Chapter One: Idaho Childhood

Remnants of the Kelly property

Lincoln, Idaho. The small white house and old red barn have fallen prey to the ravages of time and progress, but I remember well the first years of my life in Lincoln, Idaho on what my parents often referred to as "the Kelly Place.” It had previously belonged to a man named Pete Kelly who died in the house. However, while we lived there it was owned by a lawyer in Idaho Falls from whom my father rented it. It was home for the first six years of my life, I having been born two days after Christmas in 1935. Being the third son, I suspect I was supposed to be a girl to complement my two older brothers, Maurice and Wayne. Maurice was approximately ten years old and Wayne seven when I was born and the family waited nearly ten more years before my younger sister, Eula Gay, finally provided my parents with a daughter.

LeRoy Maurice and Amy Buttars Hansen

Dad and Mom, LeRoy Maurice and Amy Buttars Hansen have always been farming people who believed in the virtues of hard work and honesty. Thus my earliest childhood memories find their roots in the expression of these virtues of my parents. My mother, I remember best as a woman with great pride and an insistence that everything be done right. In speaking of this pride, it is well to emphasize that it was a very positive thing to be evaluated on the basis of the fruits it bore. It has often been my impression that she gave my father an extra will and impetus that allowed him to succeed in instances when others might have failed. Dad was one of the most patient people in the world, when it came to Mother, yet even he had to escape from time to time from the consistent battery of instructions Mom issued. One additional attribute of my mother, which deserves space here, is her total expertise as a housewife. She could sew (as a child, I sometimes wore shirts from chicken mash sacks). I know no one who was a better cook, and of greatest significance to me–she was the best housekeeper I've ever seen. Of course, in her very late years she was unable to keep the house up to the standards we children had grown accustomed to.

My father conveyed to me a sense of pride in his Danish ancestry that I have come to share. And I have always been conscious of his ability to love deeply. Although I've never understood why, I've always felt my father loved his father a great deal. Perhaps because of the work they shared, or perhaps just because sons just naturally love their fathers. To me, as a young man, Dad seemed a tireless worker, a very careful–even cautious manager of monetary resources, and a heck of a good farmer.

Having introduced the family, I'll try to recall some early childhood experiences from my first home. Everything seems a bit disjointed in time and space. Nonetheless, one of my early memories deals with my father raising a few karakul sheep in the old chicken coop.  Somewhere tucked in among extraneous memories is the conviction that I either watched lambs being born, killed for their pelts, or both.

We lived within rock-throwing distance of the Union Pacific Railroad, and it used to be fun to place small objects, such as pennies, on the track and let the train run over them. We could then retrieve them in a flattened misaligned shape. The temptation was to put bigger and bigger items on the tracks just to see what would happen. It is fortunate that I didn't do that, although my older brother Maurice had a harrowing experience from just such a deed. I recommend the reader to read Maurice's account (Life According to Maurice).

Throughout my life, I have looked a little older than my chronological age. This, coupled with my size, allowed me to start school at age five, when I normally should have waited an additional year. This was in 1941. Thus, through the succeeding 11 years of elementary and high school, I was always the youngest person in the class. Particularly in athletics, I have often wondered what might have happened had I had an additional year of maturity. There were no school busses for the Lincoln School, so I walked most of the time. Strangely enough, the only specific day I remember walking was December 7, 1941. The news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor came to me via an acquaintance while on my way to school. It made an impact, even though I was not yet six years old.

I remember also from this general period sitting on my father's lap while he read the newspaper. I attempted to understand individual letters and words. There were often diagrams with arrows that showed the progress of the Nazi forces and the Red Army. I was sometimes baffled at my father's exclamations that the Reds weren't any better than the Nazis. I knew Germany was the enemy and could not grasp why those who fought against Germany should not be our friends. But this was another case of Dad having an understanding that surpassed conventional wisdom. Communists were almost as bad as Nazis.

Another remembrance of this sort was Dad's total, unequivocal denunciation of the United Mine Worker's boss, John L. Lewis. Later, it was Franklin Roosevelt who was no good; my father cast his ballot for Wendell Wilkie. About that time, some WPA workers (Works Progress Administration – a Roosevelt program to employ people at government expense) came to try and kill some noxious weeds on our farm, either Canadian thistle or morning glory. Dad was furious that these people were being paid but only leaned on their shovels. I have identified with the Republican Party ever since.

