Tag Archives: Family History

Courage at Twilight: Champions

Mom and Dad and I had just paid our respective income taxes, and the need to be frugal was on our minds and in our conversation. “You know what? That reminds me….” And Dad began his story. It was 1947, and the world heavyweight champion, Joe Louis, defended his title against contender Jersey Joe Walcott. Sonny (Dad, age 11) pedaled the bicycle, with little brother Wiggy (Bill) on board, some 40-odd city blocks, in the cold December air, to their grandpa William T Greene’s little shack: no plumbing, no running water, no furnace, no bathroom, no stove or oven. The place boasted only a hand pump and an outhouse and a wood stove, which served both as heater and cook stove. And he had a vacuum tube radio on which the threesome listened to the 1947 world heavyweight championship boxing match. Sonny and Wiggy tallied the score as the announcers called out the blows. Mom broke into the story here: she (age 8) and her family had gathered around their diminutive black-and-white television, watching the same fight. Sonny counted the blows. Mom’s family kept score, too. Jersey Joe knocked Louis down twice, and had more points, according to Sonny, listening to the radio, and according to grandpa Wally, watching the television, and they felt confident Jersey Joe Walcott would be the new world champion. But in the end the judges called the fight for the incumbent Joe Louis, and the commentators rationalized that only a decisive win could unseat a world champion like Joe Louis. The morning after the fight, Sonny snagged an enormous brook trout from Mill Creek. “Now that’s more like it,” Grandpa Greene cheered. “Let’s cook him up for breakfast. Get some sticks and let’s light the fire.” Grandpa William T Greene, at 80, liked his grandsons, and was happy for their company—and the boys loved him. He told Sonny once that he was afraid of dying. He would not know where to go, or what to do. He would not belong. But later he explained to the boys that the spirit of his long-dead sister had appeared to him, standing at the foot of his bed. “You don’t need to worry, William,” she reassured. “When you die, I will be there waiting for you. I know where you need to go, and I will take you there.” He would join her in 1956 after 89 years on this earth. And Sonny would miss his champion grandpa.

(Pictured above and below: William T Greene.)

Courage at Twilight: Three Old Cars and a Pocket Watch

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Dad went to his father Owen’s house soon after Owen died. Living so many years alone, Owen had accumulated hordes of stuff which filled the house in choking piles and stacks. Dad emptied and cleaned the house, taking truck load after truck load to the dump. He felt that cleaning the house was a way to give his father deserved dignity after death. Owen’s brothers had told Dad that the house and everything in it belong to them, not to Owen or his children. Dad had acceded without argument, and had asked if it were acceptable for him to clean the house, to which they agreed. Owen did not have a will, so Dad appointed himself personal representative of the paltry estate. Owen had a small life insurance policy, the proceeds of which Dad gave to his mother to pay delinquent utility bills. Owen had owned three old cars. Probate law at the time allowed for the disposition of one car without going through probate. Dad spoke with the clerk of the probate court, explained that Owen’s only assets consisted of these three junk cars, and asked if he really needed to go through probate court to get rid of them. After a moment’s reflection, the kindly court clerk suggested the law could be read to allow for disposition of all three cars without involving probate, so long as the cars were disposed of one at a time. So, dad quietly sold the cars. A new law student, Dad mentioned this procedure to a law professor, who thought it a novel legal interpretation. Owen’s horse Bomber and prize-winning bull terriers had long since been sold. Left to Dad was Owen’s 1907 Elgin pocket watch. I have seen and held that watch—it is a work of art. Left to us now of Owen are the photos and the stories, which I am grateful to have. Though grandpa Owen died three years before I was born, I love him through those stories and photos.

