Childhood (Continued)

The people that bought the home from dad remodeled it so much that they took away the value of it being a pioneer home, they changed it so much. So when they sold it, it was in the business section of Kaysville, and the city wanted it for businesses. I can remember, in the area that was the dining room and the kitchen, we used to play Annie-I-Over. We played that a lot as kids. And the trees on the sides were black walnut trees, you don't see black walnut trees much anymore. Boy, how I hated having to pick up all those walnut shells. Then we'd have to take the shells off and they would turn your hand black. Black walnuts, they were black and your hands turned black too. On the other side of the house there was a big tree and you couldn't see the house behind it. It was the longer part of the house. It had two bedrooms up there. It sat on a large piece of ground so that we could have a garden and grow enough food so that we could can our fruits and can our vegetables. And that is what we did.

Dad was a gardener anyway, he loved to garden. But he, to make a living, worked in the Kaysville bank. But he had a pasture where he had cows and he had chickens, a lot of chickens. Eventually he quit banking and just raised chickens. So all through my older years of school, from the 3rd or 4th grade on up, we'd have to come home every day and collect eggs. I learned how to candle them. Candling them is putting them in a light where you can see whether there was blood in them or not. Once in a while we'd have one, so we had to candle every egg and then put them in a box after we had cleaned them. And we had to clean them with a brush that had sandpaper on it. Because if you put them in water they would get rotten too soon, they wouldn't stay fresh as long.

All through school, even when I was in High School, I was cleaning eggs. We'd kill chickens on Saturday. We'd get up really early and dad would kill the chickens and we'd have to clean them. Dad would sell them, he took orders for chickens. Oh my gosh, we all worked, anyway. A lot of work.

One thing my dad and mother loved was going to the temple. Of course they would. And they always went once a week. And in those days it was hard to get in to the Salt Lake Temple. It was far. And I can remember them going and every time they would go dad would tell us that when we were keepin ght efire goin g, becaus ewe were burning logs and coal back then, not to make a big fire in the stove or fireplace, wherever we were doing it, because sparks come out the chimney. And if sparks fall on the roof the house will burn. So when they left to go to the temple I spent half my time out looking at the roof to see if it was on fire. I was a worry wart when I was little. I would worry about things like that all the time.

We had East winds that were a lot worse than the ones we have now. And when ever we had an East wind we had boards that fit the big front window we would have to put on. It took three boards to cover it to keep the window from being broken because the house was facing East. And one time, when I was older, but still at home, when Dad had about 3,000 chickens, we had a strong East wind. There were three long rows of chicken coops on the property, we had thousands of chickens at a time that he was raising. This one big long line, there were three coops, and the roof was all one length covering all three coops. And an East wind came while they were at the temple one time and it lifted that roof right off. It was terrible and those poor chickens, he lost most of the chickens in those three coops. It was quite a set back for a while.

I didn't tell you another thing about while dad was on his mission when I was three years old. Between three and four years old and Bob was just a tiny little 18 month old. He sent us things for birthdays and stuff. He sent a little black doll to me for my birthday and I put it in bed with me and I wet the bed and I ruined that sweet doll. It took all of the paint right off of her face. I'll never forget that. It just ruined that doll, I still remember that doll, she had pigtails with little red ribbons around them. I love dolls, I always did. I loved to play dolls. And Virginia was just the opposite. She couldn't stand to play with dolls and if she got mad at me she would take a way my dolls as punishment. I can remember when Gloria was born, I was five years old. I wanted to take her for a walk in the buggy and mother wouldn't let me. But she let Virginia push her. I won't ever forget that either. I was so mad about that. As Gloria got older Mother would make me take her with me if I went to someone's house to play, because she wanted to go play too. And I hated that.

When my mother was alive we had family night and back then the church didn't tell you to do it. But my parents just did it every night. We would all gather in and I can remember mom pealing apples so that we could each have a pealed apple while dad talked. Dad loved to talk about religion. He was a preacher and we'd listen to him for a little while and then there was a program that would come on the radio. We didn't have television back then. So they would turn that program on each night and after that we'd go to bed. Some nights they couldn't do it but most of the time it was a nightly thing, but they didn't do it the night they went to the temple.

