when he would see us out in the barnyard and he’d come running and try to scratch your arms and legs or even your face. So we learned that when we went out in the yard we better carry a stick so that if the rooster attacked us, we could fight him off.

Other things that we had to be careful of were dairy cows as they had a calf They were very tame except when they had a baby calf and then they were very protective. They’d put down their head and call out a bellow and start chasing you. I would run and roll under the bottom pole of the fence just in time. While I was talking about childhood jobs earlier, I mentioned mainly the jobs we had on the farm in Murtaugh. There were at least two occasions when I worked when we were in California and I was in the eighth grade. I think these are important because they illustrate that some people are fair and pay you what you’re worth even though you might have agreed to take some lesser amount for the work that you did. While I was in Orland, Calif, we had a long spring vacation so that students could help in the nurseries where grape cuttings were to be set out and other shrubs were to be set out getting ready for the summer season. Knowing that we were going to have this vacation, I wanted to get a job so I could have some extra spending money. So I went out to one of the large local nurseries and ask for the owner. I told him that I wanted a job setting out grape cuttings and he looked at me and said that he generally hired high school boys and that I was a lot smaller and probably couldn’t do the work that they were going to do. But I wasn’t to be put off very easily so I insisted that I needed some kind of a job during the vacation. So he finally said that he would give me some kind of a job as a water boy or something else so to be there at 8:00 AM Monday morning.

On Monday morning I was there waiting for the 8:00 whistle to blow. I watched how they drug them behind them down the row and stuck the grapes’ cuttings in the ground and pulled the soil around them and firmed them so the cuttings would take hold and grow. The owner was not there so as the other boys got busy, I got a box of cuttings and followed their example and set out grape cuttings. Later in the day the owner of the nursery came and I noticed him looking down the rows where I had put out cuttings to see that I was doing it right and he didn’t say a word, but he let me go on for two solid weeks setting out grape cuttings along with the older boys. The bigger boys got a lot of fun out of kidding me about the fact that the owner wouldn’t pay me much because I was just a kid. But when the two weeks were over, the owner said, “You know I didn’t think you’d be able to do the same thing that the older boys did, but when I watched you and saw how determined you were to keep up with them and do the job right, I decided to let you go ahead and set out cuttings. I’m going to pay you just the same as the older boys (which was $.90 an hour).” Well, that was a lot more than I had ever earned before for an hours work and I really thought I was rich!

I had one other experience in working for a neighbor that taught me that some neighbors were fair in evaluating what a job was worth and then paying accordingly. The man right behind us built a new home and as the home was being built, scrap lumber of all sizes accumulated in one big area in the front yard. When the house was completed and his family had moved in, he wanted the wood in front cut up for kindling and he ask me if I would be interested in chopping up this kindling and stacking it in his shed. I told him that I would and that I would work for $.50 an hour. I went to work on the pile of lumber and completed cutting it up in one day and piling and stacking it in the shed.
When he came home that night and saw that the pile of lumber was gone, he took out his pocketbook and while I expected to get about $5 for the day’s work, he handed me a $10 bill and said that this is what he had expected to pay for the job and so he was paying me for what the job was worth!

Both of these experiences taught me an important truth. One is that most men want to be fair and if you do your best, they recognize that you are doing your best and pay you for what you are worth. This applies toward manual labor, but I have found that it holds true as far as the Lord is concerned as well. He who works hard and gets a lot done in the time allotted will get the higher pay or greater blessings than he who loafs on the job and only does about half as much as is possible for him to do in the time allotted.

This same thing was proven to be true while I was going to school. I am ashamed to admit the fact that when I was in the 9th thru 12th grades that I was rather a poor student. My older sister Loa used to sit up and do homework until midnight and she came home with “A’s,” but I often came home with “C’s.” Mother used to worry about my grades, but I said, “If you have to work as hard as Loa does for an “A,” then I’m not interested in getting one. I had the happy facility of remembering everything that was said in a class and so in most classes I could remember enough that I didn’t have to work much if I was going to be satisfied with a “C.” So all too often I went clear through a history class or an English class without any studying on the side, but just getting through with what I learned in class. As I say I am not proud of this and when I started out in college, I started out much the same way, but before the first year was over I decided that now was the time I needed to really dig in and learn what I was going to need to know. I had some experiences in college that taught me that I got out of a class what I put into it and I will relate those a little later.

After I finished high school in 1925, there was discussion at times mainly between mother and I as to where I might want to go to college and what I would study when I went to college. I had no idea what I wanted to study, but she thought that I might enjoy classes in agriculture involving both classes in crops, which is agronomy, and classes dealing with farm animals, which were in the animal husbandry department. Well, this sounded logical to me and so I started laying my plans to go to Utah State Agricultural College. Mother took me down to enroll in the college in Sept. 1925 and this was my first experience in going to a large school and going through some of the experiences in going to a large school and going through some of the experiences that had to be followed to enroll in a college, such as filing your statement of graduation and so forth. Many times I got in line and waited for two hours only to be told that I had to go through some other line first before I could go past the window where I was and I got real discouraged before the day was over.

Right away in college I learned that I was going to need to work and work hard. But I also learned that I could do whatever I wanted to do if I wanted to do it bad enough. When I was in high school I got hold of a book about Luther Burbank, who was a great plant breeder so far as nursery stalks were concerned. He created many varieties of new plums and new apples. As a result of reading about Luther Burbank’s work, I thoughtthat plant breeding would be something that I would really enjoy. So when I was a sophomore in college, I registered for a class in plant breeding. Now this class was really a senior college class and I was still in the junior college part of my major, which by this time I had decided would be soils and crops rather than animal husbandry. The class was largely made up of senior or graduate students and I found out right away that it wasn’t going to be an easy class because I hadn’t had some of the other classes that I needed to have taken before I took this class.
The teacher was George Stewart and I had had several other classes from him and he knew that I was a pretty good student and he couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t answer any of the questions that came up in his plant breeding class so he asked me to come in and see him after class. I went in and he asked me if I was a sophomore and I answered, “yes.” He said that they shouldn’t have allowed me to register for this senior college class because I hadn’t had the pre-requisites. He told me that there were 3 classes in agricultural botany and a class in genetics and one in statistics that needed to be taken first, and that it would be impossible for me to take this class without those other classes first so I should go straight to the registrar and drop his class and take one of those other classes.

Well, I was stubborn about it and I told him that I wanted to take plant breeding now and so he said that there would be about a 90% chance that he would fail me and if not he would have to give me a “D.” Of course I wasn’t very happy about that, but I thought it over for a day and decided that I would stick with the class. I found out what the books being used in the Agricultural Botany classes and genetics class that I hadn’t had and I began attending the statistics class without registering for it. I went through three textbooks and the genetics book by staying up until midnight after all the other boys I was living with were asleep and then I would get up at 4 AM and read some more. In about a month, I had finished reading all the textbooks and I was able to understand what was going on in my plant breeding class. Midterm came and examinations were given and Professor Stewart was much surprised to find that when the test papers were corrected, I had the second highest grade in the class.
He told me later that he thought that I had received help from someone so he determined to find out whether I had or not. So for the next two weeks he ask me about ten questions each class period until he satisfied himself that I really knew what was going on and then he began treating me as one of the regular members of the class.

When the final exam was given, I got the highest mark of anyone in the class and he gave me an “A.” Now this was a real important thing to me because it proved that if I wanted to do something bad enough and was willing to work hard enough for it, then I would accomplish it. This was a very important lesson for me to learn not only for school, but later for my work. During the first year at college I boarded at the home of Harvey Sessions. He had been our Bishop at the time father was President of the Murtaugh branch when it was a part of the Old Marion ward of which Harvey Sessions was the bishop. His home was only about four blocks from the college. I paid a total of $25 a month for board and room and Sister Sessions did my washing in as much as she knew the family as well as she did.

During my first two years in school, I decided that I needed someone to go to dances and parties with so one morning in English class I looked the class over and thought, “well there’s a nice looking girl” (Lucille Morgan was a beautiful young lady) and so I decided that I wanted to get better acquainted. When class was over, I caught up with her in the hall and asked her if she would go with me to a school dance. From then on I went out with her fairly often and sometimes with other girls during my freshman and sophomore years.

When I returned home from school in the summer of 1927, I again worked with father on the farm and there was talk between father and mother and me about my going on a mission. At this time I was 18 and I felt that I was ready for my mission and I would have two years of college behind me and two ahead of me when I returned. I worked all summer long and waited to be called in by the Bishop to see if I was willing and wanting to go on a mission. As the time drew near in late August and early Sept. for me to either receive a call to go on a mission or return to Logan to go to school, I became disturbed about the fact that the Bishop never called me in to talk about a mission. Finally at a ward dance one Saturday evening in early September as I danced by the Bishop, he said, “Will you come over and see me following this dance?” Of course I did and the first thing he said was had I been thinking about going on a mission? I told him “yes” and that I had been concerned as to why he hadn’t said anything about it to me earlier. Well, it just so happened that my older brother, Clifford was one of the Bishop’s counselors and the Bishop told me that he had mentioned several times in bishop’s meetings that we ought to talk to Bion about a mission, but Clifford always had said “no, don’t call him yet until he finishes college because if he goes on a mission, he’ll probably end up coming home and getting married and never finish school.” But the Bishop said that he felt impressed tonight to ask me and let me be the one to decide. I told him that I was glad that he asked me because if I waited clear until I was graduated from college I wouldn’t go on a mission because now was the time I wanted to go. So the Bishop said that I should make no further plans to go back to school that fall and my papers were sent in for my mission. The Bishop did ask me if there was any place that I would rather go and I said that with all the missions there are, I hoped that I wouldn’t get called to California because we’d lived there, but I didn’t care where else I might be sent.

Well, no more was said but about three weeks later when I went down town to get the mail, there was a letter from the First Presidency (Heber J. Grant was the President of the Church) and I hurried and opened it up and it said, “You are hereby called to serve a mission for the church in the California Mission.” Needless to say I was a little upset and disappointed. I stuck the letter in my back pocket and took the rest of the mail home and laid it on the living room table. Two nights later, mother asked me what was the matter because I had been moping around for several days and so I pulled the letter out and tossed it on the table and I said, “Here’s the mission call I got to the California Mission and I’m not going to answer it.” Well, mother and dad were wise enough that they didn’t argue with me at the time. They let me cool off for a couple of days and then one evening dad said, “Son have you answered that letter to the First Presidency?” I replied “NO!” He then said that there was a pen and ink in the drawer and that I should answer the call before I went to bed. He didn’t tell me how to answer it, he just told me to answer it. I think he knew that I wouldn’t turn down a call to go on a mission because
I’d been excited about my older brothers coming home and telling of their experiences on their missions and I’d never had any thought but that I would go on a mission when the time came. So that night I wrote a brief note to the First Presidency telling them that I’d gladly accept my mission call.

So in October I reported to the mission home in S.L.C. Unfortunately my ten days in the mission home came at a time when all the General Authorities were away to dedicate the new temple in Mesa, Arizona. So the head of the mission home, LeRoy Snow, the son of Pres. Lorenzo Snow taught us classes all day long. However, on the last two days the General Authorities returned and we had classes with such men as David O. McKay, John A. Widsoe and Joseph Fielding Smith.
I was sent directly to San Bernadino, California instead of going into Los Angeles, to mission headquarters. Pres. Joseph W. McMurrin was president of the mission, which covered all of California and parts of Arizona not covered by the stakes such as the Phoenix Stake, Snowflake, and St. Joseph. I spent three months working out of San Bernadino and Phillip Lambert was the district supervisor at the time and was followed by Irvin King. My first assignment out of San Bernadino with a missionary companion was to the little town of Corona and Cecil Bargeron who I still see occasionally on trips to the Provo Temple was my first real companion. We tracted, held street meetings and cottage meetings for three months, and then Cecil was released from his mission and I was given Henry W. Busby, a new missionary as my companion. We worked together in Corona for several months and drove to Riverside, California each Sunday to attend church services. Elder Busby had married just before his mission and after we had been together about six months, his wife came to be with him in the mission field and to have her baby.