Somewhere in the maze of early childhood, I recall attending Primary and being a member of the Zion's Boys and Girls. Before I was six, I was able to sing, I might be envied by a king, for I am a Mormon Boy. One does not hear that song anymore. However, in the fading years of his life, I saw and heard President Ezra Taft Benson sing that song. I don't know whether that made me sad or happy. Throughout my life, I have somehow carried this song in my heart, for better or worse.

Mother had served for a time in the Relief Society presidency. Dad was a member of the Bishopric of the Lincoln LDS Ward. At that time, individual wards had to provide a certain percentage of the money needed to build a new building. It was both an ordeal and a blessing. Both Mom and Dad contributed greatly of their resources to build a new church house in Lincoln. Thus, I had ample opportunity to attend church and receive the early stimuli of a thoroughly religious upbringing.

Having begun with the house and red barn, I'll now conclude this section with a few comments about them. I honestly don't know how many rooms that house had. But they were all small. There was a back room that doubled as a bedroom when Mother's family came to stay. I remember sleeping head-to-toe in that bed with some cousins I hardly knew. And there was an upstairs of sorts. We had no inside toilets or running water. We carried water into the house from a small creek that ran between the house and the railroad track. A garden was placed on the east side of the house between it and the railroad. There was the usual outside toilet, not too far from the house, but far enough that the stench usually didn't reach those in the house. Close to it was an old chicken coop. The outhouse and the chicken coop marked the boundary to the barnyard where there were usually chickens running loose. The barn itself appeared gigantic to me in my first years. In reality, it was rather small–as barns go–even though it had place for horses, cows, hay, and even served on occasion as a granary.

Ammon, Idaho. If recollection serves me right, it was in the spring of 1942 that we moved from the "Kelly Place" in Lincoln to an 80-acre farm my father purchased at the intersection of First Street and the Lincoln-Ammon road. It was here I spent the remainder of my childhood and youth.

The farm looked a great deal different in those days than it did as I grew older. Now it is no longer a farm but blocks of houses. The buildings in place when we bought the farm were in extremely shabby condition; the main house was very old with little more than pioneer architecture. Throughout my early years we knew it as the "old house" and it was used to store a variety of junk; its upstairs and attic provided me with strange, even exotic, places to conduct magic and imaginary adventures. Eventually, this house also came to serve as a granary and finally was cut down to the size of a garage.

My parents purchased a house that had been located at or near the location where the LDS hospital nurse‘s home was later constructed. (This building and the hospital itself no longer exist). A basement was dug, foundation laid, and the house physically moved to its new location on the farm, nearly four miles from its original location. It wasn't a shining example of modern convenience either, but it was comfortable and served us well. In the beginning, it had no inside bathroom and no running water. We were forced to haul water into the house from the creek on the other side of the road. In winter, this meant shoveling away the snow and breaking the ice to get to the low level of water that remained in the creek during the winter months. Eventually, a remodeling program brought us our first inside bathroom, a well, and ready-made hot water. Initially, the kitchen stove was a wood/coal burner. The living room eventually had an oil heater and still later the kitchen stove was replaced with an electric one and the oil heater with a coal furnace. My chores included gathering in the kindling (firewood) and coal so my father could build a fire to heat the kitchen and provide heat to cook breakfast.

In addition to the house and the "old house," there was an old shed-like barn in which I learned to milk cows, an old granary, and an old garage lean-to that had to be wired to a tree to keep it from falling down. And, of course, there was the ever-present outhouse. During my youth, the major sport on Halloween was to tip over outside toilets. Ours fell victim to this sport its fair share of the time. In time, it underwent some face lifting and was moved closer to the main house. Part of the shed-like old barn housed a chicken coop which was later also moved to a new location not far from the renovated outhouse. It was also re-shingled, repainted, and renovated. I shall never forget the hours in the hot sunshine I spent on top of that building re-shingling it, or the hours cleaning out the chicken coop – a duty which fell to me every Saturday.

The farm also had innumerable trees, most of which served no purpose other than to be trees. Included were several plum and apple trees that never produced any fruit of real consequence. Most of those trees were removed to make room for more farming ground. My brother, Wayne, collected a fair amount of spending money from my parents by doing the shovel and axe work required to remove a tree. As the center of operations relocated itself, my father and brothers built a new barn, and the old buildings were either torn down or moved and remodeled.