My mother died when I was 11 years old. She had to have a gall bladder operation and she didn't live through the operation. It was a terrible thing. It was really sad. It was hard the rest of our lives after that. Our whole lives were changed completely. Then dad married again with in a year. She died in August and he was married in June the next year. Well, he just didn't know what to do about his children. He had five house keepers come in and one or two of them left because they couldn't stand us and then he fired three of them because he couldn't stand them. There was one that I really liked. I can remember that so well. We all liked her, she would do anything for us, but dad caught her smoking and he wouldn't have anything like that around the house at all. He one time said, (this was when mother was still alive) "I want all of you children to promise me that unless you ever see me smoke, drink coffee, or drink liquor that you will never do it!" My oldest brother, see, but after mother died things just went to pot, he didn't live that promise. Other than that, we did. Now Gloria was really young when mother died, she was 6 years old. It just seemed like our family was torn apart. Aunt Luella came (married) and told dad she would have the youngest child from him, but the others were old enough to be on there own. And it ended up that Martha came, she was my age, and that was her youngest child. Lillian came and she was 20 years old and she really upset the family. And then she had an older son, I don't remember how old he was, I think he was in his late twenties or thirties, that came and lived there because he was mentally unbalanced. He could write, he had been to school and learned to write. He could write like a child of about eight, I guess. That was about his mentality. Everything that happened, he would get into things and do sneaky things. He wasn't to blame, I mean you couldn't blame him, but Aunt Luella would blame all of us, not him. No blame was ever put on any of her children. We were the ones who had to be punished for anything at all. It was just an awful time. I always got along with Martha though. She was my age and we were good friends. And we ran around with the same crowd in High School. With most kids it would be a split with something like that, but it wasn't with us. I still just love her. Her husband is dead and she hated him so bad. They had a terrible life together. They had five children and they had just a terrible life. I used to tell her to divorce him and she would tell me that if she did he would take the kids and everything so she would have nothing. Since he died she's just gotten worse. I try to get her to come and go places with me, but she never does. She lives right here in Centerville. She married Budd's cousin, Ralph, she's a Tingey. It's too bad I've always just loved her. It's amazing how we got along, her mother pampered her. Anyway, our lives really did change after mother died. Dad too, he wasn't the same person anymore.

I was so excited to go to school with the kids and my brothers and sisters. To get ready adn to go to school, that was just great. I liked school, I was so excited. The first day I went, when it was recess I went running home for lunch and my mother had to take me right back to school. I had to learn that you had recess and you got to go out and play for a little while, then go back in and then I could go home for lunch. When I started school all the kids went home for lunch. Or, would take lunches and eat at school. But eventually, I don't remember which grade it was, they started a lunch program and it was just soup. Different kinds of soup that the kids could buy for a nickel or a dime. I don't even remember how much it was. And oh, I wanted to do that so bad. Have some money so that I could do that, but we just didn't have it and I had to go home to get my lunch.

Childhood (continued)

My mom had two sisters that came out here and a brother. They joined the church, but my mother didn't. She was very slow joining the church. She wasn't sure and she wanted to be sure it was true. And so she didn't take to it right away, but these two sisters and her brother who moved out here were after her all of the time. So she finally moved out here, because she really had a case on dad when he lived with them, I mean he didn't pay much attention to her. He couldn't, he was on a mission. He didn't even know that she had a case on him at all. But my dad was strange in a lot of ways. He was so religious, he was really a religious man. He said he didn't get married because he had decided he wouldn't marry until he was 33, because that was when Christ started his mission and so that's when he would start his married life. My mother waited for him. She was 32 when she married him.

When she got out here she really fell in love with him. She became a seamstress in ZCMI. She was very good with sewing, to the point where she could measure people, cut the patterns and make suits and things like that. She made a lot of men's suits, that was her thing. So she was a really wonderful seamstress.

My dad, when they got married, bought that old home that he had been living in, the Christopher Layton home. The home that I was born in. He was living there after he was on his own. He got a room with the Lady that had the home. We always called her Grandma Taylor. She rented out the bedrooms of the home and then she would give them their meals and stuff. That was how she got along. And so he was there, and another person that was there was LaCont Stewart, who ended up one of the most famous artists from Utah. He won a world prize at one time for a painting that he did back east. They said he had become world renowned. The painting there on my mantle, of the old Christopher Layton home that dad bought, was done by LaCont Stewart. He and dad had been renters there and he painted that because Grandma Taylor, when dad got married, said she wasn't going to rent rooms anymore. "I'm going to retire, I'm too old to do it anymore." So she talked dad into buying the house with all the furniture that was in it and that is what dad did. So LaCont Stewart painted that and gave it to them for their wedding present. I don't know how much money it would be worth, but it's the only picture I have of the old home. It was our family home, I lived there until I got married. Now it's all torn down and they got a restaurant there on that ground in Kaysville. But see right in front there, it wasn't even a paved highway, there wasn't even a highway through Kaysville yet. We were right on main street and it was just a dirt road at that time. I told John Stewart, LaCont's oldest son, that I had a painting of his dad's and he said, "Of what? I didn't know you had a painting of his." Clifford and Virginia bought his paintings, they had them all through their house. John knew that they had all of those paintings, but he didn't know that I had one.

