In My Garden - Portraits Of Christmas

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I don't remember how old I was, but I was little, probably about six. We were going to Aunt Lindy's and great-grandmother Hansen's for Christmas Eve dinner. I was so excited I waited all day for it to be dark enough to leave. Twice Mama had to re-curl my hair because I kept going out in the wet snow to see if it was time yet. My brother, Arvel, was so new and small and I had to sit and hold him while Grandma and Mama got Mark ready and Grandpa did the chores. I'm sure Mama had me hold him just to keep me sitting awhile. I was a child who seldom sat still.

But finally, it was time and we trudged through the white wonderland of soft, falling snow toward Aunt Lindy's lights that glimmered about a block away. I say we trudged, but really I danced my way there. Supper at the big table seemed to take forever. Though ever so good was the food. I never saw it for my eyes were fastened on the closed double doors that led into the parlor. At last! We children were lined up, my brothers, my cousins, and I. The doors swung open and I stood in transfixed awe as I gazed at the huge tree on which glimmered dozens of lighted candles. It was the most glorious, breathtaking sight in the world. Forever it would shine in my memory. Not age, nor time, will ever extinguish one candle on that tree. The gifts we were given would go, but not the utter happiness of that moment.

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Another year, the air was so crisp and cold. The trees snapped and cracked and the snow crunched loudly under my feet and the runners of my sled. The sunshine was so bright and the sky so blue. My breath came in clouds of vapor as I "short-cut'd" through the freight yards and down the tracks to Grandmother's house. The sled was piled high with Christmas wrapped packages. I don't know why I was alone that morning. My brother, Mark, usually tagged my footsteps, but I likely took off while everyone else was tumbling through the wrappings of Christmas morning. I could have waited, for Mama and Daddy could have been driving over to Grandma's soon. But I couldn't quiet my inner singing enough to wait. I paused there on the tracks and decided to paint the day and to record the sounds in my mind so I wouldn't forget how wonderful it was to be fifteen and one half and so alive and free. I haven't forgotten.

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After that, I often tried consciously to record moments into my memory. So another Christmas comes to mind. But this was not bright and cold. Rather, it was blue and gray as only a winter's day in Florida can be. The sky was overcast as befitted a wartime Christmas, when so much sorrow was about. I left the barracks and wandered down to the old abandoned fishing pier. One had to watch their step on the broken planks because there wasn't time, nor money, to repair an old fishing wharf when all the fishing boats were tied up and waiting while their crews were in the uniforms of war. I felt my way out to the very end of the wharf. Somewhere out in the Atlantic a storm waged, for the whitecaps washed up through the cracks and soaked my sensible Coast Guard oxfords. The water was so beautiful as I looked down at it and I wanted to remember forever the complete peace of that moment. A lone sea bird circled me curiously. Far out on the horizon, a plume of smoke told me a tanker was likely making its way to the New Jersey refineries. And I said a silent prayer for the crew's safety as they made their way past the German submarine barricade that lay in sight of this very shore. I wondered if our Coast Guard station would be called out that day to rescue such a crew. But even such a gloomy thought could not take from me the beauty of the moment. Alone out there, with the sky and sea, I knew about the Christ child and His realness and that peace would come.

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Then, once before Dad came to us, and Patty and Mike were so small, I prepared for Christmas alone in the small apartment. I placed a little tree on the small table and decorated it gaily with bubble lights and shining ornaments. But alas! The tree was so dry and by the morning of Christmas Eve, almost not a needle remained on the barren branches. Four-year old Michael cried as he sifted the fallen needles through his small hands. I felt very discouraged and alone. Even the tree mocked me.

But that night, after I tucked the two into bed, I asked the two old brothers who lived next door to watch for me and I ran down the three blocks to a tree lot I remembered seeing earlier. The proprietor was just closing up but told me to take whatever tree I wanted and he waited while I found a small, sweet tree, then waived aside my offer of payment.

I half-dragged, half-carried the small tree up to my third floor apartment. Then I took all the lights and ornaments off the dead skeleton of a tree, and breaking it into bits, I dropped it down the garbage chute. After setting up the new tree, I decorated it and again knew the loveliness of Christmas. In the morning, Michael caroled with happiness because "Santa put the needles back on the tree". And three-year old Patty buried her face in the fragrant green branches and the fallen ornaments mattered not at all as she balanced herself on a chair and reached to hug the green branches of Christmas.

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The gifts of the Magi came unexpectedly. How was I to know that one of my very best Christmases was being born on that July day when a picnic opened the door to a shared companionship. So, when Christmas was come again, we were a complete family. It was "Dad" who set up the tree with Michael's help and lifted redheaded Patty up to place the star in its slightly crooked but rightful place.

On the morning of Christmas, surrounded by paper and boxes and silver tracks, Michael sang over and over, "I got me a dad and a train."

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When we bought the new home, it would have been nice to have spent the next Christmas there, but Indiana is a long way away and Christmas is for love and Grandma Kline had never seen this new group of grandchildren that now included baby Evan. Nevertheless, I was apprehensive as I loaded the car with goodies and gifts and children and a playpen. The day, as we started out, was so bright and warm for December. We sang Christmas carols as we crossed America, across Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, and finally, Indiana. Now my throat was too dry to sing. I wondered how this new family of Owen's would be welcomed. As we came into Linton, a soft snow started to fall. By the time we came to the old home, dusk had fallen and the lighted door opened as we pulled up. Arms eagerly reached out to draw us in and hold us close. Later, as Uncle Lloyd caressed Patty's redhead and Michael sat entranced in front of the big coal- burning parlor stove and Grandma rocked baby Evan, crooning a prayer of thankfulness for these new grandchildren, I thought, "Maybe this is the best Christmas of all."

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Okinawa: Christmas is strange in a land without snow and where the poinsettias grow taller than you on the hillside. The Christmas carols played on the base sounded familiar, but out in the villages they were a different, tinkly, oriental sound. A Christmas tree that was brought half-way round the world in the hold of a ship, stood in the living room. The maids "Oh'ed" and "Aw'ed" and brought their sisters' children to "Oh" and "Aw"! The local teenagers that I taught English to in the Koza Junior High were quizzing me about our ways of celebrating. They were dear to me and I wanted to share, but how? In my two classes there were over a hundred students, and though, by their standards, we were rich, our pay didn't stretch that far. But an idea came to mind and I called the Chaplain's Office. Public Relations! Good! A bus and a driver for a day? Fine! A picture of Santa Claus; a sew girl; and a friend with a pillow. Dozens of cookies; gallons of hot chocolate; pens tied with red ribbon; and sacks of candy. A foggy gray day, but bright with laughter and singing. Somehow the 104 students had swelled to 120 and a half dozen teachers. Divided into three groups, the busses rolled up to our front door. The house reverberated to the sound of singing and Santa Claus' "HO! HO! HO!" and toilets flushing (most of the students had never seen such a "benjo" before and they stood in line to take turns flushing, watching the cascading water with glee). Surely, this was the best Christmas of all, and our own family never regretted our short rations that season.

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Seasons of Christmas may come and go. Some to remain forever with me, others to become a part of the fabric of my life. But year after year, for a time that now seems so long ago, there was a pattern. On Christmas Eve, "The Littlest Angel" made his appearance and "the bells", one for each, were hung on the branches of a tree that always looked the same, though the "artwork" was added upon each year. Sleep came hard and ended early. But rules are rules and it was understood that each would be dressed and the line-up on the stairs would be from youngest to oldest child. Robyn (younger than Jon by one moment); Jon David; Evan; Patricia; and last, but not least, was Michael.

"Hurry, Daddy! Light the tree!" Then the parade up the stairs, into the living room, and laughter, free and happy. The handing out of gifts; the scrambling over which chair or corner was to be whose to store the loot. (One Christmas, Michael startled the whole neighborhood by putting the new record player out-of-doors on the front porch playing Christmas Carols at full volume). Breakfast was always "ebleskieve" and hot apricot nectar.

But years pass so quickly and the Christmas line-up diminishes: Mike on a mission, Pat gone, Evan in the Navy, Jon on a mission and Robyn giving Christmas instead of receiving it. The old pattern breaks, but new ones form and the joy of Christmas comes from the sound of granddaughters' voices on the phone and knowing that new memories are being formed wherever in the world this family gathers.

As Tiny Tim said, "God bless us all".

In My Garden - Journal Addendum

The final 2 years of my high school were spent in Oregon. I graduated from Nyssa Union High.

I went to college at Boise (Idaho) Junior College and later at Eastern Oregon College of Education at LaGrande, Ore. But I didn't want to be a teacher, so I just substituted and went looking for other things.