During the time we were in Corona and traveling to Riverside, we went through the town of Arlington, Calif, which was the headquarters of the Seventh Day Adventist Church. There was also a home for elderly people and so we held a service for these people one day a week. Located at the home was an elderly gentleman by the name of Hessell who had previously lived in Pocatello, Idaho and felt that he had been very badly treated by the saints there. As we met with Bro. Hessell, it was difficult to keep on a gospel subject because he continually wanted to recount the difficulties that he had experienced with church members in Pocatello. Finally I told Bro. Hessell that we were going to make one more visit to him. I decided to take him the Articles of Faith by Talmage and challenge him to read it and then tell him to call us when he had finished it. This we did and about three weeks later we got a letter from him asking us why we had ceased making our visits. He said that he had read the book and felt strongly that the Mormon Church was truly in accordance with the scriptures and that his Methodist minister couldn’t answer his questions. In accordance with Bro. Hessell’s letter, we went back as soon as possible and found an entirely different individual than the one we had been visiting. He said that he wanted to be baptized as soon as possible. We preformed our baptisms on Sunday in Riverside and after Bro. Hessell’s baptism, he returned to his home. After several weeks we got a letter from him again and he said that he had something that he wanted to show us. When we got there, sitting in front of him were a stack of letters all from Pocatello. He said that after he joined the church, he needed to mend his fences with the saints in Pocatello so he had written each one and they in turn wrote back and thanked him for the letter and congratulated him for joining the church. With tears streaming down his face, Bro. Hessell said, “You know after I read the letters from these people and thought again about the things that had disturbed me, I had to confess to myself that most of the difficulty had been on my side. For the first time in many years I have a feeling of peace and contentment.” Now Bro. Hessell was 80 years old, so the gospel came to him late in his life, but it made a great change in him and in his outlook toward life.

During our stay in Corona, we went each Sunday to Riverside for meetings and occasionally we would stay over and do a little tracting and missionary work in Riverside. One Monday morning in which we had decided to stay over and do some tracting, we came to a home where the woman answering the door said her name was Baysinger. She listened to our story and said that she would like to take a Book of Mormon and have us call back. She also said that she had a daughter a couple of blocks away married to a man named Lowry and she wanted us to call on her daughter. We did this and two weeks later Mrs. Baysinger said that she was still reading the Book of Mormon, but she handed us back the one we had given her daughter because Mr. Lowry was terribly upset and had forbid his wife from reading any more. Then Mrs. Baysinger kind of smiled and said that it would still be good if we made a call because four or five days ago Mr. Lowry had an accident with timber falling on his back at a nearby mine and he had had to be strapped in bed and rigidly kept in one position. He had become very bored and would probably welcome the chance to talk with most anyone.

So we did make the call and Mr. Lowry was lonesome and anxious for someone to talk with. We sat and talked with him several times and preached the gospel to him while he was in this unmovable position. He said that his father had been a Presbyterian minister and he had soured on the Presbyterian Church because of all the contradictions in the Bible that his father had no answer for. He asked us, for example, why there were two accounts in Genesis relative to the creation of the world and we tried to answer each question that he would raise. Finally he said that he couldn’t understand how his father could have gone to ministerial college for 3 or 4 years and known less than we did about the scriptures and the true purpose of Christ’s mission.

As soon as Mr. Lowry was well enough to get out of his bed, he and his wife and six children started attending meetings regularly in Riverside. Finally one Sunday Mr. Lowry said, “When are you going to ask us to be baptized?” and his wife answered, “When you’re ready.” So the next Sunday we baptized Bro. and Sis. Lowry, and three of their children who were old enough. Now I saw a real change in the life of this family as they accepted the gospel so I am in full accord with the statement Christ made — “I am come not only that you might have life, but that you might have it more abundantly.” These families as they joined the church most certainly did have life more abundantly.

During this time a Miss Christopherson, who had been attending church with some of her friends stated that she wanted to be baptized. We certainly have no credit to take in helping with her conversion, but we were happy to baptize her. This was one of the first evidences I had of the real influence young people have on other young people. Also during our time in Corona and Riverside we saw our first real miracle. We had been called to go to San Bernadino to a district conference at which Pres. W.W. McMurrin would be present. On our way through, we stopped to see the branch president, Bro. Harman and he said that the McMurray family had a young baby, which was extremely ill and not expected to live and so he thought it might be well if
we call on them. We did make a call at their home and the baby was in her bed. The nurse who had been attending the baby met us at the door. We told her who we were and Sister McMurray came to the door and said that she had been praying that the missionaries would come by and give her baby a blessing. We asked the nurse if this was advisable at this time and she said that it didn’t really matter because the baby only had a few hours to live. We administered to the baby and then continued our journey, an additional twenty miles to our conference. During our conference we had all the missionaries kneel in a special prayer for the healing of the McMurray baby. Three days later as we were returning to our respective districts, we called at the McMurray home and there sat the baby playing in the center of the floor. Well, everyone connected with it conceded that this was one of the greatest miracles that they had ever been permitted to behold and the nurse from the hospital had a hard time understanding what had happened to the baby right from the time of the administration.

Soon after this I received a call to district headquarters and they split Elder Busby and I up and I was sent to Redlands, California. This was close to Lomalinda, the big center for the Seventh Day Adventists and they had a big hospital there. We were told that there was an LDS man in this hospital so we went to see him and found a Bro. Jennings. He was extremely ill! He owned the Jennings block, a complete block in S.L.C. I don’t know what sins he was referring to, but he would plead for us to get Pres. Grant there to administer to him that his sins would be forgiven and he would be healed. He had a picture of himself and Pres. Grant on a golf course together. Well, it wasn’t feasible for us to get Pres. Grant and we explained that anyone with the Priesthood could give him a blessing. Although we did bless Bro. Jennings on several occasions, he continued to get worse until he wasted away and died I was in the Redlands area for about five months and I had a young companion by the name of Alma Nielsen. He was very shy and could hardly be heard at our street meetings.

One time a lady came up and said that we were the two young men she had heard sing so beautifully the night before. She raved about how well we blended our voices. We got a chuckle out of this because we had two-part singing—I sang loud and Elder Nielsen sang very soft. The reason we sounded like one voice was because I was the only voice she could hear! On Dec. 28, 1929 I was called into mission headquarters and ask to join Elder Busby again in Ontario, California. While I was in Ontario I received a telegram one evening from the Mission President, Joseph W. McMurrin stating that I was transferred to Arizona and was to take over as District President. I was to leave as soon as possible on the first transportation I could get to Tucson, Arizona.

So I got all my things together quickly and took the 2 AM bus. I arrived in the late afternoon of the following day. I took over as District President of the Arizona district in February 1929 and served one year until February 1930. The district extended from Flagstaff in the north to the town of Douglas on the south. In as much as it was part of my responsibility to hold a branch conference at least once each year in each branch, the schedule dictated that I go to Bisbee that week and hold a conference. The Branch President was Pres. Nelson and his wife was the Relief Society President. One of the first things that they started telling me about was about this unusual individual who lived there and who came to their meetings quite regularly and was very interested in the church.

But just about the time that they thought they could baptize him, he had thrown his Book of Mormon across the room and said that he just couldn’t believe that an angel of God had visited a young teenager and that this young man could have translated such a book as the Book of Mormon. On Sunday morning I was at the branch meeting house early and as so often happened in the mission field, persons who you relied on had gone on a trip without indicating that they would not be there. As a result there was no one to lead the singing and so at the last minute, I went through the song book to choose the songs and while I was in the midst of doing this, Pres. Nelson came up with a man for me to meet and indicated he was the man that he had spoken to me about. I looked up from the song book and said, “Well hello Sam, what are you doing here?” Sam just got red in the face, but I had to go ahead with my preparations for the meeting so I told him that I would see him after the meeting. We went ahead with our morning conference and I noticed that Sam was taking notes all during the meeting.

Following the morning meeting I went back to Pres. Nelson’s for lunch and then came back for the afternoon session of conference and the same thing occurred. Sam sat and took notes on everything. At the end of conference after I had taken care of some more business, I left the building and there waiting on the front porch was Sam English, the man Pres. and Sis. Nelson had told me was the investigator. I had told them at our noon meal that he was not an investigator and that he had been Supt. of the Sunday School when I labored in Corona, California and went to Riverside each Sunday. I had known Sam over a period of six months there in Riverside. Pres. Nelson couldn’t believe that I wasn’t mistaken. But as I came out, he approached me and said that when he met me in the morning he had thought that he knew me from some place but he couldn’t figure out where. I said that we had met in Riverside, California when he was Supt. Of the Sunday School. He acted as if he didn’t know where Riverside, California was and it took me by such surprise that I had to assume that he had suffered a blow on the head or amnesia or something. So I didn’t press it any further at that time, but as I went up to Pres. Nelson’s home I became more and more convinced that Sam had been masquerading as a non-member of the church.

As soon as I got back to district headquarters in Tucson, I wrote Pres. McMurrin a letter and gave him an account of my incident in Bisbee. About three weeks went by and I have no idea just where all Pres. McMurrin got his information, but he wrote me a letter asking me to go back to Bisbee and call the branch together and have Sam English acknowledge the fraud that he had perpetuated there and ask for their forgiveness and if he refused to do so I was to assemble a branch court and try Sam English for his membership in the church. Boy that seemed like a pretty heavy assignment!

On Monday Pres. Nelson and I discussed the way we would handle the situation. We decided to park in front of his apartment and wait until he got home from the mine. After about half an hour Sam drove in and the branch Pres. called to him and ask him to come get in the back seat of his car. Sam came over and crawled in and as soon as he looked up and saw who I was, I said, “Sam do you think you’re treating these branch members fairly by claiming that you are not a member of the church and I know and you know that you are?” Well, Sam knew that he had come to the end of his rope and he broke down and started to cry. And he cried for about twenty minutes and we just let him cry. Then he said that he was so thankful that I had come back and brought everything to a head, because he hadn’t had a moment’s

peace and very little sleep since the branch conference when I had recognized him. He said that the devil got a hold of him and there had been times when he felt like ending his life, but night after night he walked the streets of Bisbee because he couldn’t sleep. Well, we told him that on Tuesday evening there would be a meeting of all the leadership of the ward and that we expected him to be present and go before them and acknowledge what he had done and ask for their forgiveness.
Sam said that he didn’t want to go to work the next day and could he somehow arrange to spend the day with me. So I met him at nine o’clock and we went tracting to non-member homes. That evening the center section of the chapel was filled with officers and teachers of the branch and we went ahead with the regular meeting and then at the end of the agenda Pres. Nelson stood up and said, “I want to introduce to you Bro. Sam English, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and we will now give Bro. English time to speak to you concerning his membership.”

Sam stood up and said that he had been a member of the church all his life and baptized at age 8. He had come up through the various offices in the priesthood and had been the Supt.of Sunday School in Riverside, California and that I had known him for many months. Then there was a long pause and I was looking down at my feet, but I looked up just in time to see Sam falling over and 1 slid out of my chair and caught him on my knees so that he didn’t hit the floor. This of course caused quite a stir in the audience and I just stood up and gave a closing prayer and ask them all to vacate the building as rapidly as possible.

After all of them had gone but three or four of us, Sam started thrashing about upon the floor and mumbling something that sounded like anything but English. We tried to hold him still, but he had tremendous strength and could kick you across a room. We finally got four men holding him down and after a while he quieted down and we took him to the Branch President’s home. He acted quite normal from the time we left the church and for about half an hour while we talked at President Nelson’s home. Then I suggested that since Sam had been through this trying period that he needed sleep and we should let him get some sleep. The Branch President showed him into the room where he should sleep and then we talked for an hour and then I thought that I ought to get to bed, so Sister Nelson set up a cot for me to use on the other side of the room from Sam’s bed.

There had been no disturbance up to this point, but as we opened the door to walk into the bedroom, Sam started thrashing around throwing himself against the bed and off the bed and tearing the sheets into shreds and it was all that the Branch President and I could do to quiet him down and we just got the bed re-made and him back in bed when it started all over again and we had to forcibly hold him down in bed and we turned the light on so that we could see better what was happening. I don’t know if I can describe this in a way that you will fully understand just what this experience amounted to. In rational moments he would look at us and know exactly who we were and then he would throw his head back and let out a hideous laugh and then an entirely different look would come into his eyes and he would go into convulsions and throw himself against the steel headboard. This type of thing was repeated at about twenty minute intervals until about four o’clock in the morning and we became completely exhausted, but I remembered my father talking about people possessed of evil spirits and how he had cast them out while on his mission. So I told Pres. Nelson that I thought that Sam was possessed of the devil and that when he would go into these rages, the devil was trying to take over his body.

