The Story Begins

My mother’s parents were raised LDS. Unfortunately, several years before my mother was born, they became disaffected with the leaders of the LDS faith because they (my grandparents) believed the LDS leaders had gone astray when they set aside the teaching of plural marriage. Two years before her birth, my grandmother’s family created their own religion that continued the practices of fundamentalist Mormonism. This was during the time of the Great Depression when many people came together to form transcendental societies. A transcendental society is when people come together, pool their resources for the good of the group, and live together in a community with each person contributing their knowledge and skills for the good of the whole. Other than the religious aspect, what they were doing was not unusual considering the state of the national economy.
As Mom and I talked about her life, one memory sparked another and we were off talking about different times and places, but all the memories are important because they are what make my mother who she is. Memories are fallible, but often the emotions behind the memories are more important than historical accuracy. We may not always remember the details, but we remember how we felt.

The “Order” was started by her mother’s brother who had a vision after he fasted in the mountains. He believed that an angel came to him and gave him the keys to the priesthood. He believed that because the Mormon Church had stopped living polygamy that they no longer held the keys to the true gospel. He believed that the people who needed to find the order would find them. He did not believe in sending missionaries to seek out converts. Of course if a person goes without food long enough, I’m sure they could see and believe just about anything.

Grandma felt prompted that she and her husband were supposed to Bountiful, Utah. Her father was working at the rail-road – a good job, but left it to join the order. He provided the financial backing for the order with what little he brought with him. All they had was the money and food storage that he brought with him.

When Mom turned nine months old, Grandma documents this in her journal. She doesn’t say another word about her, but the 9 month milestone was important for her to note because her second daughter died at 7 ½ months of age. It was the first thing she recorded that day. When Mom was just over a year old they moved to a farm. She remembers going with her two older sisters to take milk from their cow to some friends. They had to walk through pastures to get there. As they walked across a farm, the big gray pigs would chase them. The pigs were bigger than the little girls. Mom was about three years old at this time. She said, “The pigs taught me how to be a fast runner; I was so scared of them.” One day as the pigs pounded after them, she fell and skinned her knee. The friend wanted to clean the wound and put salve on it, but mom believed that the wound wouldn’t heal unless her own mother doctored the wound.

Mom’s family moved to another small town. They were out of money. The leader of their group decided they would live united order. This meant that everything everyone had was to be used for the common good. No one owned anything – everything was put into the common pot and used for the good of all. He decided that everything materialistic would be destroyed. Nearly every photograph was burned. As an avid scrapbooker and historian, this makes me sick. Only two or three picture of my mother survived from when she was young. No pictures of Grandma’s little baby that died survived this sacrifice to God.

Because they lacked money, the people of the order lived in tents. They build the tents out of two by fours, shipping crates, and cardboard. This is where my mother lived until she was fifteen years old. The wooden shipping crates were nailed onto the outside of the two by fours. The cardboard was used as insulation on the inside of the walls. Every inch of inside wall was covered with cardboard boxes. Mom learned how to read by reading the walls: fragile, handle with care, this side up, do not drop, were the first words she learned to read.

Her daddy was a cobbler. He went door to door gathering shoes to repair. Living in the tents was just something they had to do – they were broke. The kids spent time at the dump looking for empty peanut butter jars that hadn’t been completely cleaned out. When one was found they shared the remnants of another man’s garbage.

On nights when the kids went to bed by nine, her mother told them stories from her own bed. The kids had two double beds where they slept three to a bed. Grandma was a good story teller. The tents were cold. Winters in their town were harsh with a lot of snow and cutting winds. They warmed themselves by the wood stove. The children stood with their backs to the fire, and then they would turn and warm their fronts. They would get the stove going so hot that the ceiling would catch fire. They would quickly form a bucket brigade to put the fire out before it consumed the tent. Panic helped them move quickly, because if the tents burned down, they wouldn’t have a place to live.

When the rains came, Grandma put pans and glasses around to catch the water. As the water ting, ting, tinged, Grandma said, “The rain makes beautiful music for us.” I can see were my mother got her positive attitude. Grandma was an accomplished pianist – I’ll bet she missed having a piano. Mom said that one day a hair tarantula, as big as a saucer ran across the living room floor. To the relief of the squealing little girls, Grandpa put a big bowl over it. “I don’t know what he did with it, but he took care of it,” Mom said.

When one lives in tents, they have to adjust to having wildlife life with them. Mice were common. They set traps to kill them. Mice bring their own predators. One day eight year old Mom was looking for some underwear in her chest of drawers. Although it was the middle of the afternoon, her room was dark. There was some light coming in through the high two foot by two foot window, so she didn’t bother to turn on a light. Mom opened the drawers, felt around for something silky, and grabbed the first thing she felt that was silky. To her horror, she held up not her silky underwear, but a five foot blow snake. She screamed, dropped the snake, fell into a heap on her bed. Her brother ran in and saved the day. He took the snake outside. The poor snake was probably as scared as she was, but this began her life long fear of snakes. She learned that it was important to open all drawers carefully and slowly, and only when the lights were on.

The tents had taken on the form of houses, but because they started as tents, they were still called tents. They now had a big kitchen with one small window and a tiny front room with no windows. Grandma loved sunshine, so one day she decided she would have a window in her front room. She got a saw and cut a huge hole into the wall. When Grandpa came home, he said, “What are you going to do?”

“We are going to buy a window,” Grandma answered.

Instead of buying a window, someone at the print shop had discarded one that was just the right size to fill the hole she cut. They made it into a sliding door and stepped over the eight inches of wall that was left to get inside.

I want you to have a glimpse of Mom’s childhood to understand why she did what she did when she married my dad. Mom’s family was poor like many were in our country at this time, but they were under the illusion that they were living God’s will. What her uncle, the prophet of their religion, said was law. He said that God wanted the children to sleep without pajamas, so the children went cold at night until Grandma could change his mind. He told his own wife to wash their baby in icy water with a scrub brush to please God. He told her to feed the baby strawberries to please God. Of course the baby got sick. My own Grandmother was obsessed with food and was probably one of the first anorexics in the world. Even when they had food she and the children went hungry because she didn’t believe in eating more than one food at a meal. She records in her journal that my Grandfather was very concerned about this and made her give the children more food. My ancestors were blindly following the teachings of a man who was probably mentally ill. My Grandfather went along with it, I believe, because he was completely obsessed with his beautiful wife. I wish that he could have stood up to her and said, “We are not going to live this way.” I could be wrong about him, but I worked with him when I was a girl and he was a kind soul. He was the person who told me to leave this cult when I was fifteen years old. Although it was too late for him, he helped me get to safety.

We often think our decisions only affect us, but the choices we make can effect generations to come.