During my teen years, Europe was falling apart under Hitler and young people of my generation were very afraid of our future.

I believe I was quite a popular person in my teens and at school. I seemed to have more than my share of

1938 Zelda the Pinup Girl

boyfriends. In LaGrande I fell in love with a Marine Reserve Flyer. When he was called to active duty to go to Guam in the summer of 1941, I went to Washington, D. C. as a "Government Girl". When Willie was killed in the early battles of the Pacific I went looking for a way to fill my days. Finally, I joined the ranks of the Coast Guard Spars. I loved the military life and fit right in.

VE Day came, my mom got sick and I received a humanitarian transfer to Detroit, Michigan, where my folks were living in Mt. Clemens. I was released from service after VJ Day but I felt very lost.

I lived very close to Selfridge Air Force Base at Mt. Clemens and there met a GI whom I married. It was a big mistake. I had a little boy. Five months before my daughter was born, I left my husband. (Laverna always said that he had been caught by the Military Police with allotments going to three wives.) I went to work at the air base and later transferred to Hill AFB, Utah because my parents had moved there with their family.

My middle years were very happy. I met a fellow from Indiana. We were married and have had a sometimes hectic life while he was in the Air Force. We moved many times before he retired, but it was a stable marriage and home life. I was placed on medical retirement from my civil service job when I was 47, but it was a blessing. Owen, after 20 years of the military had gone back to working for the Air Force as a civilian.

1947 Owen Arthur Kline

So it was "mom" who took the kids fishing and camping. We were a close family and had a great time. Money was, and still is, a problem, but we always cope. We have lived in a small house and we make do.

I had a lot of friends and outside contacts. I belonged to a garden club for years. I am still a member of the Utah Associated Garden Clubs. The members of my chapter have gotten old and many have passed away. The chapter is no longer active, but us "youngsters" still try to get together for lunch.

My husband is my very best friend. We play cards, take little trips and really enjoy our ten grandchildren. We are still very close to our five children and their children and I believe they would help either one of us cope, if necessary. God forbid.

I am blessed with a living family of brothers and sisters. My three sisters and I are really friends. We try to get together every week. My youngest sister, Margret, is 19 years younger than I, but probably my best friend.

I have a friend of 35 years who, though she does not live here anymore, is never far away in spirit. Ivene and I both treasure this special relationship. I have supported her through much trial and tribulation and I know she would do the same for me.

My four brothers are special, though I do not see them so often.

I am active in church. Many of the people of my "block" have lived here as long or longer than we have and I could call on most of them for aid or assistance.

Recently, an auto accident has severely limited my activities but I surely haven't given up. I still do handiwork and write my "poetry". I do most of my housework now, again, and we will camp again this summer.

Mostly, I love life and believe that I am extremely blessed.

In My Garden - The Child Who Never Was And The One Who Came to Take It's Place

My mother held in her arms two children who were recalled before their lives barely began. Esther Jeanette, who at nine months, left. Then Raymond Jay, who's days only spanned twenty-one.

But her greatest grief was for a child who never was. That grief was never far from her, even a half-century later.

My brother Bobby's birth in 1934 had been traumatic and extremely difficult, the only one of mom's children born in a hospital. Now in 1938, she found herself pregnant again. "Oh No" she cried, I can't face another baby right now. In addition to dad's uncertainty about employment, Bobby's short four years had been filled with one crisis after another. A pugnaciouns, bright, beautiful child, he left you laughing uproariously with him one moment and the next crying with frustration. His birth was overdue and the umbilical cord had almost strangled him. For several months after his birth he was often ill. One night when he was a few months old the nipple cam off his bottle and he lay choking. Mom grabbed him by the feet and ran next door. Swinging in the wind, he coughed and began to breathe again. Later, in San Jose, where we were moving into a rented house, he found a bottle under the sink and drank from it. It was household ammonia and he had another trip to an unknown doctor. We never finished our move into that house but returned to Preston. On our way Dad stopped in Ogden and secured a job with a new sugar factory being built in Nyssa, Oregon. Since coming to Oregon, other near misses had happened to our Bobby. Once, while putting doll clothes through an electric clothes wringer, he all but tore his arm off when his hand went through the wringer along with the clothes. Now Mom felt it was all she could do to get this son grown up.

1940 Robert Lee Jones

But she was to have another child. The "box" came out again and was covered and she reconciled herself to that fact. She was ill from the beginning and frightened that she might die and leave her other children behind. This child was not to be though. In the middle of one hot summer night, she miscarried. A "tubal pregnancy", the doctor said. She, however, always felt that she was responsible because in the beginning she had been reluctant to bear another child. She spent hours on her knees begging the Lord to forgive her. She went to Luther Fife, our stake president, and asked for a special blessing. She asked that the child be sent back to her so that she could make up for her earlier lack of faith. A year passed, but her wish was not fulfilled. Then, in the late summer of 1939, she had Dad drive her to Boise where I was going to school to tell me her secret. She was to have another baby. God had forgiven her. It was not an easy pregnancy, but it was a happy one. I went back to school after Christmas, but did not stay for the next semester because I was needed at home. Mom would go to the hospital the early part of April, but meanwhile, she had to be careful for she had promised the Lord that she would not let anything happen to this already beloved child.

Then, on the afternoon of the thirteenth of March, she began to hemorrhage. The doctor and nurse came to the house and it was decided she could not be moved the 20 miles to the hospital. Dad was sick with a very bad bout of the flu in the basement bedroom. The doctor worked his way up and down the stairs between Dad and Mama. Before dawn, on March 14th, Margret Ann was born. The doctor worked diligently to stop the bleeding, to save Mom's life and to keep checking on Dad.

I took the tiny new baby to the kitchen. I bathed her and dressed her in the clothes Mama had so lovingly prepared. The doctor came out and watched as I pulled the little flannel gown over her head and tucked her feet into the booties. He pronounced her perfect and went back to care for Mama. I rolled her in a blanket and took her to my bed and snuggled her down between Joyce and myself.

When the Relief Society sisters came in the morning to help care for the children and fix breakfast, they found the three of us in the bed sound asleep. They awakened me and took the tiny one to her mother, who snuggled and cuddled her, then to the top of the stairs for her Dad to see, though the doctor still kept him from coming up and holding her.

Mama recovered quickly. Margret Ann was the light of her life, always. She loved all her children, but this baby was living proof that her Father-In-Heaven truly loved her and forgave her sins.

1940 Evan Laverna and Margaret Ann

Yet--. All her life she secretly grieved for the child who never was. Almost fifty years later, tears would stream down her face when she talked with me about that time. I pray that death has now brought her complete peace.

In My Garden - Life History of Zelda L. Kline - Part 7

Grandma Jones had a cancer on her face. She used to come to Preston for treatment from Dr. Whirly. He used a chemical, burning the spot by her nose. Lots of people thought him a quack but maybe he was ahead of his time. I certainly thought that he was a quack when he set my broken leg and set it crooked.

When Grandma Jones came, my new big brother, Kelly would come too. That made my summer perfect. Daddy fixed him a tent lean-to beside the garage and I thought he was lucky to be able to camp out all summer. He was good to me and let me tag after him, and Mark tagged after me. Georgina said we looked like Indians trailing single file on the path through the lucerne patch over to Don Brights.

Then there was the summer that Kelly and I went into the "boot leg" business. We used Mama's food grinder and ground yellow transparent apples into mush to squeeze apple cider into some of Dad's empty brown beer bottles. Someone told us that a little sugar and a couple raisins in each bottle would "ripen" it better. We climbed up a ladder to the ceiling trap door, hid them in the attic and promptly forgot them.

Another summer came and Dad began the much needed remodeling to make our little house bigger. First, he took off the old back porch. That made the attic open. Grandpa and Uncle Carl and Vick Carlsen were helping. Someone brought the beer bottles down, stacking them where the new floor and the new walls were going up. Joyce was a toddler and played happily there with scrap wood that Dad cut into blocks for her. She found the bottles sitting there (I think the caps had probably blown off in the warm weather attic) and she drank several swigs before she got "sick". Dad realized she was having a hard time getting between the upright 2x4's and he immediately knew who the bottles belonged to. It was one of the few times in his whole life that I really saw Dad lose his temper. Kelly and I were "confined" to the house and yard. Kelly was put to work straightening nails and sweeping up the sawdust. He would go later to help Daddy hoe the beets and I would have to stay home, the worst punishment I could have received.

