I don’t remember very much about third grade except that I had a teacher I really liked. Her name was Mrs. Ellsworth. She taught third and fourth grade. She was a good teacher and I enjoyed her class a lot. I think it was Mrs. Ellsworth who introduced us to SRA reading books. They were small books that varied in reading difficulty and vocabulary. They were in a big box and they were color coded. In our spare time we could check them out and read them and then take a test. As we progressed, the books got more difficult but it was a challenge we liked. Since I was a pretty good reader, I moved right through them.

As I may have mentioned earlier, each class room in Heber had two grades, usually with one grade on one side of the room and the other on the other side. The teacher would teach one subject to one grade and then move over and teach a subject to the other grade. During the day we usually got taught spelling, reading, arithmetic, history or geography, science and then there were some subjects that were not taught every day like music and art.

We had recess twice a day, one midway through the morning and one midway through the afternoon. School ran from 9am to 4PM as I recall. We had an hour for lunch and most kids who lived in town went home for lunch.

When I got to fourth grade, Mrs. Ellsworth was still my teacher. Sometimes she would let me help out with the third grade by giving them their spelling words or helping some of them with arithmetic or reading. One day Mom came to school and found me helping out with the third graders and she didn’t think that was a good idea. In the first place, I wasn’t trained to be a teacher. I certainly wasn’t being paid a teachers wage and, most of all, I wasn’t spending my time improving my own mind. She decided something needed to change.

She went and had a visit with Mr. Capps and the next thing I knew, I was moved out of fourth grade and into the fifth grade. Boy, was that a shock!! I went from being Mr. Know-it-all to Mr. Know-nothing. The reading was OK, but in arithmetic they were doing multiplication and division and I hadn’t even heard of the multiplication tables. I was completely lost and a little scared. To add to my fear, the teacher in fifth grade was the notorious Mrs. Bankhead. Everyone knew that she was mean!!! She threw hot water on trick-or-treaters, she had dead bodies in her basement, she concocted strange potions and everyone knew she ate dumb little kids who didn’t do well in her class. I was terrified and with good cause. I don’t think she was very happy to have some “smart kid” moved up a grade into her class and I think she set out to prove it shouldn’t be done. What she hadn’t figured on was my Mom. (See Fifth grade)

I don’t think I was much different than most kids growing up in Heber at the same time I did. Most of us didn’t have much money and most of our parents didn’t have much money. That didn’t seem to be very important to us at the time.

As a small child I did like most kids and asked my parents for money when I wanted or needed to buy something. Like most parents they said yes sometimes and no sometimes. We as children knew that there wasn’t much extra money. I guess we saw Mom and Dad paying the bills each month and heard them discussing family finances. We grew up knowing that they didn’t have enough money to satisfy all the “wants” of four boys, but that if something was really “needed,” they would do everything they could to meet that need if it was essential. I think Dad earned about $10,000 per year when I was in high school.

Mom and Dad paid me an allowance for doing jobs around the house. It wasn’t a lot but I didn’t need a lot. I was expected to pay tithing, save a little and the rest I could spend as I saw fit. Usually, when I was small, it went for candy or something from Sprouse-Ritz in Holbrook where we could shop for toys.

Another way we had of supplementing our allowance was to collect pop bottles and turn them in for the deposit money. We also sometimes worked for money (usually a dollar) doing some special job for Mom. I think she found some more of those special jobs when Christmas was approaching so that we had a few dollars to buy gifts for others in the family.

When I was small, we drew names for Christmas and then bought a nice gift only for the person whose name we had drawn. That way everyone got at least one nice gift for Christmas but it didn’t take lots of money because we were only buying one gift. If we bought presents for others in the family they were, of necessity, very inexpensive.

When I was eleven or twelve years old I started helping Terry at the store and from then on, I earned money of my own. Mom and Dad still helped out with big expenses and they paid school expenses like lunches and supplies. I pretty well took care of other expenses when I was in High School.

I worked in the summer at the store and earned enough to buy school clothes and other school supplies. I also worked during the school year after school and on weekends and that kept me in a little cash for incidentals. I think I started at fifty cents an hour and when I was in college I was working for $2.75 an hour.

When I went to college, Mom and Dad worked out a deal with my grandmother who lived in Mesa. I lived with her and they paid her $20 per month for my food. In return, I took care of her yard and helped her with other chores. I had a scholarship that paid tuition and books and I usually had about a hundred dollars left over which got me most of the way through the semester. I was usually able to work a few weekends or during vacations at the Heber Store which allowed me to earn a few dollars for expenses.

I learned young in life that it was OK to wait until I had the money to pay for something I really wanted. I learned to save up money until I had enough money to buy whatever the item was. I found out that the waiting didn’t kill me and made the eventual getting of whatever it was that much more exciting. I also learned to go without a lot of things others had and I don’t think it hurt me much. My Mom and Dad, but especially my Mom, hated to be in debt to anyone. I guess I inherited my dislike for debt from them.

 

Firecrackers can get you into trouble. I know from experience. Maybe others can learn a lesson from my experience and not repeat my mistakes.

When I became twelve years old, I moved into the Aaronic Priesthood and Scouts. One of the activities we did as scouts was to raise money for a “Super Activity” each summer. Before I got there the scouts had taken trips to Yellowstone Park and Disney Land during the summer. When I got there, the activity that was planned was a trip to Mexico to go deep sea fishing. I don’t remember all the things we did to raise money but one of them was to collect scrap iron and sell it.