He would even yell out, “Don’t let them kill me,” and we would say “who” and he would say that there were people in the room who were going to kill him. So I was sure that evil spirits must be present. We waited until Sam had his next rational moment and I looked him straight in the eye and ask him if he wanted to be administered to and he said, “Yes, more than anything else in the world.” So we administered to him and as I sealed the anointing I commanded all things of an evil nature and all those designated as evil spirits and followers of Lucifer to not only come out of Sam’s body and not only leave the room, but to leave the house and I commanded them to do so by virtue of the priesthood and in the name of Jesus Christ and immediately Sam’s body relaxed and he fell sound asleep from about 5AM until about 3 PM. When I heard him stirring I went in and Sam looked around like he wondered what had happened. I helped him get out of bed and start to get dressed and one of the most shocking things was to see bruises all over his body from the top of his head down to the bottom of his feet where the evil spirits had thrown him against the steel bed and down against the floor. If any man could have come nearer to being beaten to death, it had to be Sam. After this almost all night experience, I stayed around one more day and then I started hitchhiking to Tucson because I didn’t have any money for the bus.

When I got back in Tucson, I was completely exhausted and went to bed for a long time. It was an experience that I was glad that I had because I saw the power of the adversary, but it was also one that I never want to have to go through again in my entire life. In quizzing Sam later on how he got into such a mess, he reported that he had just thought it would be fun to see how the missionaries and members of the church proceeded to teach someone the gospel so he told them he was a non-member. But after it had gone on for a while, he said that he found it hard to get out of his masquerade so he just went on leading a life of deceit and it got to a point where nearly every conversation had to be a lie and he was relieved when it was all over.

He later told me that he was trying hard to live up to the pledge that he made to the Saints in Bisbee if they would give him the chance to prove that he could be a member of real worth and service. I was pleased to see that the branch members forgave him and he was leading a normal life as I last saw him. In as much as the summer months were so hot in Tucson, we transferred district headquarters to Prescott, Arizona for the summer, where the elevation was about 5300 feet and during the summer there were many people from Phoenix and Tucson that came to Prescott for 3-6 weeks during the hottest part of the summer. One of the coolest places in Prescott was the park and people assembled there in great numbers so I held a street meeting there each day. There were 70 or 80 who would sit in the shade and I usually stood on the sidewalk out in the sun and preached the gospel. The people listened because they were bored just sitting in the shade and reading all the time. After I spoke each day, I passed out literature to those close around me. One day as I went to pass literature to a man who was sitting at the base of a tree, he asked me why I kept passing him the pamphlets when he had continually turned them down for 7 or 8 days in a row. Well, I looked at him and told him that I couldn’t tell without asking him each day whether or not he had repented. He looked at me for a minute and then let out with a big laugh and said that if I had nerve enough to say what I thought that maybe he ought to give me a chance. But he made it plain that he could never believe that the Lord made the earth out of nothing.

I made an appointment with the gentleman the following morning at the chapel and he came promptly. I found that he was a teacher from Chicago University who had been sent by his doctor to the Arizona climate. I’ll say this; no one could have presented a stronger more logical talk on the impossibility of building something from nothing. He said God is bound by law and cannot make something from nothing just as you can’t make two mountains without a valley. I waited until he got all done with his presentation and then I reached around and pulled out the book I had entitled, Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith and there I read him 2 or 3 pages in which the prophet speaks about the fact that the Lord couldn’t make something out of nothing and that the elements were eternal. They could not be destroyed only changed from one form to another.

Joseph also said that the original translation would not say “creates” but “formed” or “organized” the earth. The man asked if he could see the book and when he saw the date he said that he couldn’t believe it because some of these things were not even known in 1900. And then I bore my testimony that the scientists may not have known them, but God’s prophet knew them, and God’s prophet spoke these words clear back in 1844. He shook his head in unbelief and said that if he hadn’t seen the book himself, he would have thought that I just cooked the whole thing up so that I could meet his argument. He said that he had several grandchildren that he had forbidden to go to any church because they taught so much that couldn’t possibly be true. But he continued that if he lived somewhere close to a Mormon church that he would be willing to have them attend it. I explained the Primary program and MIA program and he said that he didn’t know that there was a church on the earth that took care of children in that manner. I don’t know just what the future held for this man because he left Prescott a few weeks later, but I do know that he left that day with a very favorable impression of the Latter-Day Saints and the gospel as it had been restored.

In late June 1929 I received a big surprise one day. As I looked out in the audience of one of our street meetings, I saw my sister just older than me. Loa had just been married to Myral Clark and they were on their honeymoon and decided to come through Prescott to see me. We had a wonderful visit that day and they stayed in one of the Saint’s home that night and then went on their way. I worked alone practically all summer in Prescott. This happened because I had paired off all the other missionaries to various fields of labor. I was promised a new missionary, but he never came all summer. I stayed in the small room just above the bishopric’s office and used the Relief Society kitchen for my cooking. I did eat at member’s homes most every noon. Every Wednesday I had a standing invitation with the Johnson’s. This was a tremendous family in more than one way. Brother Johnson weighed about 275 lbs. and he had three sons 6′ 6″ or 6’7″ and they weighed over 259 lbs. But they were also tremendous members of the church and a real bulwark to the church in Prescott.

Another wonderful man was Bro.Allen, who owned a store. When people needed welfare or were passing through and claimed church membership and were in need of gas or some other assistance, we would send them to Bro. Allen’s store to check stock and then he would assist them. Only about 25% ever took the welfare when they found that work was involved. One of the most interesting things that happened while I was in Prescott concerned a group of miners who came to town on Saturday evenings. Some would come for drinking and gambling, but some would listen to me preach in the park. After they had been listening to me for two or three Saturday nights, one of them came up to me with a big high crown hat with a collection in it. There was $35 in the hat and I asked him what he expected me to do with the money and he said that it was for me for my preaching and so he suggested that I send it into mission headquarters or church headquarters to keep missionaries like me preaching. So every Saturday night for two months, they made a collection from the crowd. I always explained that this was not my idea and certainly not for me, but the money would be sent into the church headquarters to print additional tracts and pamphlets.

At the close of summer, I moved the district office back to Tucson, and I found that there was a complaint among one of the Elders who had been assigned to work with Elder Ellis because he was subject to epileptic fits. Luckily these always occurred at night, but I decided to keep Elder Ellis with me at district headquarters. It didn’t take me long to find that if I trained my ear to it I could tell when one of these attacks was coming on. He would breathe real deep and heavy and if I would quickly go over and throw the covers right off and yank him into the middle of the floor, it would stop the onset of the seizure. Sometimes I had to do this once a week. We never said anything to each other, but Elder Ellis knew that when I jerked him out of bed, he had been about to have a seizure and he was very appreciative that I had prevented it. On more than one occasion when he had had a seizure, he had bitten his tongue so badly that he couldn’t speak. I enjoyed working with Elder Ellis. He was a good hard worker and knew his scriptures.

In October I had several Elders being released and I called attention to the fact that I had been out for two years, but the mission president never sent me a release. In the meantime, another District Conference was planned and held in a little town of Pomerine. I found that it was made up of saints who had been driven back out of Mexico by Mexican rebels. The Branch President and postmaster and irrigation master were all the same person, Elder McCray. I helped Pres. McCray set up everything for the District Conference and Pres. McMurrin was to come for the conference. To my embarrassment when I got there Pres. McCray said that he had cancelled the Saturday session of conference because the MIA wanted to put on their play. Well, I took that in stride and Pres. McMurrin didn’t say anything. The next morning I got up to make sure that everything was ready to go and I realized that my program wasn’t on the agenda, but his program. I was terribly upset because the District Conference was being handled like a Branch Conference. I went out to Pres. McMurrin, who was strolling around the yard, to get his advice. Pres. McMurrin, of course, was one of the Seven Presidents of the Seventies for the First Quorum of Seventies and a tremendous speaker. Sometimes he would leave the stand and preach to the congregation as he walked up and down the aisles. He was a very wise man. Anyway I asked him where he thought that we should schedule our District Conference and he replied that he thought this was our District Conference! I explained that I had thought so too until I got here and found out that Pres. McCray was outlining the conference sessions himself and we were just guests. Pres. McMurrin leveled his gaze at me and said, “Well, young man, can you go in there and straighten Pres. McCray out or do I have to do it for you.”

So I proceeded to go back into the chapel and tell Pres. McCray that this was a District Conference not a Branch Conference and as such the District President had charge of the meetings not a Branch President. He got red in the face and said that he could cancel out everything, but one, and then ask if it would be alright if his wife still sang “The Holy City.” So we worked in a spot for the song and then I called upon the speakers and our conference proceeded In the first of December I still had no response from mission headquarters relative to my release. In correspondence with Mother and Father, Dad indicated that they were going to be short of help that spring and hoped that I could be home by February to help out. So I wrote to the President and explained the situation and told him that they would be coming to Tucson the first week in February to pick me up. Well, they came and there was still no release so we waited for a week and the secretary from mission headquarters was passing through, D. Spencer Grow. So I told him that he was now District President until word came otherwise and we loaded up the car and then I told Father that I should report to mission headquarters in L.A. so we took the long way home so I could report to Pres. McMurrin.

Pres. McMurrin was quite surprised to see me and said that he thought that I had been released two months ago. I told him that I had never received my release and that no word had come as to a replacement. He said that he had been so busy that he hadn’t thought about the need for a replacement as District President. So I told him what I had done in leaving D. Spencer Grow in charge until he heard from Headquarters and he was very pleased. He reached over to the pigeonhole on his desk and pulled out a blank release form and scribbled out my release.

Two days later we arrived home in Murtaugh. Now it may seem that I didn’t have too much success in making converts compared to the missionaries in this day and age, but I was proud of the fact that we baptized Bro. Hessell; Bro.and Sis. Lowry and their children; and Miss Christopherson. I was to learn later that several of the miners who listened to the street meetings and took up the collection were later baptized. I arrived home then in Feb. 1930 and I went to work for father on the farm that spring. As I mentioned earlier, I wrote Lucille on my mission and when I got home, I knew that she was the one I wanted to marry, but I couldn’t see much of her until the fall when school started again. During the later part of March 1930, I came up with a small pimple at the opening of the nostril on the right side and I squeezed it one night in going to bed. By the next morning my upper lip was about twice as thick as it should be and pus like long ribbon came out. So my parents took me to an eye, nose and throat specialist in Twin Falls. He said the infection was widespread in the sinuses and he lanced up in between my jaw and cheek and drained it and then stuffed it with gauze. For 4 or 5 days I had to return every day to have it drained and new gauze put in. I’d planned on going to April Conference and so by the time I got to Logan, I was a pretty sad looking sight with my face badly swollen. So Lucille called Dr. Budge and he took one look at me and shook his head and asked how the doctor thought it could possibly drain with all that gauze stuffing it up. He took a long instrument and went up in the lanced opening and gave a big tug to open it up about twice as big. Of course, I came right out of the chair, but then it was all over. Large amounts of pus and blood drained out and the infection cleared right up within a few days.

I then proceeded to Conference with Lucille. She stayed at LaRue Russell’s and I stayed with Dan Van Dam, a family I had grown very close to. Even though they had a family of 15 or 16, they always had room for one more.
In the fall of 1930 I started my junior year of college and I went out a great deal with Lucille and we grew to enjoy each other’s company even more. When school was out in the spring and I went back home, I invited her to come out to our home for the summer and stay with us. We enjoyed some dances and driving into Twin Falls to the shows. During the school year previously at Christmas time, I had asked Lucille if she would marry me during the coming summer and she had said, “yes” so I gave her an engagement ring. I proposed one night when we were both out at a neighbor’s home where we were babysitting. So it was natural that as soon as school was out she came to stay at our place where she got well acquainted with our family.
On June 24, 1931 we went to Logan and were married in the Logan Temple. Following our marriage we took the car and drove to SLC and stayed for three or four days in the Temple Square Hotel, where we could be by ourselves and look around the temple grounds and the city.

Afterwards we went back and lived with the folks in Murtaugh and it was during the month of July that Lucille started having headaches and losing her sight in one eye and then gradually in the other. This was extremely worrisome to us and we went to the doctor in Twin Falls and he said it was inflammation of the retina due to the extremely hot weather and he gave us a prescription for medicine. We had to put packs on the eye so that the irritation would pass. But it didn’t pass and finally an optometrist told us that he didn’t know what was the matter, but he did know that it was not just an irritation from the weather. He recommended that we go to SLC and see the best eye specialist available anywhere.

So we decided to go see Dr. Donnaher who was nationally famous as an eye specialist. We had heard stories how people had sat for days in his office before getting in even though they had appointments. On our way we went to see Lucille’s old family doctor who had known the Morgan family for many years. This was Dr. Budge. He confirmed the fact that the condition was serious and he too recommended Dr. Donnaher, but he said that he would call ahead and convey his interest in the patient to the doctor.