By the time I was twelve, Ione and I were going every spring to work at beet thinning. We were paid so much for an acre row and although it was hard work, we were glad to make the money. The harder we worked, the more we made. We would come home at night, tired and dirty, but Mama would have supper ready and hot water for us in the new bathroom. We shared the money with the little kids, had money for our vacation and we could buy material for Mama to make us new dresses for Idaho Days and the 4th of July.

1931 Zelda at 10

During the winter of 1931 and 1932, the "box" was again recovered with pretty calico. Mama let us sort through it and Ione and I delighted in folding and refolding the little clothes and soft flannel blankets. We saved our own money and each bought a rattle to tuck in with safety pins and little jars.

One May morning, as the stars were dimming in the sky and first streaks of pink were touching the mountain tops, I crawled under the big old lilac and sought to find a way to stop my tears. The lilac buds were still slightly green but they would still bloom and their purple fragrance would fill this small corner of the earth. Not so the tiny baby boy that lay in his tiny white satin coffin on the piano bench in the parlor. He would never bloom. For a few, brief days he had been with us. His tiny hand had clutched my finger. His sweet smell had filled our house. Now he was gone, after having been awaited for so long. I shook my fists at the fading stars and tried to talk to the God beyond who had taken him away. At eleven, it is hard to find answers to death, yet it had been very much a part of my few years. I felt that God did not care. I beat the grass, so fresh with spring but still cold from melted snows, and found snow still in my heart.

Grandpa Brown died in September of 1927, the same year my father died. That had been his and Barbara Ellen's golden wedding year but they said his heart just quit when his son Will died.

My Grandma Brown died in December of 1932. Mark and I spent a part of that summer with her. I was always glad. I had the choice of going on a camping trip or of visiting Grandma Brown. I was always glad that I chose to spend it with her. She took us up and down the road in North Ogden to visit the old friends and relatives. Mark was just six and a half, so I spent a lot of time tending him. The old people would touch his blond hair and call him "Will". Many remembered his father and in the confusion of old age, mistook him for the boy who had lived in that valley in their youth but who now slept on the hill in the old North Ogden Cemetery. In another year Grandma would be gone and many of those of her youth would be gone too. That would be my last visit to North Ogden. I would visit Ogden often while I was growing up, but the "old home" on Washington Boulevard was open to me no more. I've always thought that it was a coincidence that the last half of my life would be spent in this part of the Salt Lake valley, the place where my Grandma was born and where her childhood was spent.

Daddy's brother, Raymond Jay had spent a campaign with us working at the sugar factory so we got to know and like him. The next year he was sick and didn't come. It was a cold, blustery winter December. It was so cold that Ione and I had to come from our porch bed to sleep on the sofa bed. We took turns getting up and putting coal on the fire to keep the dining room stove going.

We had no phone, but the Carlsens did. Just before morning, I heard Mama awaken Daddy and tell him to get dressed. "Georgina would come soon", she said, to knock on the window to tell us that Raymond Jay was dead. I woke Ione up and we shivered together, not from the cold, but because we wondered how Mama could know that, but she did. Georgina did bring us the message that night. Raymond Jay was only 22 years old. We named our Raymond Jay after him, but he died too.

Vick Carlsen helped Daddy move a garage onto the line between our properties. Daddy could then use his driveway and curve around to our garage. That left a triangle shaped space beside the house but Daddy filled it with seed given to him by Julius Cabutti. It was blue larkspur, and it grew thick, and I thought it looked like a patch of the sky. Each year I gathered seed so that we could have it again the next year. When we moved, I hated leaving my "patch of sky".

The garage floor was dirt, but in the back, Daddy built a wooden floor for Mama's new washing machine. It was electric and had a copper tub. When you filled it with water and turned it on, a plunger went up and down to clean the clothes. In the corner was a small cook stove. A wash boiler was placed on the stove and filled with water. The stove lids were taken off usually so the boiler could sit directly on the fire. We would make the fire and fill the boiler on wash days and bath days. Before the new bathroom was built, that was where we took our summer Saturday baths, in a large round tin tub. One time Ione undressed and sat down on the bench where the rinse tubs were usually set. It was empty except for the two round stove lids. They were still very hot and Ione must to this day, bear the scar of her burn. It was a long time before she sat in comfort, anywhere. Daddy gently dressed the burn each day.

Even in the winter time, our washing was hung outdoors. Daddy would shovel the snow out from under the lines. The clothes would freeze almost stiff before we finished hanging them. In the evening they would be brought in out of the cold and hung over the kitchen chairs to dry. The best part of winter wash day was soup and hot bread. Because the stove was kept going to heat the water, Mama would make a large pot of wonderful hot soup and an oven full of crusty bread.

We didn't always live on 43 East 5th South, but we always seemed to come back to the little house. We bought the Johnson farmhouse out at the edge of town. I remember the fall there because of the many trees. The piles of leaves were high until we would scatter them. How much fun it was for my brothers and I to roll and pounce into those piles. Then I would get Mark to help me get them back into piles before Mama and Dad came home.

It was a brick house with a wide, front porch. What I remember most was the pass-through in the built-in china cupboard in the dining room, leading to the kitchen and the colonnades between the front hallway and the front room.

It was here that Kelly came to live with us full time and to finish his high school in Preston.

1939 Clelland and the tree

We were out gathering icicles to make the ice cream for Mama's birthday. It was a surprise for us and we were surely glad to see him.

We didn't stay in that house long because Mama didn't like the empty fields to the east.

1939 Zelda and her Mother

In My Garden - Life History of Zelda L. Kline - Part 6

As soon as Joyce was old enough, we drove down to Brigham City to show her off to Grandma Jones. Ione "oh'ed and aw'ed" and refused to let anyone else hold her. It was love at first sight. She had lived all her life with Grandma Jones and Aunt Lucille, but she decided that summer that she wanted to come "home" and live with her new little sister. Ione was ten and I was eight and I can tell you the idea surely appealed to me. I loved my brothers, but Joyce was a baby and Ione was a sister I could share with.

And share we did. For the rest of our growing up years. Sometimes loving, sometimes fighting, but always making up. We shared our bed and our secrets. The first night Ione stayed in Preston, Mama made her bed on the parlor sofa that folded out into a bed. I wanted to share it with her, but I had an "unfortunate" fault. I sometimes still wet the bed, but Mama extracted a promise and gave me a chance. It must have worked, for that was almost the end of my bad habit. Ione and I were together until she married eight years later. Ione was the "lady" and I was the "tom boy", but we made a good pair. She preferred staying home, helping with Joyce and I preferred tramping the fields with Daddy. I would get up and go with him at three o'clock in the morning when he took his watering turn in the sugar beet fields he had contracted to grow. He taught me to milk the cow when he was working "campaign" and I would help haul the water when he would kill and clean the pork for our winter meat.

When I was very small, Mama would stay up at night making me doll houses out of shoeboxes and hanging crepe paper curtains. She would not be so lonely then.

1928 Laverna Jones

Later, on rainy days, Ione and I would play girl games. We would cut out paper dolls from Montgomery Ward catalogues and design our clothes for them on drawing paper, and with crayons. We would set up houses on the cabinets and the kitchen table, and the hours would hurry by and it would be time to put away our things and set the table for supper.

Our loudest battles were over mopping the kitchen floor. Daddy remodeled the house. We had a large, square kitchen. The linoleum had to be laid in two strips, with a seam down the middle. Old fashioned, inlaid linoleum was designed like tile, with niches and cracks to fill with dirt. Wax, in those days, was a hard paste that had to be rubbed on with "elbow grease" and it was for hard wood floors, not linoleum. That meant that every night that floor had to be scrubbed to meet Mama's criteria for cleanliness. We would each take a half, to the line down the middle. Boy, were we meticulous about not going even a half-inch over the other's side of the line. Often Mama made us redo the center because we missed some. She tried to have each of us clean the whole floor every other night but that didn't work either for we actually missed our confrontations while we were on our knees.

I actually started school in Salt Lake City at the old Oquirrh School on the "West" side. I was in kindergarten. When we went to Preston, there was no kindergarten, so I had to wait until September to go back to school. I went to the Central School, an old, three story brick edifice. I had the same first grade teacher that Mama had, "Old" Mrs. Dalley.

1931 Oneida Stake Academy, Preston, Idaho

I tremble to think what the fire marshals would say about that school today. The floors were well oiled and swept with sawdust. The lower windows were barred. The first and second grades were on the ground floor and the third and fourth grades were on the second floor. The stairway going up on the east was for the girls and the boys had to use the one on the west. Ione's first year in Preston was as fifth grader and she went to Jefferson School. I was still in the old Central and I really envied her. Jefferson was really the Junior High but the overflow from crowded Central used the top floor for the fifth and sixth grades. The top-half of the fourth grade also got to go there. I had an incentive to excel so I could go with Ione the next year. I succeeded and I really enjoyed that next year.

