Childhood (Continued)

Virginia and Paul both had music lessons and such, Paul played the clarinet really well. My mother started with me on the piano. We had a piano teacher that would come once a week at the school and I would go there to have my lessons. You would set up an appointment and have your lessons during recess time. So, I did take piano lessons for a little while, but my mother died before I really got into it and I never did have any lessons of any kind after that. Anything that would require money I didn't get. That's too bad too.

We didn't have Jr. High in those days, they did in Bountiful, they had the one on 4th North. But, that was just for the Bountiful and Woods Cross area. Everyone North of that went to Davis High School, so we had four years of Davis High School. We didn't lave grade school till after the 8th grade.

I took speech all the way through High School, I loved that. I was in two plays. They had one play a year and when I was a Junior and a Senior I got to be in both of those plays. As a senior I was the girls association president. That's the only office I ever held. We were in charge of the girls dance and one or two parties during the year. It was fun and we had to do several assemblies that we were in charge of every year.

I skipped school a few times to go see Gone With the Wind. We were terribly shocked that they said damn at the end of the movie! One time our principle got really frustrated because lots of kids skipped school to go see it when it came out.

Well, I went to every dance. In those days you didn't have to be 16 before you could date. I started High School when I was 14 and I went to all of the dances. There was a boy who lived across the street from us, Russell Martin, and I went to the Prom with him that first year. The gang of boys he was with was a lot of fun and they were just a year older than the gang I ran around with, of girls, you know. There were seven of us in the crowd I ran with. There was my step sister, myself, Alice Burton, Barbara from Kaysville, and then Helen and Elizabeth Call from Layton, and Afton Briggs from Bountiful. I still meet with them, we go out at least two or three times a year and have lunch.

It's the same way with this group I have in Centerville. We have been an organized club for many years. When I was pregnant with Bruce we organized it, so it's been going for 60 years. And this literature club I'm in, I've been in it for over 40 years. A lot of people have moved and gone. This club we organized during the war, we added to it after the war and since then a lot have moved away. There are only seven of us left out of 18 to being with. All our husbands are gone too, there's only two husbands left. I think it was very fortunate that way, because if you don't have an outside life, other than your family and husband, then when something happens to your husband you are completely lost. That's what happened to my two sisters. Gloria didn't lose her husband, but she lived in such fear of him going that she committed suicide. She was really sick and she knew that if her husband died before her there would be no one for her. No one at all. Virginia, it wasn't long after Clifford died that she went to a nursing home because she didn't know how to handle it. She never had anyone but her husband. I think you need to have a lot of friends. You need to have some friends close enough that you can count on. I have admired Curt, most boys don't stay together, but his crowd has. They get together two or three times a year too. I think it's a good thing.

High School was fun. I was in with a really wonderful group of girls. It's funny how we got together. There were seven of us that would go and do things together. Isn't it funny that we could get close like that and live all over? Two of the girls married men that became very wealthy, Alice married a man who became a dentist and then he became an orthodontist and he had a really good business and her folks had money too. Then Elizabeth from Layton, why, her husband became the President of the company he was with in California and they became very wealthy. It's fun to get together with them, Elizabeth moved back to Utah  her husband died before Budd did. There's only Afton who still has a husband. It's funny how young our husbands all died. My husband and Elizabeth's died really young and Helen's died young, then Martha's husband went. It's the same way with this group that I run around with here in Centerville. So many of our husbands died so young. And Frank White died just this week, his wife is one that has always been in our group in Centerville here. There are seven of us still alive and I think there was about twelve of us at one time. During the war our husbands all went to war, so we just started to get together once in a while and take the Bamberger and go into Salt Lake and go see a show or something. Sometimes we'd meet at each other's places. I was living with Grandma Tingey, and she hated me having them come like that. Other than that she and I got along really good together. But she didn't like me having parties there.

She loved my kids so much, Grandma Tingey did. Budd is the youngest of twelve children. They had a ranch in Idaho and that is where they lived all their lives, but when their dad decided to retire, he was getting to old to ranch like he did, why, they came down here. That was when Budd was twelve years old. They moved to Centerville and bought nine acres of ground and there was a house on it. There was a big part of it that was pasture. Because it had a flowing well down there, it had it's own water. So they had a cow down there and then they built chicken coups. Then they put in an orchard of cherries, there was a lot of cherry trees on those acres and he planted one acre with peach trees. He thought that wouldn't be as bad as ranching, but it was a lot more work. He died of a heart attack when Budd was, I think he was seventeen, when his dad died. He went out to mile the cow and he just didn't come back in. They found him dead down there and he had had a heart attack.