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 The chapter is no longer active, but us "youngsters" still try to get together for lunch.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.