1946 Ione and Joyce

Sometimes Mama would give us a dime, two eggs, and a cream bottle. We would sell the bottles and eggs to the baker for a pint of milk and two big "cinnamon" bars. The dime went for the 2-for-1 Wednesday after school movie next door. There was always a cartoon and a continued serial besides the movie. Sometimes there were scary movies. It was often dark when we came home and we would hold hands as we walked across the track and home.

The night we saw "The Mummy" with Boris Karloff we were living in the Johnson house at the very end of the road that led out into the country. We held onto each other, walked in the middle of the street and jumped at every shadow. It was frosty cold with ice under our feet. We started running, our breathing in the icy air made our chests hurt and we slipped on the ice underfoot. How welcome was the light on the front porch that awaited us, but the next week we would go back. One warm night it wasn't the scary movie we were running from. It was to get away from the Bosworth's house. In the front yard was a large pile of watermelons awaiting pick-up the next morning. Reid Bosworth, about Ione's age, and one of her "boy friends", was sleeping on a quilt beside the pile. Even so, we managed to grab one and run without awakening him, we think. We made it to our own corner, under the arc light, and broke open the melon and used our hands to eat it. I think that was the most delicious melon I ever ate.

In My Gaden - Life History of Zelda L. Kline - Part 5

My brother, Arvel, spent most of his time at Grandma and Grandpa's. They couldn't bear to give him up. Mama would have preferred otherwise, but we lived close by and saw him almost every day. She was pregnant again that winter of 1928-1929 and she was not well again. However, when Arvel had one of his bouts with pneumonia, it was Mama, who brought him home and cared for him. He was sick a lot when he was little. Now his crib stood in the living room. We kept the corner stove going all the time. Over the back of the chairs were hung the diapers and little shirts and nightgowns that Mama would spend all evening washing by hand. Dad came home that night a little after midnight. He sent Mama off to bed for a while and took over the vigil. Fixing and changing the mustard plasters, spooning the sweet water into the dry little mouth and putting the baby over his shoulder to pound his back when the coughing started. I had awakened and crept out to curl up back of the stove. Dad put me to work handing him pins and folding diapers and finally my little brother slept. In the morning, the doctor would tell us he was better, but we knew it in the middle of the night. Finally, Dad led me back to my bed in the corner of the bedroom. That bed was a folding cot. At night, a leaf was pulled up and doubled the bed size. In the morning it was folded down out of the way. I shared it with my brother, Mark, but later I would sleep on the back screened porch with heavy canvas blinds dropped to keep out the wind and cold.

When a new baby was due, there was always the "box". A square, wooden box, about three feet by two and one-half feet and two and one-half feet high. Daddy made it that winter. It was padded with cotton and covered with pretty, flowered material. Grandma and the Aunts helped fill the box, but Mama did most of it. There were hemmed snow-white flannel diapers and little shirts; there were bellybands and embroidered gowns; little sweaters and bonnets and booties. There was sweet smelling baby talc and little blankets with crochet around the edges.

Warm weather came back. The trees were green again and the newly planted garden put out green shoots. Lottie's calf had her own calf and little yellow chicks were peeping in a box beside Grandma's kitchen range.

On June 15th, it was Idaho Days at Franklin, a day of fun with picnic baskets and races and a merry-go-round. Mark tugged at my hand and we went from booth to booth. I held him up to see everything. We came home sleepy and tired and woke to a new baby sister.

1939 William Arvel (Bill) and Mark

Joyce LaVerna was born in Preston, Idaho on June 16, 1929. She was like a small, black-haired doll. We all doted on her and Grandma Hansen would sit in the rocking chair holding her and singing quiet songs.

The following spring, Grandma Anna Marie Hansen died quietly during the night of April 10, 1930. My cousin Laura and I were flower girls at the funeral. The familiar Chapel of the old First Ward meeting house looked strange and we thought "heavenly", with all the flowers and the big white silk ribbons that adorned the alter. Grandma Hansen had come across the ocean to this new land and now we were here because she had come. Her wrinkled, working hands lay peacefully quiet, the first time we had ever seen them still.

Our Chapels were called Meeting Houses when I was little. I still like that name and sometimes wish we still used it now. They were and are a place where we meet together to take our Lords sacrament, to bless new babies, and to say goodbye to those who leave us in death. We came together then to pray for rain or to find work for those who needed it or for peace when wars began or ended. Sometimes we just met together for fun, to eat and laugh and to enjoy one another.

1930 James House

Summers were such a wonderful time when I was a child. The days were so long and the sounds so much a part of summer. The slamming of the screen door, the sounds of water sprinklers, the evening cries of, "Run sheep! Run!" as we played the games of childhood. There was a large old apple tree in the middle of our back yard. At the top, the branches made a "Y" shaped crook and I would climb up and sit in the crook. I was hidden by the leaves and I kept a store of books stashed up there. When I couldn't make it to the tree, there was always the space under the front steps with a book hidden there too, or the coal shed or back of the rabbit pen. Next door, the Carlsen boys had a sand pile, and I spent many happy hours there, building roads and playing with toy cars. Sometimes the cars were nothing more than wooden blocks painted with crayons, but they were real to us. Sometimes we built a bonfire in the vacant lot and cooked "tin-can hobo" stews of salt pork and "snitched" garden vegetables. How could it have tasted so good? Later, Dad would buy a radio and we would sit around listening to "Inner Sanctum" or "The Lone Ranger" or "The Little Theater off Times Square".

And, speaking of the radio, there was the first time the Latter-Day Saint (LDS) conference was broadcast from Salt Lake City. We had the only radio in the neighborhood. Dad spent the morning making sure it worked perfectly. I remember he had to string a wire to the kitchen water tap to ground it. At conference time the Scandinavian "old" ladies, Grandma Jeppesen, Great Grandma Hansen, Aunt Georgina and Aunt Lindy, gathered in our front parlor to "listen to a prophet's voice." Did I know that I was listening to history being made? I don't think so.

In September of 1928, a new pattern came into my life. A "regular" family was put together and from the first seemed destined to "work". I remember Mama and this new Dad went down to Brigham City to meet all "the Joneses" over the Peach Days weekend. We "old kids" stayed with Grandma while Mama went to meet the "new kids" and all the aunts and uncles and Grandma Jones. I already new Aunt Bert and Uncle Jord. They had gone with Mama and "Barney" to Arco, Idaho when Dad and Mama got married. I really like them, but Mama wasn't ready to face down all of the Joneses with three "mean little kids" tagging along.

But I did meet them all a little later. The first, of course, was Grandma Jones. She seemed small, even to a seven year old. Her hands were brown and leathery but with a surprisingly gentle touch when she brushed my hair out of my eyes. My hair was always that way because I played so roughly.

There was Aunt Lucille who taught school and lived with Grandma. I guess I never knew what color Lucille's eyes were. I always did, and still do think of them as snapping and black. She walked with a cane. I believe I was told it was because of an old ice skating accident. I learned early that you did not enter her room, her "domain", the front parlor, without a specific invitation, and they were few. I remained somewhat in fear of Lucille all my life. I always felt that to her I was somehow not quite worthy of belonging to the Joneses. And yet, there is an almost last memory of her that belies all of this. (It was at) Dad's funeral and her taking my heart-broken Robyn's arm and leading her over to sit beside her, giving her a piece of candy and watching to see that she didn't have an insulin reaction.

Aunt LaVon and Uncle Harvey Erdman lived just a little ways over from Grandma Jones. I was never able to think of LaVon as "aunt" for I never in anyway became friends with her. But Uncle Harvey I truly liked. Sometimes I would wait on the swings in the park across from their house and, when he came out, I would run across and walk to town with him. Often he would take "young" Harvey and me to the drugstore for ice cream cones and then the two of us would sit on the little stone wall in front of the courthouse and make comments about everyone walking past us.

1929 Evan Jones and his brothers (Back Row: Jordan, Evan, Carl Majier, Front Row: Seymour Brigham, Hyrum, Raymond Jay)

Then there was Dad's oldest brother, Hyrum. I didn't get to know him very well until later. But I thought a lot of him because Dad deeply loved him so I knew he had to be good. When in California I did come to know him, it was a happy experience. His wife, Frankie and I became lifelong friends. Years later, after he had died, she and her sister Toni came and stayed with me in Mt. Clemens, Michigan. Two of the most beautiful women I ever ment.

Uncle Seymour, another brother, was married to Varda. They had two children, but I never knew any of them because they were later divorced. He then married Aunt Cora, so it was her I came to know. I liked her. They lived on Goshen Street in Salt Lake, close to Ione and she worked at Auerbachs. Later they moved to California too.