We drove on down to SLC and went to Dr. Donnaher’s office. We arrived about 9:30 AM and were taken into the doctor by 11:00 AM. He examined Lucille very briefly and said that she needed to go in the hospital immediately for an operation to remove bone and pus from the optic nerve that had broken in from the sinus. Well, that looked like a mountain as far as expense was concerned and I said, “How much is it going to cost?” He replied, “No use worrying about cost, just get her in the hospital.” But I wanted him to know that I had no money and was still going to school and he said not to worry that we could pay him when we got out of school and had secured our first job.

She went in the hospital that same afternoon and was operated on that next morning. The doctor let me stay in the operating room while he performed the operation. She was given a local, which numbed all the area around her eyes and nose. Then he went up through her nose and gradually broke out little pieces of bone and laid them to one side until he’d opened up through the sinus and could see the optic nerve. Then he said that now was the time to be real still because he could damage the optic nerve. It took him about ten minutes to clear the bone away and he said that her sight should start getting better right away.

I thought it was quite remarkable that her sight did improve and was back to normal in a very short time. She had been nearly blind. We will always be thankful that there was as good a specialist as Dr. Donnaher in SLC at that time because it was only a short time later that he had marital problems and moved his office to California. After we got out of school and had our first job with the State Department of Agriculture, he wrote a note indicating what the bill was and what he’d like us to start paying on it. So in a comparatively short time, we paid him off. Lucille had already paid off the hospital bill and anesthesiologist from money which she had saved from teaching school prior to our getting married.

In the fall of 1931 we returned to Logan for me to take my senior year at Utah State Agricultural College. It had been decided that my younger sister, Inez would come to Logan to start school and so we needed a large enough apartment to accommodate three individuals. We finally found a suitable apartment in the basement of a home. It was $14 per month, and the main disadvantage was that we had to share the only bathroom with other occupants in the house. It was necessary for me to work every hour possible to earn enough money for us to live on. We did get $20 from Inez for room and board, which did help. I carried a full load of 20 hours at school and worked every light hour at the rate of 35 cents an hour. I had to do all my studying at night. Lucille and I had a bedroom to ourselves, and Inez slept on the daybed in the front room. In spite of such an intensive schedule of work and school, I was able to get on the straight “A” honor roll for the years 1931-1932 and 1932-1933.

As the year drew to a close, mother and father came down to Logan to witness the graduation exercises at which time I received my B.S. Degree in agriculture. I did have work at the school which could continue through the summer months and in as much as a regular job was not available, I kept my work at the school at 35 cents an hour working full days for Professor D.C. Tingey on his wheat breeding program and at times in the experimental station looking up bibliography on such subjects as treatment of alkaline soils and treatment of irrigation waters and so forth for the head of the agronomy department. Dr. Evans also had a small alfalfa breeding plot and grass breeding plot and I was given the responsibility to see that these plots were kept free from weeds and that the stakes were maintained in the proper plots.

During that summer a small frame house belonging to Sister Petersen (a neighbor of my wife’s mother) became available. Although it had no running water or toilet facilities inside, it was cheap and so we rented it paying only $7 a month. The toilet facilities were way outside in the back. We had a cook stove in the kitchen and a heating stove in the front room and we could keep very comfortable temperatures in the room downstairs, but upstairs where all the bedrooms were the temperatures got down to below freezing. We lived in this home through the summer of 1932 when our first baby, Janice was born on July 1, 1932. Most of my time was spent at the experimental farm north of Logan about one and a half miles away from the college campus. In late June as we were looking forward to the time that our first baby might be born, here came a messenger one day saying that they had taken Lucille to the hospital and I should come in as soon as possible. Well, a truck didn’t go in from the experimental station until noon. But at noon I rushed up to the hospital and to my surprise the baby had already been born. I know it was a deep disappointment to Lucille for me not to be present at the birth of our firstborn. After Janice was born, we sure hated to take her upstairs to those cold rooms so frequently we let her sleep between Lucille and I in our bed instead of in her baby bed.

One other item that was fortunate, I was working on wheat breeding data and this was right in line with my masters degree so the work I did that summer of 1932 helped me to finish my masters degree by the spring of 1933. At this point I’d like to express a word of appreciation for professor D.C. Tingey, who I worked for about three years during my college work. He was a real friend and gave me plenty of encouragement because he knew that I was trying hard. Often he was known as “Mr. Rough and Tough,” but that was only to the students who wouldn’t try hard and do their best.

During the summer of 1932 a significant thing happened to me that helped me get my first job the next year. Jobs at this time were very scarce because of the horrible depression. Dr. Evans called all graduate students into his office one day and said that he had been able to work through the State Commission of Agriculture and eliminate the appointing of political hacks who formally had filled the jobs as agricultural inspectors in the State Agriculture Department. It was now going to be on the basis of having to pass a rather stiff examination. After giving all the details he said, “Bion, I hate to have to tell you this, but in as much as you are an out-of-state student and were born and raised in Idaho, we’d have to give Idaho as your main residence and any references that you might have from people who have known you over the years would come from Idaho, so I don’t think you should even go down and take the exam because they will choose someone who was born and raised in Utah.” However, as eight or nine of us boys got together and drilled on the subjects we thought might be on the exam, I figured that I might as well go along with the rest and so I studied with them and then went along to the state capital in SLC for the exam. We all found the exam to be much stiffer than we expected purposefully, I suppose, to eliminate the political hang-ons that expected the pork-barrel type of employment. As it turned out only two of us had a passing grade on this test –myself, who got the highest grade, and Golden Stoker who got the next. I immediately thought that I had a job with the State Dept. of Agriculture all sewed up, but much to my disappointment I was informed by the State Commissioner of Agriculture that in as much as he would like to make the appointments direct, it was still mixed up in politics enough that you had to have the endorsement of the Democratic County Committee. Well, the District #1 for which I was trying to become inspector covered Box Elder, Cache, and Rich Counties. It didn’t take long to find out that I was completely out of the running in Box Elder and Rich counties, but Cache County did not have anyone as yet.

At this point I need to relate an experience that had happened earlier in the summer. One day when I was in one of the laboratories in the agronomy building taking genetic data on wheat chaff, two men walked in and watched me for a few minutes. They were from the ninth ward where the Morgans had lived for many years. After talking back and forth among themselves and visiting with me casually, one of them spoke up and ask if I would like to be a delegate from precinct 10 to the county convention. I responded that I didn’t think that I had any chance of being a delegate from that precinct because I didn’t know anyone from precinct 10 and I didn’t even know where precinct 10 was. They replied that I didn’t need to worry about that if I was willing to go to the convention and go along with the things that they proposed then they would see that I got elected to the convention. Well, I thought about it for a minute and decided that it would be a new experience so I said, “yes.”
After they had gone I began to wonder what political party it was going to be because I had been raised a strict Republican and it was quite disconcerting to find out later that this was a Democratic Party. About ten days later these men came back and said that I had been officially appointed the delegate from precinct 10 (to this day I don’t know just how that was accomplished). But it didn’t take long after getting into the convention to see just how underhanded many things were.

The first order of business was to split up into precincts and precinct 10 was given a room in the southeast corner of the building. As we assembled in this room, one of the men who had been instrumental in getting me appointed as a delegate said to the elderly chairman, “I think there is someone up front who is lost and looking for where precinct lO is meeting so you better go get him and bring him back.” So after the chairman left, one of the men stood up and said, “I move that we release the existing chairman and give him a vote of thanks. Then they motioned that so-and-so be made chairman of precinct 10 and again no one had a real chance to vote. I was real disappointed at this type of activity at a political convention, but later found that the fact that I had been a delegate from precinct 10 to the Democratic Convention was to play a very important part in my being able to obtain my first job with the State Dept. of Agriculture.

I started out to visit the various members of the Democratic Committee in Cache County and almost the very first question I got asked was “was how do we know that you are a good Democrat?” I’d say, “well I went to the county convention as the representative from precinct 10 and that always made them feel that I was okay. So one after another they agreed to give me their support. When the time came for the meeting to elect the District Agricultural Inspector, I only needed one more vote to assure a majority to elect me. As I tried to get one more vote, everyone turned me down flat. Finally on a Friday I went to Dr. Bernhissel who was a dentist and was chairman of the committee. I told him what I needed and he said to forget about it because they had already decided to support another man and he would be selected on Sunday when the meeting was held. Needless to say I was real disappointed because I had passed the examination with the highest score and this man that they were going to agree on hadn’t even passed the exam at all. But this just shows how difficult it is to get a job out of government once it gets into politics. I was mentioning to one of the other individuals on the staff of the Agronomy Dept. what my troubles were and he suggested that I go see Dr. W.W. Henderson. Now it just so happened that I had taken genetics from Prof. Henderson and I not only received an “A” but he had been so taken up with the notebook that I kept, that he tried to purchase it from me.

As I walked in on Saturday morning, he looked up from his desk and said,” Well, Bion what can I do for you?” I proceeded to tell him my difficulties and it didn’t take him long to understand what I needed. He turned around and took a phone off the hook and said, “Hello, Dr. Bernhissel, I understand that you are meeting tomorrow as a County Committee to give your endorsement to the man who is to be District Agricultural Superintendent in District # 1.” He continued the conversation by saying that he had a man that he wanted to see get that position and he gave Dr. Bernhissel my name and then hung up. And it was just that simple! I did get the endorsement of the County Committee on Sunday.

I was then told that I had to be approved by the State Agricultural Board. Much to my disappointment I found as the report of the meeting came out in the paper that all the agricultural appointments had been made except in District # 1. So I got in touch with David F. Smith, the Commissioner of Agriculture in the state and he said that Box Elder County and Rich County put up such a fuss that he could see that if it came to a vote I would have lost out so he made a motion that the appointment of Inspector for District # 1 be postponed for one month. He suggested that during that month I visit the members of the committee and get better acquainted and let them see and know who I was. The interesting question that David F. Smith ask me was how much experience I had had in this kind of work. I told him that I was born and raised on a farm and that I had studied about the quarantines imposed by the state on noxious weeds and pesticides, but when it came to having experience directly on a job like this, I hadn’t had any and I never would have any unless someone would jar loose and give me a job.

The result was that when they met a month later, I sailed through as the Agricultural Inspector for District # 1 and was put on the state payroll at the tremendous salary of $125 per month. These were depression days and things were cheap and that was a good salary. You could buy a new automobile for $900 and we rented our first apartment in Brigham City for $25 a month. After getting our apartment, the next thing I had to have was an automobile and of course as a student I didn’t have any money to purchase one, but I went down to the Chevrolet garage and got hold of the owner. His name was Norm Watkins. I’d been in looking around the floor and there was a 1932 Chevrolet bronze color that I thought would make a pretty nice automobile. So I told Mr. Watkins that I was interested in the gold sedan. He started making out the papers and ask if I wanted to finance it through GMAC and I said, “yes.” Then he wanted to know how much I could put down and I told him that all I had was $25 and he looked at me like I was some kind of an idiot. But I guess he thought if I had guts to come in and want a new car with only $25 down, that I would have guts enough to make a go of my new job and be able to make the payments. He said that there needed to be more showing than $25 so he wrote out a personal note for $100 so that the GMAS loan would go through. So I signed a personal note to Norm Watkins and got in the car and drove it out. The following Monday morning I started my job as District Agricultural Inspector for District #1 of the State of Utah. That was in April, 1933. I might just add that I got my car paid for well within the time limit set that the payments were due. County Commissioners of Box Elder County provided me with a desk in one end of the room occupied by the County Agricultural Agent who was Bob Stewart at the time. I used the agricultural agent’s secretary for typing of reports and letters. My work consisted of inspection of fruits and vegetables that were being shipped to the market.

The main things that I inspected were potatoes, tomatoes, cherries and peaches. I got a good man to help me during the peak season when fruits and vegetables were being shipped, but I also worked early and late and went when and wherever it was necessary to inspect a truckload of goods. Each load needed a certificate showing that they were US# 1 grade because a produce dealer in Box Elder County would receive an order from someone in Chicago or Omaha for # 1 potatoes or # 1 cherries. So on the basis of the certificate that I gave, the transaction could be made. I soon found out that it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to inspect a man’s potatoes after he had a half of a car load or two thirds of a car load and tell him they were running off grade and they’d have to be resorted and rebagged before the car could be completely loaded and started on its way to the eastern market.