Clifford and Virginia didn't have the money to pay LaCont, of course, his paintings weren't that much money then, so they would just pay so much a month for them. If they got one paid for they would start paying him on another. They did that for years and she had six or eight picture of his.  Different sizes and beautiful pictures. Before she died she had to sell them because she needed the money to go into a nursing home. She got 68,000.00 for those pictures back then and that was before LaCont died. They paid about 200.00 for them. I thought that was too much money to spend on a painting at that time. But, they were paying him off for years.

We drew for the picture, drew numbers, and Budd said "If she wanted it so bad why didn't you let her have it?" I said, "because I don't have a picture of that house and I don't have a LaCont Stewart picture and I used to work for him."

I used to clean for him. I would clean his house for .35 cents a week. I would clean their whole house and she would have me come on Tuesdays and do the ironing for them. She had four boys and her husband and in those days everything had to be ironed. And their shirts, oh my gosh, I never got through all the shirts and she would pay me .35 cents for that too. That's all I got. When I got married, he had a studio building back behind their house, and it was just packed with pictures that he had done. Just stacks of pictures that he had painted and I would go out and sweep and clean the place. I didn't move pictures or anything like that and I thought when I got married maybe they would give me one of those pictures. My sister-in-law, aunt Edna, she had a shower for me and invited Zafora. Zafora Stewart was her name, and she brought me a little green water pitcher that cost .54 cents. That was her gift to me after all those years. They said she was a really tight fisted women as far as money went. But I thought surely they'd give me one of those pictures. Dad remodeled the place years later and it didn't even look like that anymore. He took away the old look of it and now that would be right in style today. People would want it to look just like that if it were still around. I'm glad I have that painting. He lived in that house with my father and that's why he painted the picture. When dad bought the place, he gave it to them for a wedding present.

Childhood

I was born September 15, 1922 in Kaysville, UT. In a bedroom. The home was originally the Christopher Layton home. He was one of the men that Brigham Young sent to different areas to settle. Layton, UT was named after him. Kaysville had already been settled by someone named Kay. His last name was Kay and so they called it Kaysville. Christopher Layton had 8 wives and 63 children. His last wife that he had, ended up being my stepmothers mother. She came back and lived in the home that I was born in, the home that Christopher Layton (her husband) had built, until she died. She was a cute lady and I loved her so much. Lots of people in Kaysville and Layton are related to the Layton family because of the posterity that he had and they all settled right around there. In fact my brother's wife, her grandfather was a Layton. He was one of the children of Christopher Layton.

My father was Robert Bruce Major. They called him Bruce. My mother was Pearl Estelle Bernett. She came from West Virginia and dad met her on his mission back there. His first mission. At that time missionaries went without money (without purse or script), and he traveled all over the South. He was in West Virginia most of the time. It was interesting to hear him talk about it. He loved the South and he loved the people. He said this family, that mother came from, were not latter-day saints at all and weren't interested in the church, but they would take in the missionaries and help them. He said that he stayed there quite a bit during his mission. Otherwise he said that he was invited to stay in people's homes, but many times it would have been better to stay in the barn. Some of the places were so bad. But he served two missions out there. When I was a child he was called on a mission again, to the Southern States, and he was gone for a year at that time. They needed missionaries and he was always volunteering it seemed like. He loved it.

After I was married he had Virginia take Gloria and Bob so that they could go on a mission to California. In his patriarchal blessing it said that he would be called to go on a foreign mission. It said he would go back to the land of his ancestors and teach. Well, he never did, that was his last mission and he was in his late 60's then. When they were called to serve in California he turned it down! I told him that he was always telling all of us that we were to do whatever was asked to do in the church and that you don't hesitate. And he said that they got it wrong, my blessing said hat I'm to go over seas. I said, "Dad you have got to go on this mission, you may be called again, you don't know that." And he went. They served in Northern California. That was his best mission, he loved his mission. My step mom went with him, but she had to come home early. She had a son, Evan, who was like an eight year old and Martha took him while they were on their mission. But, every time she wrote to them she would tell her mother to come home. So Aunt Luella went home when the mission was about half over, but dad stayed the entire time.

He just loved that mission and he did so much good there. His biggest success was, he said there were many girls down there who had married men who weren't in the church. Couples where only one of them was a Latter-Day Saint. He worked with them and converted so many men, he just had a wonderful mission. The highlight of his mission too was one day he was in church, it was a small church, and a Jewish man heard the music as he was walking down the street and so he walked into the church to see what it was. And he became really enthralled and Dad introduced himself to him and invited him to church. And he has done a lot of good in the church, he is a very special man. I can't think of his name now and I used to know him so well. Well, he married a Latter-day saint woman and they had a half a dozen kids as fast as they could. Every time I heard about him they were having another baby and then she died and left him with the six little kids. When I was on my trip over in Jerusalem, there he was. I saw him in one of the church houses and we went in. No it was in the Dome of the Rock. So I went up to him and introduced myself and he had a young blond woman that he introduced to me as his wife. So he was remarried, that was the last time I saw him. Dads story about that was written up in the Sunday school magazine. It's called something instructor. Anyway it talked about this mans conversion.