Aunt Bertha and Uncle Jordan moved to Sacramento, California in the 1930's. I still remember the day they came to Preston to say goodbye and I remember their address, 600 50th Street. He started an insurance business and did very well. Their son, Jack, was my age and I missed him when we went to Brigham City because we were friends. I missed Aunt Bert most though, because she was my champion. She always took my side in the squabbles. I especially remember her talking me out of a churchyard tree. I had determined to perch there until we left for home the next day. In California, we always stayed at 600 50th Street in Sacramento. When Owen and I brought our family home from Okinawa, we stayed there, feeling most welcome, while Owen was discharged at Travis AFB. Aunt Bert even let us use her car while we went car shopping.

Uncle Carl and Aunt Bea were so much a part of my growing up years. Not long after Mama and Dad were married, they moved down to Preston from Montana. They bought Gooches' house next door and divided it, half into an apartment. Carl worked at the "Factory" and Bea at the egg hatchery.

In My Garden - Life History of Zelda L. Kline - Part 4

That first summer my Mama was sick a lot. She was a new widow, pregnant and she already had two other children. She had already lost a nine-month old baby girl, Esther Jeannette, a few years before and she seemed destined for more than her share of grief. Mama told us of the year that Esther Jeannette was born and died. We lived in the small mining town of Rolap near Castle Gate, Utah.

Castle Gate in 1974, days before its distruction

Both towns are gone now. I became very ill with pneumonia. She was pregnant at the time. The doctor told her I would probably not live. So she prayed to her Father in Heaven and begged him to spare me. "If one must return to you, take the one I do not know." Then, on a Sunday morning, the Mormon Elders came to the schoolhouse across the way to hold Sunday school. Someone there told them about my mother and they crossed the ravine to her small house and gave me a blessing. The story is that I began to recover immediately, even reaching for an egg she held in her hand over my crib. Though she was told over and over that God does not bargain with us, she somehow always believed that Esther Jeannette's death was because she had offered her back to God.

Sometimes it seemed that Grandma was too cross with her. I guess it was hard on both of them. The only fights I ever had with Grandma were when I would stand up for Mama's love of pretty things, but usually Grandma would go and find a pretty handkerchief or ribbon or she would crochet a pretty baby sweater for her afterwards.

William Arvel Brown was born in November and he became the absolute delight of Grandma and Grandpa. As a couple, they had never had any children of their own and, though Mark and I were treated with great love, this was a special child born under their roof and, by a kind of osmosis, their own.

One thing happened that winter that still makes me smile and love Grandma even more. She was so human. Mama decided that it was time she had a little fun and she went often with her friends over that holiday season. Grandma really didn't mind tending us children but she just liked to nag at Mama. Then the worst of her predictions happened. On New Year's Ever, Mama slipped and fell on the ice, breaking her leg. Grandma then had the full care of us all. She griped at Mama from morning until night. One afternoon she had just finished mopping her kitchen. She took a step onto the wet floor and slipped, falling flat on her back. She lay stunned for a moment and then she started to laugh loud and long. Mama looked at her, startled, but as Grandma rose to her feet, still laughing, Mama laughed too and there was peace between them, for a time.

Winter stayed a long time but finally Grandma's daffodils bloomed on the sunny side of the house. About then Mama received my father's World War I bonus and the Brostroms family over on 5th South in Preston sold her their small house. We had our own place again. Most of her things had been stored in Grandpa's barn and she really enjoyed putting them in place in her own home again.

As I have said, it was a small house. I remember there was a parlor and dining room with an arch between them in front. There was a kitchen in back with a large pantry on the east and a small bedroom on the west. Across the back was a screen porch. You had to go outside to go down into the cellar. In the spring, the cellar would fill with water. Everything had to be stored around the side on the ledges that were above the water level. I remember there was a goldenrod bush that flowered under the kitchen window. Later, when we extended the house out, that bush had to be moved, but it would not grow anywhere else. I truly missed seeing its sunshiny color from our kitchen table.

The house faced north. There was a yellow transparent apple tree and two big lilac bushes in front. In the back were apple trees and a coal shed that I could climb. The coal shed had a slanting roof with a trap door so that the coal truck delivering our coal could just let the coal slide through the trap door. It was my job to keep the coal bucket by the kitchen range filled.

Vick and Georgina Carlsen lived next door. They were good neighbors. Vick was Danish, Georgina was Irish and they always made life interesting for Georgina had an Irish temper. Their children ranged in age similar to our family and we played together for many years.

Grandpa came and helped us plant our garden. We also got our milk and eggs from Grandma. About this time, they moved to a new house that Great Grandma Hansen had built on 1st East, only a block from us. They had about three acres and Grandma loved her big new kitchen.

Life really changed for us that summer. Mama went with a friend to a birthday party in June. The party was for Evan Jones, "Barney" as his friends called him. On September 2, 1928, they went to Arco, Idaho with his brother, Jordan, and Jordan's wife, Bertha, and they were married. I remember the night they came home. Grandma was staying with us, but she couldn't get me to go to bed. I sat, straddling the kitchen chair with my head leaning against the back so I wouldn't go to sleep. When they finally arrived, Mama looked so pretty and happy I was happy too. It was "Barney" who led me to bed and helped tuck me in that night but he quickly became "Daddy".

Before too long, it was "Dad" I followed everywhere. I helped him dig the trenches to bury the cabbages upside down. They stayed crisp and fresh that way and were our "winter greens". I held the boards while he built a small barn for Lottie's calf that would freshen before spring. I went with him out to the sugar beet field that he had helped us grow on shares and which was ready for harvest.

Dad spent most of his life working for sugar factories. In those days there were no union hours. "Campaign" became a part of our lives. As soon as the beet harvest began, the sugar factory started operating twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It would keep doing so until the last of the harvest was processed into sugar. That was "Campaign".

Evan Jones and Sugar Factory Campaign Workers

The men worked 12-hour a day shifts every day of the week, including Sundays. The shifts ran from noon until midnight and from midnight until noon. Later the government would force them to eight hour shifts, but not during our Preston years. Dad was a "Sugar-end Foreman" and I was proud that my dad was a boss.

The wives started something I heard called the "Campaign Wives" club. They got together to play cards or gossip or eat. Mostly, I think, they ate. Everyone tried to outdo the others on the goodies. Mama was a marvelous cake baker and I'll talk more about that later. One year they had a costume Halloween party. They went downtown to show off and I tried to follow them and fell on the icy street. Dan Swainston, who wasn't a sugar man, picked me up and brought me home. He was a barber but his wife, Rita, was still a part of the wives' group. So was Ellen Tufts, whose husband ran the Grand Theater. Even after so many years, I remember them so well. I loved most of them dearly. There was Ellen Harmer, Donnie Poage, Lucille Christensen, Mrs. Light and her daughter Bonnie and Aunt Bea, Dad's brother Carl's wife. They were all quite young and, I believe, they were mostly happy during those few years when their children were small, before the world turned upside down.

In My Garden - Life History of Zelda L. Kline - Part 3

Most people think of Danes as being light complexioned but many are really quite dark. Actually, Grandpa was a "Black Dane". His skin was even more wrinkled and darkened by the years of the sun and the wind and exposure to the elements. He was a section hand for the railroad and spent his days, summer and winter, with his crew pumping his little rail car up and down the tracks, inspecting the tracks for damage and repairing it when found. His eyes were the brightest blue you ever saw and they actually twinkled with a smile that his mustache hid. His shoulders were broad and his arms were strong from years of swinging a pick and sledge and pumping the "hand car". Though I was a husky six, he could pick me up and swing me high.


That first summer in Preston was actually a happy time for me. When Grandpa was home, I never left his side, tagging wherever he went. Potato planting was a game. I watched him and Grandma cut the seed potatoes so that each piece had a seedling eye. Then I followed Grandpa down the row, dropping the pieces in the holes he dug. Then we would go back down the rows, brushing the dirt over and back into piles. Later we would inspect each pile each day to catch the first green shoots. It was very hard to comprehend how those wrinkled brown lumps of seedlings could produce Grandma's mounds of creamy, white mashed potatoes. Late in the fall, when I helped gather the harvest dug from those mounds and piled the smooth round ovals into the storage gunnysacks, I found a great wonder in nature.