One thing that I did do that helped me get established and helped me get the support of the producer was to get to the closest phone as soon as possible after I’d inspected a car of produce and tell the man who had purchased the fruit or vegetable that the car either passed or didn’t pass so that he knew in plenty of time so he could fit it into his shipping schedule and meet the needs of the purchaser on the other end. Once in a while some farmers tried to bury a bunch of poor potatoes or tomatoes that would be rotten by the time they reached the other end. But generally by going in and inspecting 8-10 sample bags it was possible to get a pretty good idea whether or not the car was going to meet the # 1 or # 2 or a combination.
At one of the conventions in SLC the Chief Agricultural Inspector criticized three of us for excess mileage that we were running up on our automobiles and the Commissioner of Agriculture broke in immediately and said that he wanted Bion Tolman’s name taken off the list. “If you look at the number of cars that he inspects personally during the season you’ll find that he more than doubles in fees (because they paid $4 for an inspection) what we pay him back in mileage.”

I’d like to relate two contrasting incidents that happened during the two years that I worked for the state in Box Elder County. I got a call one day to go out to a young Japanese farmer’s place to inspect a carload of onions that were sold on the basis that they were guaranteed to all be three inches in diameter. I went out and right away I could see that too many of them were just under three inches and were going through the three inch hole in the gage plates that I had. Well, the young farmer was quite disappointed, but he said that he wanted to meet the requirements and so could he borrow the official sizing ring for over the weekend. So on Monday I got a call that he was ready for inspection again and I went out and dumped out a sack and there wasn’t a single onion that didn’t stay on top of the three inch hole and so I dumped several more sacks and it became obvious that all the onions in the bags now met the requirement. I started to quit but the Japanese farmer was pleased with himself and would say, “Try another one.”

And so I tried five or six more and he beamed and said, “100%.” It was real obvious to me that he got a real thrill out of being able to watch every onion meet the requirement! This was in contrast to another place where I received a call to come and look at onions where some rag heads as they were referred to from India by the name of Sing were farming and he took me down the row of onions as they lay on top of the ground ready to be taken to the sorting sheds to be bagged. Finally when we got away from where there was anyone else around he said, “I sort and bag these onions and you turn them down, I lose money. But if I sort them and you make them US #1 I make money and I will give you something.” This was the only offer of a bribe that I ever remember receiving. I looked down at the ground and there was a beautiful, hard onion about as pretty an example as you could find. I reached down and picked it up and said, “You make them look like this and I’ll make them pass.” From then on the Sing brothers knew they had to make their onions meet the standard in order to get the certificate.

Our second baby, LuRee was born April 7, 1934. This was while we were living in the Sheffield house in Brigham. It proved to be an early birth at seven months and she was only about three pounds. She had to stay in the hospital quite awhile. I won’t report the details, which Lucille has given in her history, but something interesting happened while Lucille was staying over at her mother’s after LuRee had been born. I found an apartment with Horace Mann in a nice brick and stucko home that was so much nicer than what we had ever had to live in. It seemed to be in the possibilities of our budget and so I rented it and got a friend to help me with a truck and we moved all our possessions from the Sheffield home over to the Mann house. When Lucille came back from Logan, I took her to the new home and said, “Here is the new place we have to live.” In the meantime I had also gone to SLC to Southeast Furniture Co. and got a hold of Morgan Sorensen and I picked out a bedroom set and surprised Lucille with it. That is the same bedroom set we are using now so it is about 45 years old. Some of the girls have tried to lay claim to it, but I imagine mother and I will have it for our entire married life.

After I had been working as a state agricultural inspector for two years, I was approached one day by the head of the extension division of the Agricultural College concerning a job as a county agricultural agent. I decided that the job would be much less political and so I accepted it. I had to give the state two weeks notice and so I went to David F. Smith and turned in my resignation. He tried to talk me into staying, but I turned him down even at the offer of a better salary. I did agree to stay on for two weeks and train a replacement and he said that he appreciated that. This was on a Friday. On Monday when I went to work I got a call from the head agricultural inspector, Earl Hutchings, who said that as of that morning I was off the payroll. I was quite disappointed in this kind of an attitude, but I thought if that’s what they wanted it was okay. I called the extension division in Logan and got W.W. Owens and told him what had happened and he told me to report to SLC as soon as possible to be the assistant to Vere Martinau, one of the oldest and most experienced agents and he said that I would be on the payroll as of that morning. So my exchange of jobs was made without losing even one day of pay.

When I got to Salt Lake I found that county agent Martinau was ill with hepatitis and it would be some time before he would be back at work. So I took all the calls at the office and I organized crews for the WPA projects to clean up noxious weeds on patches on farmers’ fields throughout Salt Lake County. I had many night meetings to meet with farmers and explain the program to them. I always got a kick out of one meeting I went to in Midvale. We were standing around outside waiting for the Bishop to come open the chapel and I heard one farmer say to another one, “Just what is the purpose of this meeting?” The other one replied, “It is just one of those agricultural agents trying to put on a big show.” I didn’t say anything at the time, but as we got in and I called the meeting to order I said, “You know I thought I knew what this meeting was called for to explain the noxious weed clean-up to help your farms, but I overheard a conversation outside in which it was clearly stated that the purpose of the meeting tonight was for me to just show off and try and push through a program of some kind.” I then went on to say that they could accept what I had to explain on any kind of a basis that they wanted, but I made it clear that any time that someone thought that this was just a smart-alecky program, we could certainly take it off that individual’s farm.

I also had charge of 4-H club work. I had several clubs including garden clubs. I met with the club leaders on a weekly basis so that we knew at all times that the young people were getting adequate supervision on their projects. Some raised calves for competition in the state fair and it proved to be very worthwhile.

After I had been on the job for six months the county agent in Tooele county was moved into the Logan office, and I was asked to go over to Tooele to take the place of the county agricultural agent. I enjoyed it in Tooele because it gave me a chance to see where my grandparents had lived and the area in which father and mother had been born and gone to grade school and to note the monument that was built with a bronze plaque stating that Cyrus Tolman and his brother Judson were called by Brigham Young to go to Tooele and establish a saw mill. This was done to provide some of the lumber that went into the Tabernacle on Temple Square.

One morning I’d gone down to the little town of Erda, which was only five or six miles north of Tooele and the man’s wife came out from the house and said that I was wanted on the phone. I went in and it was Dr. F.V. Owen of the beet sugar development office with the USDA on the phone. He said that one of their employees had just been transferred to Michigan and he’d been keeping track of the better students out of Utah State Agricultural College and was offering me the job to replace this man at the sugar beet breeding office in Salt Lake City. If I was interested I was to come in and turn in my papers to be sent to Washington. Well, I reported in that same afternoon to Dr. Owen and in a short time I got the appointment of assistant agronomist where I worked directly with Dr. F.V. Owen in conducting variety tests so that we would know which lines of sugar beets to carry and which varieties were the best.

During the ten-year period I had an increase in salary from $2100 a year to $3200 a year. I had had several job offers with commercial companies to quit my job with the government but none of them had been really appealing enough that I felt justified in making the change. Finally I came in one day and Dr. Owens said Doug Sealey who was president of Utah, Idaho Sugar Co. had been talking with him on the phone and said that they were setting up an agricultural research program for the company and if possible they would like me to come for an interview and to accept the job as agricultural research director. The job entailed setting up the program and hiring the necessary personnel and deciding what work needed to be done to help farmers the most in sugar beet production. Dr. Owens said that he felt I ought to follow up and see just what the offer was.

I met in an office at the sugar company with Mr. Sealey, Wilford Cannon and Jack Keane and they explained the program and said that my salary would be double what I was getting at the government office. Well, I couldn’t turn down an opportunity like that. Not often do you get a chance to be almost your own boss, set up your own program and decide what you’re going to do and pick the people you are going to use. I notified the government office that I was leaving and on April 1, 1945 I reported to the Utah Idaho Sugar Co. and began my more than 28-year career there.

My first big effort was to get out fertilizer plots through various districts in the company including tests in Utah, Idaho, So. Dakota, Montana and Washington. We moved ahead rapidly with a program which demonstrated beyond all shadow of a doubt that the main thing we needed was commercial fertilizer containing nitrogen and phosphorous. In as much as the farmers were used to only adding phosphate to their land, it proved to be a hard project so I made appeal to the fertilizer companies to make a mixture of 24-20 and then I could say, “put on 400 lbs of 24-20” and that made it very simple and of course 400 lbs. approached the 100 lbs. of nitrogen and 80 lbs. of phosphorous that they needed per acre.

Even though I was now with the Utah, Idaho Sugar Co., I went back frequently and kept close touch with work that was going on at the government offices. As a consequence of this I got well acquainted with the Savitskies, two Russian scientists who had fled out of Russia from the University of Kiev when the German army was forced back out of Russia and they had been stationed for sometime in a displaced persons camp in Austria and were looking for someone to sponsor them to come to the United States. The sugar beet industry gave that sponsoring and the Savitskies were sent to Salt Lake City where they worked with Dr. Owen in the breeding office to develop sugar beet seed that was monogerm in character. I worked closely with them on this and helped increase seed plots for them when it was necessary and as a result we were close enough to the program that by 1958 we were the first commercial company to make extensive use of monogerm seed. In 1959 we planted our entire acreage of sugar beets using monogerm seed. This was responsible for me being chosen to go to Europe to international meetings to tell sugar companies about monogerm seed as it had been developed in the United States and as we were using it commercially. I explained that they needed different drills, it needed to be planted and it needed to be handled differently as far as cleaning procedures were concerned. We had had enough experience that I knew the answer to all their questions and so my trip representing the United States turned out to be a very successful and enjoyable one.

The first part of my trip on this European tour was to attend some meetings in London on factory operations. Not that I was a factory man, but in as much as I was going to be there on agricultural business I was asked to attend these meetings. I was staying at the Charing Cross Hotel and found out that just across the street was the place called Trafalger Square. This was where all the anti-government demonstrations took place and any protest movement would start there and move on down toward Buckingham Palace to express their dissatisfaction with whatever program they were trying to promote. Immediately following the factory meetings there were agricultural meetings held under the direction of Sir Oswald Rose who held a position with the British Sugar Corporation very similar to the one I held with u. & I. This meant covering quite a large area of the British Isles to see the work that was going on in different places. During the time the British Sugar Organization was treating me as a guest, and so at the first noon luncheon I sat by Dr. Battles who was Chairman of the Board of the British Sugar Corporation. As the meal got underway, I noticed three waiters on the opposite side of the table going down the line giving each person their choice of three different kinds of wine and some not only took their choice, but had some of all three kinds. It was interesting as the thoughts that came to mind, well a little bit of wine isn’t going to kill anybody and it might be embarrassing if I said, “no.” But as they came down our side of the table, I just reached forward and turned my three glasses upside down and so Mr. Battles ask what I would like to drink if I didn’t drink wine and so I asked for orange juice. Well, I expected a glass full of orange juice, but they brought me a small pitcher full of fresh orange juice. The interesting thing about that was that as the tour continued each time whether it was at breakfast or noon or evening meal, I could go into the dining room where the meal was going to be served and always tell where I was going to sit because there was a pitcher of fresh orange juice sitting in front of the plate. This showed me that people respected those who lived up to the principles of the church they belonged to.

During the meetings in England I met a man named General Costello and found that he was a graduate from West Point and a general in the Irish Army. But the important thing as far as I was concerned was that he was also head of the Irish Sugar Corporation. He asked me if I would go to Ireland and spend some time with their plant breeder there explaining the techniques of breeding monogerm hybrids. I hadn’t decided what I was going to do that week because I had had several offers – one to go to Sweden to the plant breeding station in Stockholm. But he wanted me so much that he bought me a round-trip ticket to Dublin and handed it to me and so I decided to go to Ireland. I was met in Dublin by Barney Bromby and he took me to the town of Purcell in central Ireland. It was about 2:00 AM when we arrived and we had to beat on the hotel door to get in. A man came to the door with a kerosene lantern and dressed in red underwear and invited me in and took me up some winding stairs and some crooked halls to a small room in which my bed was located.

The next morning was Sunday and I could see people going to church on bicycles. I could also see the farmers bringing their milk in on horse drawn carts. Monday morning Barney Bromby called for me and we started our journey through Ireland because we could talk about sugar beet problems as well as sightsee at the same time. We saw many old castles and parts of castles that had been left from way back in the 1200’s and 1300’s when the Romans conquered Ireland.
As Barney drove throughout the countryside, I decided that there was only one thing that kept you from having a fatal crash between two automobiles, and that was the fact that there weren’t too many automobiles in Ireland as soon as you got out of the main cities such as Dublin.