My dad loved him so much and when dad died he was one of the main speakers that was there. Dad was really proud of that, that he converted a Jewish man and his grandfather had been a Rabi. He said at dads funeral, I remember him saying, "I'm just so glad that Bruce Major will be in the same area where my Grandfather is, in the spirit world now, and he'll be able to teach him what he did for me."

Anyway, lets get back to where I was born. I was the third child of five children and my oldest sibling is Paul. The oldest was Paul and Virginia two years after him and three years after that was Grayce and 18 months later was Bob and Gloria was three years after Bob. Bob's name was Robert Bruce too. I never had a common name, Grayce is an old name and it was an old fashioned name when they gave it to me. I didn't know anyone else named Grayce when I was growing up. They named me after Dad's oldest sister, she had died, I never did get to meet her and they decided to give me her name. As I got older I've met one or two ladies named Grayce.

See my mother and dad didn't get married until later in life. My dad said that he wasn't going to get married until he was the age that Christ started his work which was at the age of 33. My mother was one year younger than him, so she was 32 by then. I had all of my children by the time I was 30 and she was just starting her family at 32. And see she didn't live a long life because she died when she was 47. It was really too bad. I'm sure dad had a lot of regrets over that, because they didn't have long together. He re-married after that but his life wasn't a happy life and it was partly because of his children. My older sister called our step mom the wicked witch of the west.

Paul was a quiet and shy boy, but a really good man. He didn't marry in the temple and that upset dad so much. Dad was such a religious man and so he kept at them and kept at them so after their third child they finally went through the temple but I don't know that they ever went back. It might have been better if they never had gone through the temple. But they were such good people. I used to work for him when they first set up business and it was hard times trying to get going. He started making donuts and then he got a confectionery store where he would make sandwiches and donuts there for lunches and stuff. I worked for him there, but it didn't last too many years. I don't think over two years. Then he opened a regular bakery in Kaysville, he was a wonderful baker. He would not use imitation things in his stuff so his bread didn't have dry yeast in it, but fresh yeast and milk not water. He wouldn't have it if it wasn't the best. And he was a good baker and they did very well with that. They did very well until he got arthritis just like I've got. He just couldn't lift the pots and pans and all the stuff that went with baking. So he had to sell the bakery and he was young, younger than I was when I got arthritis. He went out to Hill Field and got a job and his wife was working out there too and they both retired from Hill years later. They had a beautiful home in Kaysville. But they never got churchy. They had four children, one daughter and three boys. Out of that bunch, two of the boys were religious. The youngest ones wife is a worker at the Bountiful temple and last time I went I was thrilled to see her there. The oldest boy was a sweet, sweet man, but got his feelings hurt by his mother and father and so he never went back to see them again. I went to the wedding of his daughter and I said, where are your folks? And he said, "what folks, I don't have any folks." His name was Paul like my brother, but they always called him Paul B. for Paul Burnett (which was my mother's last name.) I told Paul B. that those are the only parents he would ever have in this life and he needed to get re-acquainted with them. It had been years by then since he had spoken with them.

When I was between 2-3 years old I got pneumonia and it was really a dangerous disease back then. Most people died then if they got a bad case of pneumonia. Dad said they prayed and prayed and fasted for me and I don't know how long it was before I was well. I had it a long time, I don't know how long. My mother said I had it long enough that I couldn't walk and I was just like a baby. I had to be fed, I was 2 1/2 years old. In those days pneumonia killed you because they didn't have any antibiotics. Just like my mother dying, it was because of an infection that got into her wound where they had opened her and they didn't have any thing to kill the germs with.

I guess they really babied me a lot because Virginia said I was a spoiled brat. She used to tell me stories that I was adopted and that my parents really didn't love me and I didn't really belong. She would tell me that just to make me cry.

I was born with red hair, auburn hair, and I hated that hair because they would call me read head gingerbread 5 cents a loaf, take a bite take a bite it's good for your appetite. I remember that because it was so bad. I hated my hair, that dark red color. I had it until I started having children and with each child it got lighter and pretty soon I had no red. I was shocked when I realized that the red was gone in my hair. But it didn't bother me at all since I never liked my red hair even though that is what grandpa said he married me for. He had said he was marrying me for my red hair and my freckles. I still have plenty of freckles. Trina had freckles just like I did. When we were putting make-up on her, when she was in the casket, Rita, Sue and myself went over to put her make-up on and do her hair and stuff. Dave was there and he said don't you dare cover those freckles and I'm sure she would have said, be sure and cover those freckles.