Grandpa had a great respect for education. One of the first gifts he gave me was an easel blackboard with a roll top showing the alphabet letters and the numbers. On those summer evenings, he taught me to read by lamplight. He didn't like the bare electric bulbs hanging from the ceilings and preferred the kerosene lamps to read by. He spoke with a heavy accent. However, he read piles of papers and books, both the Danish papers his sisters sent from Denmark and the big city papers that were sometimes left in the trains passing through and which the porters saved for him. He took me by the hand and led me up the steep steps to the door of the Carnegie Library. There we walked quietly between the shelves and shelves of books, always going home with our arms loaded with treasure. By the time school started in the fall and I entered the first grade, I could read.

1928 Markus Jeppesen

Strange, is it not, that a short, immigrant laborer helped plant such a love of reading in me. More than that, he taught me patriotism. He built a flagpole and flew the flag on national and state holidays. He taught me to revere such men as Washington and Lincoln. He made me copy the Gettysburg Address on my blackboard and then made me learn it by heart.

I knew he was an alcoholic and hid his bottles in the granary and under the porch steps, but it never bothered me. He never missed a days work. He kept his yards and garden immaculate. The fences and sheds were always in good repair and if Grandma sometimes had to help him to bed at night, I didn't mind. I now believe that he drank out of frustration because his mind kept reaching out beyond his bodily limits. In later years, when I was grown and Grandma was dead, he remarried. I heard that he had increased his drinking. At his funeral, one of his friends told me that his early death came as a result of that drinking, but it mattered not, for my tears that day were for the Grandpa of my childhood, who had given me so much.

Grandma too, was a part of that summer and the summers that followed. I would awake early to follow her to the barn and watch her milk. We would feed the cats fresh frothy milk and then pour it into shallow pans to cool on the milk shelves in the cellar. We would then feed the chickens. She said that they were dumb, noisy animals. Their eggs were important and they were good eating for a Sunday dinner. There was always a dog and several cats. The big green parrot, Polly, was her first love and her second was her milk cow, Lottie. She told me stories of her girlhood, when she would ride horses like the wind and break the ponies to the saddle. She grew up in an all-girl home and her stepfather taught her to be his farm "boy". Her hair was red and her skin looked like creamy milk.

1928 Amanda Petra Jeppesen

It was hard for me to reconcile my picture of this staid, rather heavy-set woman with that wild, red headed girl, but her sisters, Aunt Alma and Aunt Lindy, assured me it was so. She wore a flannel petticoat, and flat, sensible shoes and cotton hose, but one day, I snooped and found a heavy, Satin robe, trimmed with lots of lace, hidden in the bottom of her drawer. Her hair stayed red to her death.

She played the mouth organ and guitar and could sing all the old songs, but mostly she could cook. Make that-COOK. Her food was legendary. It's no wonder I was a fat little girl, what with soups, loaded with feather-light dumplings, homemade bread and home-churned butter, cakes, jelly rolls and sugar buns. She use to carry chicken soup to anyone who got sick and I use to think that people got sick just so they could have Aunt Amanda's soup and crusty-buttery bread. She used to make something called Red Mush from rhubarb, raspberries and sago. She would cover it with thick, clotted cream. I believed that is what ambrosia must have been.

Grandma taught me to cook. Luckily, there were plenty of eggs and butter and cream, so my failures were not so bad, but I learned, and she never worried about the mess I made. I can still see myself as a pudgy little girl, standing at the table on a chair with a large apron tied around me and elbow deep in dough. I guess I knew a lot about heaven then.

Grandma's flower garden was the envy of the whole town. Her dahlias and roses would have taken prizes anywhere, but instead she shared them with everyone. Even a casual passerby could count on taking home a prize bloom if they stopped to admire her yard. She said, "God meant gardens to be shared with everyone." and grandma was a sharer of ever thing.

In My Garden - Life History of Zelda L. Kline - Part 2

1927 Jeppesen Home in Preston, Idaho

The little house was friendly and warm. Someone had built a fire in the big kitchen stove. A pot of soup bubbled fragrantly and I realized how hungry I was. A fresh-baked loaf of bread wrapped in a snowy dishtowel was on the table along with a dish of yellow butter. While Grandma busied herself undressing sleepy, unhappy Mark, Aunt Lindy came in from helping Grandpa finish the chores. Setting me at the table, she dished me up a bowl of soup. Grandma Hansen sliced the bread and Grandpa put the coffeepot on front of the stove to boil. Now it was my turn to have my face washed and my warm flannel gown pulled over my head. Climbing up into the high bed and then snuggling down into the comfort of the feather tick. I curled up around Mark's warm little body. I hoped Mama would come soon. My prayers had been said that night at Great Grandma's knee and again she touched my head and said "Poor little Selda." but I was too tired to cry and I went to sleep, to wake tomorrow to a new life in a new place. It was April 1927.

That was the same spring that Charles Lindberg flew his Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic to Paris and even in our small Idaho town, the news was received with excitement. I was a child of fantasy and given to dreaming. As they talked about that silver plane flying through the clouds, I wondered if that was how my father had flown through the clouds to Heaven, where everyone kept telling me he had gone.

I could not stay sad long. Mama came and I got to share her bed with her. The jonny-jump-ups were blooming in the grass at the feet of the poplar trees and Grandpa had made me his chief garden planting helper. It was pleasing when he came home from work as a section hand on the railroad, to help him cut the seed potatoes, making sure that each section had an eye. Following him down the moist garden row, dropping a potato in each hole he dug, then mounding up the dirt into a mound, I thought of huge mounds of mashed potatoes with lots of butter.

I finally made friends with Grandma's green parrot. After ignoring Grandma's warning and getting my fingernail thoroughly bitten by his sharp beak when I attempted to scratch his head as she did, I learned to keep my hands safely away from his cage. Finally he got to know me and would cluck excitedly when I came around and learned my name, calling me "Selda", as Grandpa Jeppesen and Grandma Hansen did. When I couldn't tell my thoughts to grown-ups, I would go and have a secret conversation with Polly. He would give me sympathetic and understanding sounds and I always felt better.

I also had two cousins about my age up the street. There was Laura of the golden curls and beautiful manners that I was constantly being urged to copy. Her dress was never torn and dirty, as mine frequently was. Her stockings never got holes in the knees, as mine did. She always wore shoes and I loved nothing better than pushing my feet out of mine and going barefoot. Even so, I still loved to sit with her on the top step of the outside staircase of her house and would try to copy her neat embroidery stitches.

We were thus employed one sunny Sunday when Great Grandma Hansen found us and lectured to us long and diligently about the sin of such a deed on the Sabbath. She told us as she rustled away that we would have to pick every one of those stitches with our nose in the hereafter. We worried about that the next few days and secretly picked all the stitches so the Lord wouldn't require such a thing of us.

My other close by cousin was Laura's brother, Elmer or "Egg", as we used to call him. He was a little older than I was but I spent most of that first summer trying to keep up with him and by earning my reputation as a tomboy. His friends reluctantly let me tag along and finally accepted me as one of them. We climbed the highest trees and jumped from the highest haylofts into the deepest haystacks. We knew where the water snakes lived in the deep grass along the ditch banks and carried them wiggling in our hands to scare the more timid Laura and her friends. We would "run away" to the sand hills after we had been scolded or punished, but we always came home in time for dinner and more scolding. I loved Aunt Lindy and never really minded her scolding because while she did so, she usually was preparing thick slices of bread with lots of butter and homemade raspberry jam or a cold drink of buttery buttermilk. She thoroughly believed that growing children should always be fed, no matter what.

In My Garden - Life History of Zelda L. Kline

Life History of Zelda L. Kline

1921 Clockwise from Baby: Zelda Lorraine Brown, Laverna Maude Brown, Amanda Petra Jeppesen, Ane Marie Hansen

I was born Zelda Lorraine Brown on the third day of April 1921 on Quincy Street in Ogden, Utah. My parents were LaVerna Maud Jeppesen and William Albert Brown. My mother had also been born in Ogden but she had grown up in Preston, Idaho. She was born to Amanda Petra Andreason and George Spears, but was later sealed to her stepfather, Marcus Jeppesen. My father was born in North Ogden to Barbara Ellen Beckstead and George Brown.

1921 William Albert Brown and Zelda

In the seven years my mother was married to my father, "Will", we lived in many places: Ogden, North Ogden, Rolap (near Castle Gate, Utah) and Salt Lake City. It was in Rolap that my younger sister, nine-month old Esther Jeannette died in 1924.

1924 Rolap, Utah

And in April, 1927, while they lived on Sixth West, in Salt Lake City, my father died, leaving my mother a very young widow of 24 with two small children and a third to be born seven months later.