Courage at Twilight: A Single Tear

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I sat on the edge of Mom’s bed. She was 35 years old. And I was 10. A single tear coursed slowly down her cheek as she confided to me in that quiet private place that her father had died. My grandfather Wallace. We had lived with Wallace and Dorothy a scant two years earlier, where I started 3^rd grade while we waited three months for our lagging visas. Dad had been “called” by our church to “serve” as a “mission president” in Brazil. Translation: Mom and Dad had been invited to work on a volunteer basis leading a group of younger volunteer proselyting missionaries sharing the Gospel of Jesus, as representatives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Dad took a three-year leave of absence from a generous Johnson and Johnson, and Mom and Dad and three young children, including me, made the long voyage to São Paulo, Brazil. It was October 1972. We left behind the tear-stained face of grandpa Wallace, locked in mortal battle with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Dorothy had tried every healing remedy she heard of, including a grape juice diet—after two weeks, her sick husband threw the offered juice across the kitchen in disgust. Wallace fought hard to stay alive until Mom returned home to Utah, and he almost made it. He passed away in April 1975, and we returned in July. Mom did not travel to the funeral, deciding instead to dedicate herself to the mission and to her young family, which then included a new baby. As I sat on the edge of Mom’s bed and watched the lone tear drip down her face, I felt the peaceful warm elixir of great sadness mixed with great hope, the sadness of love and loss, and the hope of healing in Jesus and the promised reunion of resurrection. During his 62 years, Wally (as his friends called him) had organized the construction of church buildings by church members, had led a congregation of thousands as a lay minister, had driven a milk truck and school bus and hay wagon, had picked tomatoes and peas and sugar beets for church welfare storehouses, had been “daddy” to my mommy. Though I last saw his face when I was eight years old, I do not remember his tears of knowing good-bye, but rather his gentle playfulness, his chicken coops and carrot rows and hand-pumped well, and his scruffy smile at me upon his lap.

Pictured above: my grandpa Wally in 1962.

My family preparing to leave for Brazil in 1972.

My grandma Dorothy in 1962.

Courage at Twilight: A Can of Stew

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Dad’s father, Owen, retired early from Utah Oil Company. He lived in his parents’ home, an old, run down, small shack of a shelter. He paid rent to his siblings. The house had few amenities. It had no water heater, so he bathed in cold water. The stove did not work, so he cooked on a hot plate. Only the top oven element worked, so he baked under the broiler. The toilet water tank was broken, so he flushed by pouring water from a bucket into the bowl. He had no clothes washer or dryer. The heat for the house came from a coal boiler, which worked only after building a fire hot enough to burn the coal—often, the house had no heat. Owen lived alone. He made all his own meals, which included no fresh vegetables or fruits. He washed his underclothing and socks in a bucket of cold sudsy water agitated with a toilet plunger; his shirts he took to the dry cleaner. In his early 20s, Dad visited his father one afternoon, and Owen asked if Dad had any money with him. Yes, Dad said, some. Father asked son to go to Safeway, please, and buy him a can of stew, confessing he had not eaten for three days, for he had no money. He had eaten only oatmeal for days before that, until the oats ran out, and he had not eaten anything since. When he did have money for food, his staple diet consisted of bacon and eggs and canned goods. (Where were Owen’s well-to-do brothers? I wondered with a trace of anger.) As a result of these privations and habits, Owen’s health deteriorated. One afternoon, he called Dad to take him to the hospital—he felt very poorly—where the doctor ordered a chest x-ray. “Take a deep breath and hold,” the radiology nurse instructed. Owen growled back, “What the hell do you think I’m here for?!” He was at the hospital because he could not do exactly what the nurse wanted him to do: breathe deeply. He felt he could hardly breathe at all. Dad got his father settled in the hospital that night, and told him he would be back the next morning to check on him. Ten minutes after arriving at home, the hospital called: his father, Owen, was dead. Owen was only 59. Owen’s father, Nelson, died at age 62, also of heart disease. Dad and his brother Bill sat in the hospital room with their father’s body, late into the evening. They both felt a spirit presence in the room, and commented softly to each other about it—somehow, they knew their father had stayed with them in that room in their grief. In a moment, they sensed that Owen had left to go where the spirits of all good, humble, broken men and women go. After graduate school, Dad took up jogging, and ate nutritious foods, so he would not have to die at age 60 of heart disease. Now, at age 86, he remarked to me sadly, “I feel sorry for my father.” I shudder to remember that I am the same age as Owen when he died. How grateful and fortunate I am to have my father still alive, still a pillar of strength and love for the family.