It was in 1944, I think, that my oldest brother, Maurice, was drafted into the Navy and went off to war. He had made a number of overtures about enlisting, but loving parents who feared for his safety dissuaded him each time. He was eighteen. I, being only eight, lost his association for a number of years as his entry into the Navy marked his permanent departure from the dependency of the family home. I do remember receiving a few small "victory" letters (as they were called) from him, describing seeing flying fish and the like from the deck of his ship (LST 654) on which he served as a radar operator. It was, then, with significant joy and relief that we learned of the victory over Japan in the late summer of 1945. The news came as Dad, Wayne, and I were out in the field placing bundles of grain into shocks to ripen. I recall running back and forth between the house and the field as a courier of the news.

The early years on the farm were difficult in many respects with much hard work and financial concern on the part of my parents, but they were also pleasant years. With the impatience of youth, I remember wanting to learn to milk a cow, – an ability I rapidly acquired and would later have been very happy to do without. Like most farm boys, I was assigned a variety of chores; most were morning and evening repeats such as milking, feed and watering, gathering eggs, and otherwise caring for farm animals. I also cleaned barns and chicken coops and had to sweep the basement every Saturday. In the spring of the year, we would round up the young heifers and bulls, castrate the latter, brand them all, cut off their horns and get them ready to go to pasture in the hills during the summer. Later, I had my own heifer which I named Pet. She got extra of everything and would come running when she saw me. Over my objections, she too was sent to the hills. She never returned and I was devastated.

After school was out in the spring, it seemed like I changed clothes and went to the sugar beet field to remain there all summer, first thinning, and then hoeing the weeds. First and second crops of hay broke this routine. In gathering in the hay from the field and putting it into a large haystack, I usually drove the derrick horse (later a tractor). We took pride in my Dad's ability to stack hay higher and straighter than anyone in the neighborhood.

In the late summer, the grain (wheat, barley, and oats) was cut and bound into small bundles with a horse-drawn binder. The bundles were then picked up and stacked into shocks out in the field to dry and ripen – waiting the time when a large thresher pulled and powered by an old-fashioned steam engine tractor would come and thresh the grain. One could hear the contraption chugging along on the unpaved road on the way to one farm or the other. It was incredibly slow with its huge metal wheels, but performed its function of operating, via a big drive belt, the thresher itself. This was a busy time when neighboring farmers would get together and trade help, producing a threshing crew of considerable size. My mother would cook huge meals and gained the reputation of being one of the best cooks on the threshing circuit. The bundles of grain were pitched up into the thresher that separated the wheat, etc. from the straw. This provided not only the grain in bulk form, but also giant piles of straw on which I could later fight mock battles against the Nazis, Japanese, or whomever the pretended enemy might be. I often pretended I was a Chinese Communist guerilla, without the faintest sense of what that meant in political terms.

A small farmer, like my dad, didn’t specialize in anything; potatoes, sugar beets, alfalfa hay, as well as wheat, oats, and barley comprised the field crops. Fall meant harvest time, two-three weeks’ vacation from school, and opportunity to pick up potatoes for a little spending money. Every fall, I was able to earn about $50, that was to last me until spring. After all the potatoes were harvested and stored in a "spud" cellar we had built ourselves, attention was turned to the sugar beets. In my childhood, the beets were "pulled" with an implement designed for that purpose drawn by two or four horses and then topped by hand with a huge knife with a hook on its end with which to pick up the beet. Later, the whole process became mechanized.

But somehow the essence of the farm was the corral filled with an odd assortment of cattle. Most were Holstein derivatives, perhaps mixed with one or more other varieties so that no bloodlines could be traced. They were just cows. With anywhere from eight to fifteen providing the milk that was sold to a local creamery, our standard of living went up and down depending upon the quantity of milk those faithful animals produced. Of course, we also raised pigs. Sometimes they were Durocs–rusty red, handsome animals, as pigs go; other times they were huge spotted Poland-China which resembled the Holstein cows with their patterns of black on white or white on black, whichever way one chose to look at them. And there were chickens of every variety that changed every year, but were somehow never mixed with one another. Rhode Island reds were chunky and laid large brown eggs; while leghorns seemed the most prolific in the quantity of eggs and were therefore the variety that most often graced the chicken coop, which occupied at least an hour of my time every Saturday morning.

For food and normal expenses, it was the milk check and eggs bartered at the local mercantile store that provided the necessary funds. The somewhat meager profits from the farm crops were put back into the farm, paying the mortgage, and buying the equipment that was necessary to make it all work.