The earliest memories are like a kaleidoscope, bits and pieces of swirling colors and times:

• A tall man standing beside a black kitchen cook stove with shining silver edges, frying something in a pan for me.
• Through an open door, a rocky piece of ground sloping down toward a river or stream and bright sunlight making me blink my eyes as I came out of the darkness of the house onto the step.
• Another time, the same man holding me on a very large old-fashioned tricycle as it rolled down a driveway in front of a yellow house and Mama standing across the street, watching.
• Sliding down the arched legs of an old-fashioned dining table and bumping my lip and crying when I saw the blood.
• Pushing a wicker baby carriage proudly with my baby brother, Mark, in it.
• Coming into a warm kitchen out of the cold night, wrapped in a quilt, being sat on a stool and the quilt falling away while Grandma Brown set a bowl of fresh bread and milk in front of me, spooning strawberry jam on top.

The old house was secure then.

Then I remember another night when things were not so secure and there were neighbors and people standing around. Later I remember being led up a flight of steps to a room to see the tall man, my father, laying as though he were asleep in a strange bed, but I knew he was not "just asleep".

The fear really came later, when I was lifted up to look at him as he lay in Grandma's front room. Years later in my life, I came to know a poem that said "pillowed in silk and scented down" and I knew what it meant and I remembered that day.

Later, a train rushed through the late afternoon. Mark was sleeping an exhausted sleep in Grandma's arms and I was glad that he had finally stopped crying. I climbed over onto Grandpa Marcus' lap and felt comforted, pressing my face against his bristly mustache and smelling his old pipe. Great Grandma Hansen was there too, sitting across from us, nodding sleepily. Mama had stayed in Salt Lake to take care of all the multitude of things that must be taken care of when death has paid a visit.

That train ride was when the bits and pieces settled down and my definite memories began. If I close my eyes, I can still see it as it was when we left the station and started up State Street toward home. Though it was April, it was cold and in the last daylight, flakes of snow were drifting down. I stuck out my tongue, tasting the cold wetness; glad to run ahead and shake from my legs the stiffness that came from sitting on the train so long. As we came to Aunt Lindy and Great Grandmother Hansen's house, Aunt Lindy came out with a shawl over her head. While they talked grown-up talk, I skipped up and down, anxious to be through this strange journey. Grandma Hansen patted my head and said, "Poor little Selda." and I knew that I should cry, but not quite why. Then they walked with us down the street to Grandma's house.

In My Garden - The Other Child

The Other Child

Mary hustled about the cabin. Robert and the boys had left at sun-up with the homemade sled to go up into the canyon after wood. Mary didn't notice the passing time because there was so much to do. The red berries the boys had brought back from the mountainside last week, that she had dried so carefully, must be strung on some of her precious thread so that they could garland the rough walls of the new cabin. There was Indian popcorn to pop for more garlands to drape around the small cedar that fragrantly filled one corner of the small room. But over and above all was the pudding. She had hoarded her precious store of cloves and spices. The sugar ginger in its little tin box she had brought all the way from England with her. Then there was the orange peel from oranges Robert had carried so carefully from California when he had rejoined them after the battalion broke up. She had preserved it in wild honey. The chopped suet was from a deer. Instead of brown sugar the sweetener was molasses mixed with honey. But, would it taste like English pudding? It had to. She had looked forward so long to this Christmas.

Not since she and Robert had left England had they celebrated a real Christmas. There were the warm shirts for the boys and the knitted stockings and mittens for Robert and a handmade doll for the baby. It had taken her months to make them and they were now wrapped in brown paper under the little tree. The tree wasn't really English either, but some of the German Saints in the fort last winter had put one up and she had liked the idea. This year, in their own home, rough cabin though it was, they would be a family again. Last winter they had been in the fort and the winter before they had shivered through a lonely Christmas at Winter Quarters. But now she would make her English memories live again for her children. She would make Robert remember when they were first married in their snug little English home.

She hadn't noticed how dark it had grown until she opened the door and looked out to see if she could get a glimpse of her menfolk. The bright sun of the morning had gone and snowflakes were starting to drift down. A small frown creased her forehead but she supposed they would come soon. Mary Ellen started to cry so she closed the door and turned back to where the baby sat on the fur rug in front of the fireplace. She sang to her softly until she went to sleep, then laid her on the hand-pieced quilts that covered the bed behind he curtain.

She went again, to look out and this time her heart thudded in her chest. There were fresh tracks in the new snow and they lead around the shed where their one and only milk cow, the only one in the west valley in fact, was housed. Mary forgot her fear and turned back to the corner for the old gun. They had been warned about spending the winter outside the fort. But no, she would have her own place. Perhaps they would all be scalped for Christmas. Then who would eat the pudding now in its rag bubbling merrily in the iron pot over the fire?

She gasped when she turned around. Four heavily blanketed figures stood at the door. But she dropped the gun as one held out a bundle to her. Her mother's heart went out to the small infant that was mewing like a kitten. The baby's skin was hot to her touch. She looked up to ask what to do. But her visitors had left as silently as they had come with only the tiny baby to remind her that they had been there. In the next hour she forgot everything but this small life. She warmed some of Bessie's good milk and spooned it between the small lips. She applied warm goose grease to the little brown chest and crooned and talked the tiny stranger into a sound sleep, then laid him lovingly along side her own sleeping Mary Ellen.

The boys came crashing in as twilight deepened and Mary shushed them. When Robert saw the sleeping child his face whitened. "Do you know what you have done?", he declared. "If that baby dies, we'll be blamed."

"But it's Christmas Eve, Robert. Remember the other child. I could not turn him away." Robert nodded his head, but he determined he would sit awake through the night with the gun at his side. Sometime later, when the candle guttered low, the babe felt cool to Mary's touch and she went to sleep to dream of another baby in another time and another land.

The snow stopped during the night and Christmas morning dawned bright and clear. Mary almost forgot about the baby sleeping so quietly now as she hurried about building the fire and rousing the boys from their quilts in the loft. Not until the door opened quietly did she remember. At first she thought it was Robert coming in from his chores, but it was the blanketed figures of yesterday. She could see now that it was three men and one woman. As she placed the now peaceful child in the woman's arms the look that they exchanged was that of one mother to another. The other mother squatted down and began crooning softly. One man went out then but returned in a minute with a puzzled Robert. He was carrying a large foul of some kind.

When that day ended, Mary knew it had not been an English Christmas after all, but a new way in a new land. They had shared this day with their Lamanite friends and every bite of pudding had been a delight.

Years passed and often a growing Indian lad came to share a day with Mary. And when she was old and left this land at last, a dignified Indian Chief came to kneel and share in her family's grief.

The Writings of Zelda Lorraine Brown Kline

Edited by Owen A. Kline and Michael E. Kline. Assistant Photo Editor David O. Kline

Copyright @1999 The Kline Family Organization, Inc.

First published in the United States of America by The Kline Family Organization, Inc. 4381 West 5375 South Kearns, Utah 84118

In My Garden - Of My Sisters

Of My Sisters


Me? Well, I have been here a long time. Ever since They took one of Adam's ribs and made me. Ever since then I have been trying to prove that I got the best of man. I am strong and I am weak. I am courageous and I am a coward. I am still the greatest puzzle the world has ever known and the simplest story ever told. For me men have conquered nations and have laid kingdoms at my feet. For me men have become both saints and sinners. I have been behind everything that has ever happened since I first gave that apple to Adam. And, thought they have not always known it, I have always guided men's footsteps and Destiny's hand. For a gilded trinket, I have sold my soul, and yet, I have left behind splendor and luxury for a bit of brown earth and pink calico bonnets.

I was Delilah. Remember? I did love Samson, truly I did. But I loved more the silks and satins of Persia, the emeralds and rich stones of Egypt and the furs from the land of Gog. For these I betrayed my love, and yet, was he not to blame too? He was cruel and ruthless with his strength, but was not he weak of spirit to so easily give up his secret?

Once I was Cleopatra. Historians say my love for Mark Anthony was not so strong as my desire for power. I say they are wrong. How much easier it would have been for me to follow this man I loved, but I was a ruler and could not forsake my people.

Once, above all else, I was Mary and cradled in my arms the infant Christ. I gave Him birth. Naught can dim the splendor and glory of that.

As Joan of Arc, remember how I led my country's army against the gallant English and was victorious. I stood on a hilltop at dawn and though I had been but plain of face and form before that, at that moment I was as beautiful as any woman who had ever lived. What matters they called me a witch and betrayed me? Who remembers they who sentenced me to die? All the world remembers me though I died by flame at a stake.

I was Madam DuBarry too and kings and rulers howled before my beauty.

I moved the hands of history like pawns upon a chessboard.

I was she of England whom they called 'Bloody Mary'. And I was also Elizabeth and 'Good' Queen Victoria, too. The cruel, the great, the gentle was I in them, for who can say truly what I am?