Pictured above: My grandfather Owen with Dad (b. 1935; this photo c. 1939)

My grandfather Owen Nelson Baker, Sr. (1901-1960)

My great-grandfather, Nelson Baker (1871-1933)

Courage at Twilight: Spider Face-Off

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While Dad was reading late one night, a spider emerged from under the sofa, walked slowly toward him, stopped, and stood tall on its front legs, looking up at him, as if challenging, Here I am. What are you going to do about it? Dad knew there was nothing he could do about it—he could never heave himself out of his recliner and catch the spider before it dodged away. Victorious, the spider sauntered nonchalantly back to its hideout under the sofa. A couple of weeks later, another spider scampered across the kitchen floor, near where Dad was standing at the sink scrubbing a pot. This spider, too, looked up at him with a challenge, but Dad simply stomped on it. Dad felt bad, preferring to let these fascinating creatures live—but not in the house. When Dad was a teenager, his father Owen staked out a 40-acre mining claim in the Nevada desert, and occasionally took his two sons to camp in the desert and work the claim. They imagined striking it rich with gold as they dug their holes in the hill. Owen had welded steel plates to the old truck’s undercarriage, allowing him to bowl through sage brush undamaged. After making camp one afternoon on a low flat sandy arroyo, with blue skies overhead, they began to hear a strange rumbling, and looked up to see a wall of muddy water rushing down the dry stream bed. They lurched from their bed rolls and made it with the donkey to higher ground just in time to see their camp entirely washed away. The torrent ended as quickly as it began, and the boys set off down the muddy channel to recover what gear they could find. Here was the stove, and the aluminum plates. And there was the pistol barrel sticking up from the mud and sand. Dad came to a narrow gorge across which a stout plank had once been placed. He was halfway across when an enormous tarantula climbed on the other end of the plank and started to walk toward him. They both stopped and looked at each other for a moment. “I think the tarantula was asking me, Are you going to let me cross, or what? Dad back up and off the plank, and the tarantula recommenced its slow crossing. He watched the tarantula amble off into the desert, and then crossed the gully in the other direction. Since the two recent faceoffs in the house, Mom brought in pest control to spray for spiders—they simply do not belong in the house. But that tarantula was king of the dessert.

(I encountered this migrating tarantula while mountain biking in Settlement Canyon, Tooele, Utah.)

Courage at Twilight: A Drive Down Memory Lane

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We took two drives in two days, Mom, Dad, and me—I drove the faithful Suburban. The first day we drove into the hills, into the gated neighborhoods with the big houses, which grew bigger and fancier with altitude. Several houses were enormous, of the 20,000 square-foot variety, with turrets and weather vanes and wrought iron fences and security cameras. One resembled an English country mansion estate. We felt distinctly uncomfortable at the thought of all the money poured into these lavish houses. We are not wealthy people, and did not know how to relate to such wealth. The next day we drove across the valley to find Mom’s maternal grandparents’ house. We found it in a rundown part of town, with century-old match-box houses, tiny, unkempt, honest, 20 little houses crammed into a single mansion lot. I remember visiting great-grandpa James Evans—I was four. He scooped Neapolitan ice cream into cones from his top-loaded deep freeze. He walked stooped with age, humble but dignified, showing me his little cherry orchard with the concrete ditches ladling irrigation water to each dwarf tree. More than 50 years after that visit, I snapped a photo of his little old house. Around the corner was the Pleasant Green church where my grandfather Wallace first met my grandmother Dorothy. He was a guest minister, and she played the organ. After church, Wally asked Dorothy if he could drive her home, and she accepted. After he dropped her off, she got a ride back to the church so she could take her car home. I snapped a photo of the church, and we drove away from history and memory back into our comfortable present, far across the valley.