The farmlands in Dublin were all lined with rock fences and as you came to an intersection where there was only room for one car in the road, Barney never slowed down, but just gave a couple of toots with the horn and went through an intersection at the same speed we had been traveling along the regular road. I wondered what would happen when someone from the other side would give their two toots at the same time and the cars would both crash in the middle of the intersection.
He took me clear down to the southern end of Ireland where the town of Tiperey was located to Calarney and up to the country where the river Shannon flows to Locksawella which is way on the north end of Ireland. This brought home something that I had heard in Irish songs on the Edison phonograph. The record said, “And her beauty spreads for many a mile from Calarney to fair Locksawella.”

During my last day in Ireland we spent the whole day visiting in the town of Dublin. One of the outstanding things about Dublin was that every 2 or 3 blocks there was a complete block set apart for a park and always in the park had been placed statures of men who were prominent in England. They proudly took me up to each slab of cement where a statue had once stood and said, “Lord so and so used to stand here, but when we gained our independence we tore the statue down.” I guess I was shown 24 or 30 such spots. Finally I noticed there was a large shaft in one of the parks about 50-60 feet high and on the top of that was Lord Nelson of the British navy and I said, “Well you must have thought that Lord Nelson was a pretty good individual. His statue still stands there.” And Barney looked at me and said, “Now I wouldn’t say that, we just haven’t figured out a way to get the blocks down.” It was interesting that within two years after I returned from this trip there was an article in the newspaper that someone had climbed this shaft and fastened dynamite to the statue and blown both the statue and the shaft and fastened dynamite to the statue and blown both the statue and the shaft clear to the ground.

I returned then to London just in time to be present while the British iris show was on. I was known by several of the Iris breeders in England so they gave me a royal welcome and asked me to join them in judging the show. There were some very outstanding things in the show, but most of the iris had been imported from the United States. Following the iris show, they made arrangements for me to visit one of the large nurseries in Haarlem, over in Holland. My itinerary for the next week was to go to Haarlem and visit the large nursery in which specie irises were just at their height and tulips were at their full bloom. So I got the plane to Amsterdam and then took the train to Haarlem and on down to Stuttgart where Bob Clark, my nephew was residing on his mission. The trains run very rapidly in the European Continent and they warn people when they are coming to a stop to have their baggage right by the door and the door slides open and people jump out and the baggage is pushed out and the train proceeds on its way. I started to try and find out just when we were going to come to Haarlem because I got nervous about the fact that we might come to Haarlem and I might miss the stop and be carried way on past my destination and the men who were going to meet me at the station wouldn’t know what had happened. I tried to find someone who spoke English who could help me, but everyone just shook their head to indicate that they didn’t understand English.

Anyway I sat back down and began to watch out my window and the train began to slow down and as it got down to a slow crawl, I looked out the window and there was a building with the name Haarlem on the front. Well, I thought that might be the depot and because no one went to the doors to get off, the train would speed up and go on to the next town. I ran up to the car in the front and then the car in the back and there was no conductor and so I finally just reached up and pulled the emergency cord which brought the train to an immediate stop and grabbed my suitcase and jumped off the train and found that I was standing out in the middle of a field of weeds. About that time two or three men came from the train and asked if I had stopped the train. Finally someone was speaking English and I explained what happened and they told me to get back on the train. Everyone on the train was in an uproar. It sounded almost like a riot and someone said, “This will cost you plenty.”
One of the trainmen pulled out a notebook and asked for my name and address.

In the meantime workmen were trying to get the train started again because by pulling the emergency cord, I had pulled the electricity and the large motors of the train ran by the electricity. The embarrassing situation proved to be that as the train again moved forward about 100 yards down the track, there was a large passenger depot for the town of Haarlem. At that time I gathered up my suitcase and got off As I got to the bottom of the steps leading from the subway, where I was to be met, there was a large commotion behind me and there were two train men and a policeman and they were pointing at me and shouting so I figured I might as well face the music. I stopped and went back to meet the men and the officer ask me if I had stopped the train. I explained what a bad mistake it had been and fortunately the cop was good-natured and understood so he told me to go on ahead. As I turned to go back down the steps, the trainmen were still yelling and were very upset that the policeman wasn’t going to do anything.

I was picked up at the station as it had been pre-arranged and went out to the large nursery to see the iris and tulips and other beautiful flowers. In late afternoon, I continued by train to the address where my nephew Bob Clark was doing missionary work. The landlady wouldn’t let me in, so I sat on the front porch waiting for Bob and his companion for about one hour. When they arrived home, we had a nice visit and the next morning I went by train to Bergen op Zoom that was clear down in the southern part of Holland. Hank Reitberg, a man who was head of the sugar beet research station in Bergen op Zoom, met me. He took me out to the hotel and then to the laboratory. At noon, he called one of his assistants to take me to lunch because Hank’s wife was ill and he had to go home everyday at noon to take care of her. As he left he said, “Don’t take him to the bar because he doesn’t want anything to drink, he’s a high priest in his church. Well, the word high priest about scared the young assistant out of his wits. So as we arrived at the hotel, we went past the bar and directly into the restaurant and ordered our meal. As our food was brought I noticed that the young man didn’t pick up his fork to start to eat and he looked at me and said, “Would you like to ask a blessing on the food?” So I asked a blessing on the food and then we ate and discussed the work in the laboratory. Arrangements had also been made for me to go out into the fields where they were breeding for resistance to virus in beets. After we had talked for more than an hour, I suggested that we go visit the plots out in the field, but he hesitated again and then said, “Well, would you like to have prayer again before we go out in the fields.” I said, “No” and explained that I had prayers night and morning and at each meal and that was sufficient. So he took me to the fields and then late that night I caught a train to Brussels, Belgium where I then caught a plane, which took me to Frankfurt in West Germany. I stayed there only one night and then caught the plane back to London.

Again I stayed at the Charing Cross Hotel and readied myself for the large international meetings that were being held and at which I was to give my paper. This was my first experience at speaking to a very large crowd and all the nations of Europe were represented and of course translators were needed. My talk was heard in about twelve different languages.

Then we sat around and the plant breeders from the various nations ask questions of me concerning monogerm hybrids. It didn’t take me long to find out that they were very skeptical about the fact that we actually had monogerm. They thought that maybe we were just segmenting the seed and making it monogerm. I had to explain to them that this was a genetic monogerm controlled by the principles of genetics and that it actually only had one germ per seed ball and that all the processing we did was to knock off some of the rough edges so that it could be used in precision drills. That made it possible to plant a single seed about every 2 inches down a row. This made the thinning process much faster.

After these meetings were over, I proceeded on my regular schedule to catch my plane to New York, but our plane was late and I had missed all my connections in New York so I ended up on a flight that stopped at every little town across the country and it was a long tedious air trip. Looking back and thinking about this trip to Europe, I think it was one of the highlights of my life. At the international meetings I not only gave my paper, but one that was sent by the research staff from the Washington D.C. office so I actually read two papers and felt proud to represent the U.S.A. During the remainder of my employment with the Utah-Idaho Sugar Co., I had several honors accorded me. I had served as Director of the American Society of Sugar Beet Technologists for fifteen years and during that time I was Vice President twice. I served as a director on the board of West Coast Beet Seed Company for fifteen or sixteen years. I was also a member and director of the beet sugar development foundation for twenty years and had served as president twice and vice president eight times. In recognition of these long years of service, I received a meritorious service award from the American Society of Sugar Technologists and was voted a life membership in the society as I approached my years of retirement.

While I value this honor, I was extremely pleased to find that the beet sugar development foundation where I’d been a director for twenty years and president twice during that period rescheduled their meeting which had been scheduled to be held in San Francisco to Salt Lake so that I and other members of the U & I Sugar Co. could be present. And there the president of the foundation had a testimonial dinner in the Hotel Utah for me and presented me with a letter giving details of the service I had rendered and expressing their appreciation for the contribution I had made to the industry. Copies of these documents will be found in the back of my history.

At this point I would like to recap the record of my schooling and employment by years:

Born 1907 – Murtaugh, Idaho
1907 – 1913 – Childhood experience
1913 – Entered first grade
1917 – Fifth grade in Long Beach
1918 – Sixth grade back in Murtaugh
1920 – Orland, California, Seventh grade
1921 – Graduated with 8th grade diploma
1921-1922 – Ninth grade in SLC Irving Jr. High
1922-1923 – Tenth Grade LDS High School in SLC
1923-1924 – Eleventh Grade at West High School in SLC (lived with aunt)
1924-1925 – Senior and graduated from Twin Falls High
1925-1927 – Utah State Agricultural College
1927-1930 – Mission in California and Arizona
1930-1932 – Utah State Agricultural College, received E.S.Degree
1932-1933 – Masters Degree in plant breeding from A.C.
1933-1935 – Worked for State Dept. of Agriculture
1935-1936 – Worked as County Agricultural Agent
1936-1945 – Worked at the U.S. Dept of Agriculture in research
1945-1972 – Worked at Utah Idaho Sugar Co.

A brief summary of my employment with Utah Idaho Sugar Co. might be as follows: I was hired as Director of Agricultural Research. Five years later I was made General Agricultural Superintendent and also kept the title of Research Director so I took on the additional responsibilities for directing the entire agricultural crew. In 1958 I was made Vice President in charge of Agriculture and kept that position until I retired. As Vice President for Agriculture I was responsible for all agricultural superintendents in all districts where the company operated and through them all field men that numbered about 45 and most of whom I had hired. The qualifications I required of them were that they be born and raised on a farm and that they had attended an agricultural college majoring in agronomy and that they understood their work to be done and put in as much time as it took to get that work done. Sometimes during pressure periods the field men might need to put in 16 hours a day. I had a very happy relationship with the field staff and hired about 80 college graduates over the years.

To illustrate the impact that this had on the company, when I retired, three of the district managers were men whom I had hired and had come up through the agricultural department and all the agricultural superintendents were of course men that I had hired and all the field staff were men that I had hired. Even the Secretary/Treasurer for the company was a young man that I had hired and the man in charge of personnel and insurance was also a man I had hired as well as the man in charge of sugar beet sales.

The agricultural engineer in charge of beet maintenance crews was also one of my young men so you can see that it didn’t really matter which department of the company, someone that we had trained in the agricultural department was in a key position throughout the company. This I regard as one of my greatest contributions to the Utah Idaho Sugar Co. I tried to train good, reliable personnel. A great compliment was paid me by the President of the company several months after my retirement when questions kept being ask at a management meeting about who used to do such and such and when the answer kept being Bion Tolman, the President replied, “I guess Bion was doing a whole lot more for the company, than we even realized. He was carrying a lot of responsibilities on his shoulders.”

I have been elected to some honorary societies over the years. I must start back in my college days when I was elected a member of Alpha Zeta, a honorary agricultural fraternity. My grades were good enough as I graduated that I was automatically elected to Phi Kappa Phi. I belonged to Delta Phi, the fraternity for returned missionaries. During the time I worked for the government for Dr. Owen some of the publications I had written on sugar beet production were recognized nationally, especially when I published in the government publication termed Better Cultural Research. It was a complete article covering the various stages of sugar beet seed production in the St. George area of southern Utah and while I have not been very active in the organization, I was given membership in Sigma Chi and still carry some insurance through this group. My name also appears in Who’s Who in the West and Who’s Who in Commerce and Industry.

Of course these honors do not mean much concerning the ultimate purposes of this life, but they do give you satisfaction when you know that you have worked hard to do the job that you had to do and that your efforts were recognized not only locally, but also nationally and even internationally. Now I would like to move to my church service and list according to years the important events that happened to me as far as the church goes. During the years that I was 4, 5, and 6 years old, we had a union Sunday School to which all denominations came to study and I had a non-LDS teacher. It was interesting that the children got along very well, but the adults fought like cats and dogs over lesson discussions. During this time sacrament meetings were held at our large brick home. Finally father gave the church a piece of land upon which the church building could be built and he put up much of the money and in about 1916 the chapel was finished. There were no furnaces in those days so a large potbelly iron stove heated the assembly part of the Chapel. The main assembly room was divided down the middle with curtains to make four rooms and the stage was divided into two rooms and the basement into four rooms for classrooms. As I look back on this it is a wonder to me how we learned anything because you could hear lessons being given by two or three other teachers as well as your own.