I crossed unknown waters to make for men, a home in a new land. I helped plant crops and built cities. My lullabies drowned out the sound of tribal drums.

Remember how I, Molly Pitcher, crouched behind the cannon one bleak December day and fired the shots until the Red Coats fell back in defeat.

And who will ever forget Abe Lincoln? I was his mother. I taught him his first letters and bred into him a love of a God he never once forgot throughout all his span of years.

I was the women of the South. I fought the 'damned Yankee' on my doorstep and then nursed him side-by-side with my own kinfolk. I cursed Sherman during his 'march to the sea' and, when it was over, I tried to build again the old, gracious, gentle way of life I had known. But even I failed there, for what I built was, after all, a new way of life.

I was the black women of the South. Born in chains and slavery, echoing the age-old song of 'let me be free', seeking a better tomorrow for my sons and daughters.

I went to California, Oregon and Utah. I went in wagon trains and prairie schooners. I pushed and pulled a handcart. I sang hymns with lips that were blue with cold and walked beneath a sun so hot it burned the grass beneath my feet. I was the dance hall girls in shining spangles, the adventureress, the builder, and the saint.

There was a time when I sent my sweetheart, my brother and my son to war. 'We won't be back 'til it's over, over there' was on their lips as they left. When they did come back I shortened my dresses and bobbed my hair. I sang jazz, danced the Charleston and was called a 'flapper'.

I was 'Rosie the Riveter'. I said goodbye again and again to him whom I loved. I rolled up my sleeves and went to work. Sometimes I felt like crying but most of the time I sang.

In other lands I was a Jew. I fought to outlive the gas chambers and fires. Later I went to another place and, like Esther of old, I helped restore the land of Israel.

More wars came and went. My own war for equality wages anew, and yet I am still the creator of homes and families.

I am no worse nor better than I have always been. I am courageous and still I am a coward. I am weak and still I am strong. I am the source of most of the world's joy and most of the world's sorrow.

I am the strength of the world. I am the gentleness of the world. I can't explain myself and wouldn't, if I could, for I am still, above all, the world's greatest mystery.

I am woman.

The Writings of Zelda Lorraine Brown Kline

Edited by Owen A. Kline and Michael E. Kline. Assistant Photo Editor David O. Kline

Copyright @1999 The Kline Family Organization, Inc.

First published in the United States of America by The Kline Family Organization, Inc. 4381 West 5375 South Kearns, Utah 84118

In My Garden - Of My Brothers

Of My Brothers


And here is my story.

It is the longest one ever told, for I began with Adam. And of myself, I, too, can say, "I am both good and bad". I am a poet, a shipbuilder, a tiller of the soil. Sometimes I am master and sometimes I am a slave. I have built towers to the sky, only to see them tumble beneath the might of God's wrath. I have built my cities strong and beautiful, and then have seen them crushed beneath the fury of a conqueror's heel. But I always built again, more enduring, more wisely than before.

Three goals have ever been before me. Power: Power to hold aloft my banner higher than all the rest. Gold: Gold from the depths of the earth and the heart of mankind. And Peace: Peace found in poetry and the bright shadow of a fireside. And yet, all of these goals have been but one, to lay before a woman the power, the gold, the peace I have found.

As Noah, I scorned the taunts of others. I was strong then in the will of God and built my Ark to save from that time hence, the race of all mankind.

I was Moses and gave unto the world the laws which men live by or against. Thou shalt not and thou shalt not, said I. For forty years, I led the children of Israel through the wilderness until at last, they gained their Promised Land. But I, myself, could not enter therein, because once my faith had faltered.

And once I was a disciple of the Christ. I heard his voice lift in such quiet glory as no man before, or since, has heard. I stood beneath the darkening skies and trembled as thunder cracked the heavens; at the foot of Calvary's cross I wept, and yet found peace in Easter's dawn.

But I was Judas too, and worldly passions tempted me with thirty pieces of silver. For thirty pieces of silver, Oh God, I sold my soul. Then I touched the lowest tide by which men live.

I was Alexander, whom they call the Great. What emptiness the title holds, for though I conquered all the known world, and gave to Greece the glory that once was hers, yet, myself, I failed.

I was Caesar too. My armies marched across the earth and brought to Rome new laurels, new victories for her brow. But I died by the thrust of a sword, my blood staining marble steps and the soul of him who betrayed me, Brutus, that was my friend.

I was Martin Luther and sought to find my God in my own way. I changed the history of the world and began again man's everlasting fight for freedom.

Do not forget that I was Louis Pasteur. I, too, gave men a new way of life. I was a gentle man, but still I was strong. By my test tubes, I conquered, too.

I was Napoleon, who was a shopkeeper's son. I conquered Europe from the Black Sea to the British Channel. Nations bowed humbly before me. Power, yes, power was mine to hold in my two hands. But I went to Waterloo and I, myself, at last was humbled.

I was Washington. Remember the winter I spent at Valley Forge. By faith and with God's help, I led the "Thirteen Sisters" to victory. I saw a free nation rise and start the fulfillment of man's eternal desire for freedom.

And I was Benedict Arnold. Yes, you remember me. I, who brought the Colonial forces through to victory at Saratoga, the battle that turned the tide of history. Yet, I became a traitor and was scorned by friend and foe. Lonely is the balance of life and the coming of death to the betrayer.

Once they called me honest Abe Lincoln. I was a common man to whom God gave the power to lead a bewildered nation through darkness. I was not Union or Confederate, but American. From rail splitter to President, I had but one desire, the keeping of this, my land, a nation of the people, by the people and for the people.

I went westward toward the sunset. I crossed the Mississippi, planted wheat fields in Kansas and corn fields in Iowa. I scaled the heights of the Rockies and crossed the great deserts of the west. I dug gold from California and planted orchards in Oregon. I was a gambler, preacher and storekeeper. I felled the great timber and let my cattle rove the sagebrush covered prairies. I built schools, churches, bridges; I made roads, laid rails, dammed rivers and gave a new heritage to the future, the west, for I was a pioneer.

The turn of the century came and I was Teddy Roosevelt. My Rough Riders made legends. You remember them. One was a message to Garcia.

Once I said goodbye to home and country. I went to the Argonne, the Marne to fight again the battle for freedom, the "war to end all wars".

I came back sick at heart and cynical. I tried to cure myself with prohibition and tales of a chicken in every pot. I was afraid of myself, of life, of being called soft. I found new worlds to conquer in the air, the movies, and the radio. And there was a man named Franklin D. Roosevelt who brought again to the forefront the struggle for the freedom, the rights and, yes, the obligations of the common man. Across the seas a man who called himself Adolph Hitler arose to power. I tried to shun, to ignore him. But my new sciences had brought the world to me.

Me? Well you know me. I came into being on a peaceful Sunday morning. I wear Navy blue, Army khaki, the forest green of the Marines and the blue denim of the laborer. Some of my friends I left at Bataan and Corrigedor and Wake Island. I walked through the burning sands of a desert in Africa and crawled on my stomach through the jungles of Guadalcanal. I trained my eyes on distant horizons of Arctic northland and prowled beneath the ocean's surface. I flew through the broad blue reaches of the sky and into space, undaunted by danger or distance. But I also worked in the factories and on the farms. By day and by night I built weapons of war, where once I made the luxuries of peace.

There was a far off land called Korea and something called the 38th parallel. I went there too, to fight and die for an idea called freedom. I airlifted the tools of freedom into the city of Berlin. I have crossed the 'wall' and many of my graves may be found at its foot.

I was John F. Kennedy. An assassin's bullets found me in Dallas and a sadness came upon the world.

In Vietnam I failed to accomplish what I came to do, but not because I lacked courage in America.

A new search for freedom and I was Martin Luther King, seeking to widen boundaries of equality for black and white. An assassin found me too.

But I look toward the future. Looking forward still, to that which I have ever looked forward to since my story began. Today I falter, but tomorrow I shall go forward again, seeking always the light of freedom, the light that sometimes falters and flickers in the winds of destiny and is sometimes fanned into a brightness that shines though out all of the world. My story, a long one already, is a story just beginning, for I am yet good and I am yet bad. I still reach for power, for gold or for peace. I am never content, striving always for that which I do not have, be it good or bad, for I am the race of Man.

The Writings of Zelda Lorraine Brown Kline

Edited by Owen A. Kline and Michael E. Kline. Assistant Photo Editor David O. Kline

Copyright @1999 The Kline Family Organization, Inc.

First published in the United States of America by The Kline Family Organization, Inc. 4381 West 5375 South Kearns, Utah 84118