Above: the Church where Wally met Dorothy.

Monument to the Pleasant Green church.

Grandpa Evans’ little old house.

Courage at Twilight: Mom’s Rag Rugs

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When Dorothy Lucille (aka Mom, b. 1939) was a child, perhaps age 6 or 7, she accompanied her mother Dorothy Erma (b. 1915) and her grandmother Dorothy Ellen (b. 1895) to visit her great-grandmother Elizabeth Esther (b. 1875). Grandma Elizabeth was crocheting an oval rug from strips of cloth cut from old clothing. Mom liked that Grandma was making something so beautiful from practically nothing: rags. Mom’s matriarchs encouraged her interest with strips of cloth rolled into balls. Grandpa James Edmond carved for her a large oak crochet hook. Mom’s mother taught her the crochet stitch. After marrying Dad, Mom began her serious crocheting of rag rugs—they had no carpet or rugs in their first home. For her first project, in 1962, she sat on the floor and crocheted an enormous round area rug, one small stitch at a time. After Dad retired and the family moved back to Utah, Mom began crocheting again in earnest. She finds her sheets at the Deseret Industries thrift store. She washes and irons them, cuts them into strips with a cutting wheel, and rolls the strips into balls, which she crochets while sitting in her recliner. Her rugs can be found throughout her home and the homes of her children and grandchildren. When I come home from work, or when we watch movies or crime shows (she loves N.C.I.S.), Mom quickly and deftly winds the crochet stitch into a growing oval with multi-colored and patterned sheets. Each rug is unique, some understated and plain, others blaring and fun. Mom taught my daughter Hannah and me the rug crochet stitch, and we have made several rugs. Hannah’s rugs represent a humble work of art six generations in the making.

Here is a sampling of Mom’s rag rugs:

Courage at Twilight: Sunday Afternoon Drive

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Mom asked me almost sheepishly after church, “Do you think, perhaps, we could take a drive today? I would so like to see the old Bawden home my grandparents built.” “Of course!” I answered. “I’m sorry the thought did not occur to me before.” Dad’s faithful Suburban lead us by the back roads across the Salt Lake valley to historic Granger, my mother’s hometown. We noted fondly the orange-dotted pumpkin farms and horse corrals and vegetable gardens, and commented on the architectural eras of the homes—1930s bungalow was our favorite. Mom suggested we drive by the house where Dad lived from 15 to 26, from junior high school to his 1962 marriage to Mom. “I moved here 70 years ago,” he observed flatly. Many of those years were unhappy and traumatic for Dad and his siblings due to trouble at home. But Dad was blessed by the influences of Isabelle Bangerter, Grant Bangerter, and Ella Bennion, all of whom built him up, treated him kindly and with respect, nudged him toward a path of personal fulfillment, and influenced his concepts of self-worth and the life worth living. The tension and sadness I felt in the car evaporated as I drove away. A few miles away, there sat the old Bawden house, strong and modest and pretty, built by the family in the late 1800s. I met my great-grandparents there when I was a little boy as the family gathered for Thanksgiving dinner. In the 1930s, Mom’s father Wallace built a bungalow nearby, for his new wife’s wedding gift, and there Mom grew up, in the new Bawden bungalow near the old Bawden homestead. Granger was all farmland then, with homes separated by miles of farms. Now it is deteriorating strip mall suburbia. I spent many days in Mom’s childhood home, roaming the empty dusty old chicken coops, breathing the soothing old smell of the oil-and-dust garage, pumping the hand well, hunting giant night-crawler earthworms for trout fishing, and roasting hot dogs on the outdoor cinderblock grill at family parties. When my grandma lived in a nursing home in her mid-90s, the family sold the house to the car dealer next door, who razed the prime half-acre and put in a parking lot. I can’t help thinking of Joni Mitchell’s famous Big Yellow Taxi from 1970: “They paved paradise, Put up a parking lot.” I feel grateful I have memories and photographs of that old paradise.

