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| 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.
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| 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.