Some of the things that were different in those days were that the minutes of each meeting was read each Sunday and approved as read. Instead of having individual cups for the water as we have now, two glass mugs with handles on each side were filled with water and two pitchers full of water were also blessed and then the cup was passed along the row and each took a sip. So as many as 100 people took a sip from the same mug each Sunday.Thinking back on these early Sunday School experiences I can remember that my older sister Alta always played the organ and mother led the singing until Ivan returned from his mission and then he took over. Father was the Branch President and as I indicated earlier many of the church events took place at our home such as baptisms, celebrations and Relief Society.

When we first moved to California there was no organization of the church in the town of Orland. But we soon organized a branch Sunday School because there were several other families who moved to Orland with us. We held church in the Elks Lodge hall. On stake conference we drove 80 miles to the town of Goodly.

During the summer of 1921 we moved to Salt Lake City. This marked the beginning of a period when we were always able to attend all church meetings. We lived in the Wasatch Ward with Bishop Marvin O. Ashton who later became the presiding bishop of the Church. I was still a deacon because we had moved around so much. But I was soon ordained a priest. We spent 3-4 years in SLC and then moved back to Idaho to take care of the farms because those individuals to whom the farms had been sold were not meeting their payments.

In 1927 I went on a mission to California and Arizona. Then the first summer I was home from my mission, I was called as a member of the Sunday School presidency. Upon returning to Logan in the fall of 1930, I was released. I went to school in Logan until 1933. When we moved to Brigham City in 1933 I taught Sunday School at various age levels. Then in Tooele I was called again to the Sunday School presidency. As we moved back to SLC into the Edgehill Ward in April of 1936 I was made advisor to the teachers quorum and then a member of the Seven Presidents of Seventies and set apart as a Seventy. This was during the war years. We were called by the authorities of the church to start a special garden project. So we obtained the use of some land from the S. L. Country Club adjacent to the golf course that was not being used and got permission to use water from the Parley’s Creek that was owned by the prison. This worked out very well. We had seventy families involved in the victory garden. It was during this time that I got well acquainted with Elder Mark E. Petersen because he and I took all night turns in seeing that the victory garden was properly watered. During the three years that we carried forth this garden project, we canned from 25,000 – 36,000 cans of produce consisting of peas, beans, beets, com, carrots and when we divided this between the seventy families who participated in the project, these families each had their years supply of garden produce.

In February of 1944 we moved our family to the Bonneville Ward and I was made one of the Seven Presidents of Seventies in the Bonneville Stake and most of the time we were there I taught the Seventy’s class in priesthood meeting.
In November 1951 we moved to the Canyon Rim area. Before long I was called to be the Stake Sunday School Superintendent by Gordon B. Hinckley, who was in the Stake Presidency and I held this job for ten and a half years. It was the Sunday School’s job in those days to raise all the money for the budget. We put on stake carnivals to raise money and they were very successful. In those days we had a complete board of about twenty faculty members. We held monthly meetings with the ward people, giving them teaching aids, etc. Following this period of working with the Sunday School of the Stake, I was called as a member of the High Council and given the responsibility of supervising the stake ranch which consisted of 45 milk cows and about 400 acres of pasture and hay land.

Then in 1962 we moved into the Holladay Stake in the Holladay 1st Ward. I was called to head the committee to work with the Adult Aaronic members of the ward and the Project Temple. We had forty-two families in the ward where the father was an Aaronic Priesthood holder. We chose five or six families to concentrate on and we invited them to Temple seminars held in our home. Wilford Hinckson was the teacher of this class and we worked together hard to help develop testimonies in the minds and hearts of these couples. Over a four-year period, we were successful in bringing sixteen families into activity and to the temple. Today I still meet these people and they express their appreciation. I might say at this point that this was a family effort. My wife not only provided a lovely home and refreshments for the Sunday night meetings, but on many occasions one of the couples would call and say that they couldn’t come because they didn’t have a babysitter and so my wife or one of my daughters, Kristie or Linda Kay would go out and sit with the children. I feel strongly today that the perspective elders program would be much more effective if provision was made for those elders to meet in a home, not in a chapel on a regular weekly basis. These couples felt close as a unit and socialized with each other and helped each other.

At the end of a four-year period, I was again called to the High Council of the Holladay Stake. I served here until about 1972. During this time my main responsibility was with the seventies, which involved the stimulating of missionary activity. During the last five years since I was released from the High Council, I have served as the Executive Secretary to Bishop Bruce Andersen in the Holladay 24th Ward. (Insert summer 1990- While still the Executive Secretary, I was called to serve on a special 8 man committee to microfilm confidential records of the First Presidency. We covered records starting with Pres. John Taylor’s administration through those of Pres. David O. McKay’s administration. We were instructed by the First Presidency that the records were confidential and that God would hold us responsible if we were not true to this trust. When 1 was set apart by Pres. N. Eldon Tanner, he said, “I seal you up against the power of the Destroyer for so long as you are engaged in this project.” It took us two and a half years to complete this work. We filmed the records, developed the films; edited them to make sure they were legible, and as they were completed, they were stored in the Mountain Vault. This was tiring work, but I enjoyed every minute of it. I also served as a member of the General Church Farm Committee of the Church for fifteen years. During this time I was in constant contact with, first, the Presiding Bishopric, and later with the First Presidency – particularly Pres. N. Eldon Tanner whom I admired and loved greatly.

My family has always supported me in my callings in the church as well as with my involvement as the President of the Tolman Family Organization for 28 years. During this time, much in the way of genealogical materials was assembled and a Family Magazine was established and is still being printed from four to two times yearly with letters going out to about 1300 persons each time. During my Presidency it became necessary to find a special place to store our records. Land was purchased and with the Lord’s help we were given a lovely frame home that had to be moved from commercial property, and the owners gave this house to us just for moving it away. A foundation was built and the house moved on it and work was done by many family members until it was finished. On July 7, 1978 this building was dedicated by Elder S. Dilworth Young, a member of the First Quorum of Seventies, to the use of genealogical work for the family. Much good has come of this building, which is located in Bountiful. It is now used for both genealogical and Church extraction work. I have a great testimony of genealogical work and Temple work for the dead. And 1have tried to be engaged in this work for much of my life, especially after my retirement).

Now I would like to relate some of our family experiences. But first 1would like to go into some things that relate to these experiences and that might be of interest to my family. I would like to talk about my mother and father’s techniques in raising a family. I think I have already mentioned the fact that during the winter months when it got dark early, we went into the parlor and mother and father read to us out of books by Harold Bell Wright. These books were about cowboys; not cowboys like we see on T.V. – dirty, noisy, rough guys, but his books painted a glamorous kind of a fellow with clean clothes, new boots, big sombrero and jingling spurs.

Sometimes as we were reading, situations would arise which were not too favorable for an adult or child to participate in and mother and father would always pause and say that they were thankful that they never had to worry about their children getting into difficulties like that. They used this technique at the breakfast and dinner table also and very seldom did they talk to us individually about things that they didn’t want us to do, but they talked back and forth to each other and of course we sat there and listened.

For instance when a couple ran away and eloped, they talked about how disrespectful that was to the parents and how the parents ought to be the first ones to know about it and first to be invited. Then they would comment how glad they were that they didn’t have to worry about any of their children doing such a disrespectful thing. This built up a feeling in us that it was something that we wouldn’t do.

One other way that mother taught us indirectly was through Relief Society. Meetings were held in our home and following them there were always goodies to be had and so I’d come in from my chores and have refreshments and mother always found something good to say and she’d get her arm around me and say, “I never have to worry about Bion because I know that he’d never be caught doing something that would hurt someone else in anyway.” So what could I do? Mother had put me on record in front of nearly every woman in the ward, so as a result I had to try and live up to the picture she had given. I know that I didn’t always live up to that picture. In fact, I remember one morning as we were getting in the white top (a buggy pulled by a team) to go to church, dad noticed that I had purchased a cap gun and had it with me. Dad told me that I wouldn’t need the gun at church so to take it in the house. I got down and slammed the screen door and then hid the gun in my coat and went back out to the buggy. Of course I didn’t have it in my pocket for nothing, so I passed it around to various ones to look at during the sacrament and as it was handed back to me, someone had pulled back the hammer and I shot off the pistol accidentally right during the sacrament. Needless to say this was very embarrassing to me and to my parents and when I got home, my father got a long leather strap and really gave me a wailing. He made the point at the time that I was getting the licking for disobeying him and lying to him not just because the cap pistol went off during the sacrament. That was the hardest licking I ever remember receiving.

Father really believed in the scripture, “ask and ye shall receive, seek and ye shall find” and so if something was worth having, it was worth asking for. So he was quite liberal with us when we asked for things, but he never passed out things unless first we asked. I remember when I had my first date to go to Twin Falls to a dance. We needed to leave by 8 o’clock and so I’d asked Father earlier in the day if I could use the car. When I got in from doing my chores and got dressed up, I went into the parlor where dad was and stood there waiting for the keys because I knew that he knew it was time to leave. But he didn’t move from the newspaper for ten minutes while I stood around waiting and finally mother motioned me out to the kitchen and explained that I might as well learn now that I could stand there until midnight and father wouldn’t give me the keys to the car until I asked him for them. I didn’t understand because I had asked him for the car earlier and he had agreed and I knew that he knew I was ready to go. But I did as mother suggested and asked father for the keys to the car and he reached in his pocket and threw out the keys on the table, but made no move to give me the money I needed for the dance. So I stood around for another ten minutes figuring he would ask me why I hadn’t left yet, but he didn’t! So finally I said, “Well gosh, aren’t you going to give me any money for the dance?” So he leaned forward and pulled out his purse and threw it on the table and much to my surprise there was about $50 in the purse. But I picked it up and put it in my pocket and drove off. I learned that I was never questioned about how much I spent, but I realized that if I ever spent too much, I would get told about it. Each time as I took the car and went on a date, I went through the same procedure. So I always remembered that if something was worth having, it was worth asking for.

Father also taught in this manner that all that he had was mine as long as I was willing to use it wisely and so I was given the purse not just something taken out of the purse. Now I’m not saying that this is the best way to raise children, but we didn’t have allowances in those days and I didn’t go off the farm to work and so Dad knew that all the money I needed he had to supply. He told me that if I wanted to go to work for someone else fine, but that if I stayed and worked on the farm, I would have money for whatever I needed – date, school, etc. This philosophy also helped me understand that “he who does God’s work will get God’s pay,” because if I did the work my own father had for me to do, I would receive whatever I needed and likewise my Heavenly Father desires for me to have all that is His.

My father also put us on our own responsibility and made us make our own decisions. For example, one Sunday some young people had arranged for a few carloads of young people to go up into the lava beds north of Shoshone. Out in these lava beds you could go under a low edge and then go down a tunnel and 30-40 feet under the surface of the ground where the cave opened up into a large area. The sides, ceiling and floor were frozen ice and this ice stayed frozen even during the hottest summers. Well, my oldest sister Loa and I wanted to go and many other young people were going so I went in and explained to my father what we proposed to do and asked for the car. He reached in his pocket and gave me the
keys and then said, “Now son, you make up your mind. If you think it is more important to go with this group to the ice caves than it is for you and mother and I to go to Sacrament meeting this afternoon, then you go ahead. Well, naturally I left the keys and sadly went into the other room and Loa asked what was wrong. I told her if he had only said, “no” then we could have had a fight about it, but when I had to make up my own mind; there was only one answer. We were expected to act right and put on record to do so. As a result whenever something came up that there was some question about, we would think how mother and father would feel about it and unless we felt that they would feel proud about our decision, then we wouldn’t do it.
As father got older and used to come to our home to visit especially at General Conference time both fall and spring, he would sit and tears would come in his eyes and he would say, “Bion, I’m sorry for some of the hard whippings I gave you when you were a boy.” I had never resented the whippings though because I knew that I only received a spanking when I deserved it. So I told father to forget about it and not to worry about it again.

My folks did expect obedience however, and didn’t expect to have to tell us more than once what to do. I can remember that my bedroom was just off the kitchen and I could hear Dad put his shoes on in the kitchen as they’d clomp down on the floor and in a minute he would open my door a crack and say, “time to get up son.” I knew that I had about five minutes to get up and dressed and out to the bam because he would have fed the cows that were ready to be milked. Sometimes when I had stayed up late the night before and wanted an extra hour’s sleep, I’d say to myself: he didn’t call me very loudly and then I’d lay there for a minute, but never did I dare stay in bed longer than a minute because I knew what was expected. Dad would have the hay in the manger and the cows in the stall and we would milk the cows together.