My great-grandparents’ home in Granger, Utah.

Courage at Twilight: Gathering for the Sunset

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In July, just before I moved, Mom told me about how she and Dad sat in picnic chairs in the driveway every evening at 8:45 to watch the sun set, enjoying the colorful clouds. I texted her one night that I would go stand by the apartment complex fence at 8:45 to see the sun set over the Tooele valley, in solidarity with her. While she gazed toward the Oquirrh mountains to her west, I looked toward the Stansbury mountains to my west, each with peaks over 11,000 feet. As July moved into August, our sunset time came earlier and earlier, today already at 7:45. Sitting there in the driveway, the three of us, on our picnic chairs, we waved at neighbors driving or walking by, talked about the day’s work and news, and admired the brilliant colors. With the worst California fires in history, Utah’s sun became an orange-poppy sphere that we could stare at without discomfort for the thick smoke. As the sun dipped behind the mountains one evening, Dad announced, “I can see Venus!” I looked and looked for several minutes, but could not see the “first star.” His cataract removal and lens implants seem to have given him telescopic eyes at age 85, while my 20-20 eyes (thank you Lasik) still searched for the pin point. As the sky darkened, Mom told of when she was six years old and sang at a neighborhood talent show, in the church building, and for the occasion her mother made a dress for her out of rolls of white crepe paper stitched together, with red paper trim and pink paper hearts. Then Dad led us in a round of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” and told me how wonderful my mother is (which he tells me every day, and she is). Soon the automatic sprinklers popped up, and the quarter moon shone a rich orange through the smoky sky.

Rag Rugs

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(Large rag rug crocheted by my mother for my kitchen–October 2015.)

When my mother, Dorothy Lucille Bawden Baker, was a child, perhaps age 6 or 7, she accompanied her mother, Dorothy Erma Evans Bawden (born 1915), and her grandmother, Dorothy Ellen Beagly Evans (born 1895), to visit her great-grandmother, Elizabeth Esther Pierce Beagly (born 1875). Grandmother Elizabeth was crocheting an oval rug from strips of cloth cut from old clothing. My mother noticed it and told them she liked it. Looking back, what caught her attention most was the notion of making something so beautiful from practically nothing: rags. My mother’s matriarchs encouraged her interest and offered to give her a crochet hook and strips of cloth. Grandfather James Edmund Evans (born 1889) carved for her an oak crochet hook. Her mother cut some cloth strips from old clothing for my mother, and taught her the crochet stitch. After my mother’s marriage in 1962, she began her serious crocheting of rag rugs, for she and her new husband, Owen Nelson Baker, Jr., had no carpet or rugs in their home. For her first project, she sat on the floor and crocheted an enormous round area rug. After retiring and moving to Utah in 1998, she began crocheting again in earnest. She found her sheets at the Deseret Industries thrift store, and bought a cutting board and cutting wheel. Her rugs can be found throughout her home and the homes of her children. She has given away many rugs as gifts to family and friends. I recently asked her to teach me to crochet. These small rugs, intended as prayer mats, are my first efforts to crochet something from nothing. I made them for my three daughters and my daughter-in-law for Christmas (2015). I hope that my girls find enjoyment in them, and in knowing that they hold a humble work of art six generations in the making.

The beginnings of Hannah’s rug, with a sun at the center.

Ringed with a light sky, ready for a darker ring of sky.

The sky is complete.

Ready to be circled with dark, rich earth.

Hannah’s rug completed.

Laura’s rug: blue evening sky trending toward sunset and night.

Erin’s rug: sun, sky, and atoll surrounded by ocean.

Avery’s rug.

Chapter 16: Around the Fire Pit

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–I’ll help you learn to walk.–
(Erin-10 to Hyrum)

One Monday evening after dinner, the whole family walked on Rabbit Lane. The sun was setting large and red, and the chilly Spring air settled upon us as we returned home. We gathered around our new fire pit to tell stories, sing songs, and roast apples and marshmallows, sitting on camp chairs and logs. Continue reading →

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