Uncle Donnie Porter offered to provide a lumber truck to haul the scrap iron to Phoenix if we would collect it and load it. The different scout patrols competed to see who could collect the most scrap iron. My patrol went all over town and identified scrap iron of various forms. Some of it was old plows or old car parts. For several weeks we collected scrap iron around Heber using our tractor and wagon and hauled it down to the sawmill and piled it in a stack. When the big day came, all of the scouts met and started throwing the scrap iron on the trailer. We ended up with almost a full trailer load. I think we made was over $600 when it was sold. That was the money to pay for our trip to Mexico.

Our final destination was Guaymas, Mexico on the west coast. We traveled down through  Nogales and Hermosillo, to Guaymas. We had reservations at a nice hotel and each day for two or three days I think, we went out fishing. The fishing turned out to be rather boring and we didn’t catch much, but besides having fish, Mexico also had FIRECRACKERS!!!!

Firecrackers were illegal in Arizona but not in Mexico at that time so we spent a good deal of our spending money on firecrackers. Some of the favorites were cherry bombs and bottle rockets but we also bought the packs that had 50-100 small firecrackers all wound together. If you wanted to, you could light the whole pack and it would pop and pop or you could unwind the firecrackers and pop them individually. That’s what most of us did.

After the two or three days in Mexico, we headed home. When we got to Nogales, Mexico, we stopped for some last minute shopping. A good deal of that shopping was to replenish our firecracker supply and to buy other “tourist trash.” As we approached the border crossing we noticed a sign that said, “Deposit all fireworks in this can!” We didn’t want to do that!

I don’t remember just who (but it could have been me) came up with the bright idea of throwing the firecrackers over the border fence, walking through the checkpoint and then recovering the firecrackers when we got on the other side. That is what we decided to do. We all tossed our firecrackers over the fence and walked back to the checkpoint. We walked through and headed up the fence to recover our fireworks but they weren’t there. About that time one of the men from U.S. Customs pulled up and asked us what we were looking for. He suggested that we accompany him back to the checkpoint. When we got there, the officers took each one of us into small rooms for interrogation. The officer who questioned me asked me who I was and where I was from. Then he asked me what I had been doing in Mexico. He asked me if I had tried to smuggle fireworks into the United States. He asked me if I knew it was illegal to have firecrackers in Arizona. Then he asked me the questions that stopped me in my tracks. He asked “Aren’t you a Mormon?” When I admitted that I was, he asked “Do you know the 12^th Article of Faith?” When he asked that I knew he was probably a member of the church and I felt pretty ashamed of myself and our whole group because I did know the 12^th Article of Faith. I had memorized it and I also knew what it meant. He gave me a little talk on obeying, honoring and sustaining the law and let me go.

We went home to Heber empty handed as far as firecrackers were concerned, but better off for the lesson we had learned. Smuggling firecrackers is not consistent with obeying, honoring and sustaining the law. I have never forgotten that experience and I hope I have done a better job of living up to what we say we believe in the 12^th Article of Faith.

My childhood required tremendous strength, endurance, perseverance and just plain old hard work that many of today’s children miss out on by growing up twenty to thirty years later. Sometimes I feel like a failure as a parent because my children never experienced some of the hard work I experienced. I will try to share some of those experiences with you.

Although some of my children have experienced what it is like to carry a single piece of wood from the wood pile to the backdoor, none have experienced the challenge of keeping a large stack of wood on the porch at all hours of the day and night to keep the family warm during those cold winter nights in Heber. It was my job for many years to help Dad cut the wood, haul it from the woods to our house and then pile it in the woodshed. I was responsible to split the wood and carry it arm load by arm load from the woodshed to the front porch, through the deep snow. I did not carry a single piece. I had to carry huge arm loads teetering above me as I staggered from the woodshed to the front porch. It took a stack of wood about 4ft X 4ft. X 2ft to keep the fire going through a single day. It was my job to replenish that wood pile on the porch each and every evening regardless of whether a blizzard was blowing or whether polar bears were roaming the town looking for a small person to eat or not. It often took many trips to accomplish my task.

In addition, I had the responsibility to milk the cow at least once each day. That involved getting the cold bucket and walking through the deep snow to the barn, providing feed for the cow and then sitting down in sub-zero weather to extract the stubborn milk from the cow’s udder. First, I had to wash off the teats with water. Then I had to chip the ice off the teats so that I could milk the cow. Each stream of warm milk put off sweet smelling steam as the milk landed in the bucket. By the time I had completed milking, my fingers and toes and nose and ears were all nearly frostbitten but never mind, I staggered back to the house through the snow carrying the precious milk for the sustenance of the family.

If I did the milking in the morning, I hardly had time to thaw out my extremities when I had to fight my way through the snow drifts to school, going uphill all the way. It is a miracle that I survived the ordeal, but I managed to get to school every morning on time and in good spirits to face the day. (I may have had a slight aroma of fresh milk or of cow manure, but I was not the only one.) Then at noon, it was home again through the snow to eat a morsel of lunch then back through the shoulder deep show to school for another exciting afternoon of instruction.

Sometimes it was also my job to deliver milk to other families who didn’t have milk cows. Then I would have to fight my way uphill through the drifts to their doors to deliver the milk to their starving children. Never fear, I was “Johnny on the spot” each and every morning. Neither snow nor sleet nor dark of night or early morning kept me from my assigned deliveries.

I hope as today’s children read this, they will hanker for the opportunity to experience some of the things I experienced when I was growing up. Obviously these activities were character building and I turned out none the worse for wear but it sure got tiresome walking through the snow, “uphill both ways!”