One thing that I appreciated was that if I was given a particularly hard job, father saw to it that I didn’t do it alone. Father would say, “Come on son, let’s go cut bull thistles in the pasture” and we might spend half a day at it. When he shared the disagreeable jobs, they didn’t seem so hard & I never had any resentment for such jobs. I had the feeling that my father was always just. Ordinarily if I was swearing I would get a switching, but I remember red clover cutting time when the clovers had to be cut early in the morning when there was still dew on the ground. We would start mowing down the red clover seed when the dew was still on so the seed wouldn’t scatter. The red clover seed had been in long enough that there were patches where the blue grass had grown up pretty high, and generally when you hit those spots the sickle knife that was cutting the grass in the cutter bar on the mower would start to chatter a little bit and then the horses would slow down and stop. Well, one morning the blue grass had been especially bad and I’d have to stop and get off every few minutes to clear the cutter bar because the knife wasn’t as sharp as it should be. I finally got so exasperated that I let out a long list of swear words not knowing that father was right behind me and when I paused, father asked me what was the matter and I explained how sick and tired I was of getting off to clean the bar. So father suggested that we take time right now to go up and sharpen the knife and then buy another one so we could change the knife every morning before starting out and that would eliminate much of the trouble. Now father appreciated the fact that I was really tried over what was happening. He didn’t condone the swearing
and I knew that he didn’t like it, but he also knew how upset I was and so this time he didn’t light into me about the swearing.

Now it might be interesting to hear about some of the old cars that I remember. Father bought our first automobile in 1914. It was an EMF and I never did find out exactly what EMF stood for other than what Dad said it stood for, “Every Morning Fixit.” It was a cross between a buggy and the automobile of today. It had a top that could be pulled up and then fastened with straps. It had a propane gas tank on the running board with tubes to each headlight and you had to open up the lens on each headlight and lite them with a match. The tires were very poor and they had to be replaced every 4,000 miles. I can remember that after having this automobile for about one year, Dad traded it in for a Studebaker. I think you would find it interesting to know how and where we got gasoline in those days. In as much as it was a small town there were no service stations established. But the old mercantile store had a platform in back with gasoline in fifty pound barrels. We would set the barrel up on the platform and with a spigot in the end of the barrel; they would run gas into a five-gallon can and then pour that into the gas tank using a large funnel and a felt hat. The hat was to filter impurities out of the gas.

After we’d had the Studebaker for about two years Dad went to Twin Falls one day and came back with a seven-passenger Cadillac. People were really curious about this and it caused a lot of excitement because it was generally agreed that he had bought one of the best cars available in the United States at that time and it was unusual to see one long enough so that the jump seat would pull up between the back seat and the front seat which made it actually a seven passenger automobile. It was this car that we made our trips back and forth to California in. Now we went to California on the Lincoln Highway and it is possible in certain parts of Nevada to find an old sign even today saying Lincoln Highway. But the highway was not much of a highway. It was two ruts in the road and you could only travel 25 – 30 miles an hour because of the deep dust. By the time we got to the Sierra Nevada’s there was a good road over the mountains that was being maintained by individuals who then put a tollgate across the road and you had to pay $5 to go through to the next toll gate. We would have to go through 8 or 9 such gates before we got over the Sierra Nevada’s.

It might be interesting to just name some of the cars that were common: 1916- 1920’s – EMF, Biscoe, Maxwell, Stanley Steamer, Saxton, Overland Stoddard Daton, Model T Ford, Model A Ford, Essex, Hudson, Star and Mormon (one of the biggest cars being built at that time). Now I would like to move to some of my family experiences and family life with my own daughters. As I have already mentioned in June 1931 I married Lucille and Janice was born just a year later on July 1, 1932. (Insert summer, 1990 – Janice was a very pleasant baby while in school, but not as easy a teenager. As an adult, she developed a good sense of responsibility and has always been willing to do whatever I ask her to do. She used to go with a group of us once a month to the temple. She has been so faithful to visit me in the nursing home everyday and I look forward to her visits). Then LuRee was born April 7, 1934 (Insert summer, 1990 – LuRee was so little when she was born that she had a bed in a shoe box and electric light over her bed to furnish heat. She worked hard at schoolwork. She also had trials as a mother with the illnesses of her Steven and Ruth and has sensitivity to other people’s problems and suffering because of it. She tried hard to take good care of me after my broken shoulder while I lived in her home). Then Carol Ann was born on May 27,1936. Carol Ann was very ill as a young child, but I am not going to go into that since Lucille has covered that in her history. These three oldest girls were all born in Logan even though we were living in SLC when Carol Ann was born. (Insert summer 1990 – Carol Ann had great obstacles as a child due to her rheumatic fever. She met LeBaron while still a teenager and made a good choice in choosing such a fine husband. She also served a wonderful stake mission.

As an adult she has suffered with bad health all her life, but has always done anything she was physically capable of doing for others. She has a fine mind and a sensitive heart. Sally Dee was born in Salt Lake City on September 14, 1941. (Insert, summer 1990 – She started out a little homely but developed into a very beautiful young lady. She walked very early. As a teenager, she could make friends faster than anyone I’ve ever met. She was my “yak, yak” daughter, which made her fun for people to be around. She has supported her husband well as a bishop these past several years). After Sally came Linda Kay born Dec. 9, 1944. Spencer W. Kimball stood in the circle the day she was blessed. He had been called as an apostle and had moved from Arizona to S.L.C. and lived in our ward for a while. (Insert, summer 1990 – She was a good natured baby and beautiful with her curly hair. She was always a good student and hard worker and she was doing service projects with her Pat Boone fan club a lot for many different charities. As an adult, she lived away from home in Texas and Hawaii and we enjoy her family’s visits when they come. She likes to do genealogy and has helped with this history. She has taught the scriptures well to her children). Closely following Linda’s birth was Kristie who arrived on Feb. 14, 1946. (Insert, summer 1990 – She was without much hair as a baby and scared us at her birth. She was a good student and interested in history and went to France in college. She got a masters degree before getting married. She is a good teacher and supports her boys well in their activities in sports and in school). We had six girls and no boys until the girls began getting married and we acquired son-in-laws and grandsons. At the present time we have six daughters and their husbands who were all married in the temple and a total of 25 grandchildren. (Eventually there were 29 grandchildren and as of the summer of 2003 there are 120 descendants of Bion Tolman counting children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great great grandchildren and their spouses).

During the time since we have been married up to the present time, Lucille and I lived with the folks one summer in Murtaugh, we lived in two different apartments in Logan, a small home in Brigham City and then an apartment in the Horace Mann home. When we moved to SLC, we lived first on Kensington Ave. and then we got transferred to Tooele where we lived in a stucco Spanish-type home. The most frustrating thing about these different homes was that they needed landscaping and I would just get one landscaped and then we would need to move. In the spring of 1936 we moved to Salt Lake City again and lived at 1620 So. 14th East and then to Wasatch Circle where we enjoyed a nice circle for our small children to play in. In 1951 we moved to Kenton Drive where we had a large yard and I began my iris-breeding program. We lived there until 1963 when we bought a lot in Holladay. We built the first home on the Briarwood Estates subdivision and that subdivision is now completely filled and we have been able to see the houses as they were built and meet all our good neighbors as they have moved in.

It was during the time that we lived in our home on Kenton Drive and our present home on Carol Jane Drive that our daughters got married. I am happy to report that all our sons-in-law and grandchildren are faithful to the church and we love our son-in-law Jim’s half-sisters, Susie and Leeann just like they were our own granddaughters. We took some interesting trips with our family. The girls, especially the young ones loved to go to St. George when I went there on company business. They loved to climb the red rocks and so each day either in the morning or in the evening I would go climbing on the rocks with the girls. On one of our vacation tours we started at the Hoover **** at Lake Mead and then went to Zions Canyon, then to the Grand Canyon and then to Bryce Canyon. I think we had the three oldest girls with us then. Later we took the other three girls to Zions and Bryce.

One of the most enjoyable trips was our trip to Alberta Canada. We had the 4 younger girls still at home and they went with us. We went to Lethbridge where I had a sugar beet meeting and then we visited Lake Louise, Banff, and Waterton and came back through Glacier National Park. This was a wonderful trip that was truly memorable.

Then as many as were left home went to Disneyland and adjacent areas. I always thought that one of the outstanding things about all our trips was that we sang almost continuously the whole way. Sometimes I sang to the kids the old phonograph record songs that I had learned as a boy. Other times we sang songs from musicals or church hymns. One of the games we played in the car was to see who could find words on signs for each letter of the alphabet. Many hours were spent searching road signs for “Q’s” or “Z’s.”

Before completing this history I would like to innumerate the sicknesses and illnesses that I have had. As a youngster I had mumps, chicken pox, measles, whooping cough, influenza (the severe kind that killed many in 1918). I can remember that we were living in our new brick home and when I came down with the influenza, they set up a bed in one comer of the basement and kept me away from everyone else. Quilts were hung on wires so that I was isolated from the rest of the family and so I only saw mother for about a three-week period.

Beginning clear back in grade school I remember having problems with abdominal pain. The doctor would give me some kind of pills and tell my parents that I would outgrow it. Well, that proved to be wrong because the older I got the worse the pain became and I started having stomach hemorrhages. Finally in about 1947 I had to have a stomach operation and the doctor stated at the time that so much scar tissue had built up around the outlet to the stomach where the ulcers occurred that there was only a hole as large as a knitting needle to get from my stomach to the large intestine. I was very sick after the operation, but within a few years I could eat everything I wanted without much difficulty. (Insert, summer, 1990 – In my early sixties Dr. Greene found that I had Parkinson disease. I was very lucky that it was kept under control quite well by medication for over fifteen years. However, as I got older my equilibrium was not as good and I had a couple of falls, one of which was off Willie and Wendy Wimmer’s back porch, which resulted in a broken shoulder. That started a series of problems for me. While recuperating at LuRee’s I had a blockage and the doctors took out part of my bowel that had
kinked. Then pneumonia set in and I was between life and death and I lost about 60 lbs. in about 10 weeks. I tried to stand up and broke my hip and went back to L.D.S. hospital. I spent time at Western Rehabilitation where I got worse. Then I went to Woodland Care Center for about two and a half months and finally Highland Care Center where I live presently).

In closing I want to bear my testimony that I know that God lives and that we are his spirit children and as we come into this world and are baptized we become the adopted sons and daughters of Jesus Christ. Through our righteous living we become joint heirs with him and can gain all that the Father has. I would encourage everyone to heed the oath and covenant of the Priesthood as listed in section 84 of the D. & C. wherein we are unmistakably told that through obedience to our callings in or through the priesthood we can grow in perfection toward godhood until the time comes that we are full partners with our Father in Heaven, equal to him in knowledge and understanding and mercy and justice and all of the characteristics which God possesses in their fullness.

Note: The bulk of this history was tape recorded December 1976 while on a trip to Hawaii to visit my family. I then transcribed it, which took me four months about 15 to 20 minutes a day. Dad then made some corrections to it, but wasn’t completely happy with it and kept it in a drawer for many years. During the summer of 1990 when I went to visit him at the Highland Care Center, I took the copy that he had edited and asked Dad some questions and he inserted several things into his history that afternoon. He also wrote a much shorter history for the Tolman Family Magazine in 1983. One area of Dad’s life that has been left out of this history is his beautiful gardens. He hybridized iris and day lilies and had several flowers named by the American Iris Society including one called, “Lucille Tolman” and another called” Fiesta Days”. For many years in June he would take his prize iris to the Utah State Capital for the iris shows and often come home with either the “Best of the Show” or the “Sweepstakes Award”. People came from all over the valley to walk through Dad’s garden in June including President and Sister Kimball on more than one occasion. When Mom died in 1983, Dad told me that now he wouldn’t have to work so hard on that one side of the garden. I asked him what he meant and he said that he always tried to make the most beautiful part of the garden the spot Mother could see from her chair in the family room. I am not sure Mom ever knew that he was doing that for her, but it brought tears to my eyes. For their 50th wedding anniversary Mom wrote a poem about Dad called “Man of the Soil” which can be read in her history.

Dad died on March 19,1991 the spring after he had added the inserts to this history. His daughters will remember him as the man in the garden bent over a flower delicately moving pollen from one flower to the other or the scriptorian with a church book in his hand, marking passages as he read and studied the doctrine of the restored gospel. His church library was one of the largest in the valley and Bookcraft Publishers offered to buy it from him, but he wanted the books to stay in the family. All six girls have books in their homes with his notations and markers and pages turned down and we have our memories of a father who served the Lord with all his heart. (Linda Kay Tolman Smith, April 16, 2003).

Visit FamilySearch to learn more about Bion Tolman. Visit the Thomas Tolman Family Organization to find out how you can get more involved in family history.