Murray

We moved to Utah during a time that rationing was in place. I remember Mom telling of when things got knocked off our trailer that our stuff was being hauled on, and the jars of jam and the jars of buttons got broken. It was worth the effort to pick each button out of the jam and to try to get all the glass pieces out of the jam to save for future need.

I started kindergarten in Murray. I loved kindergarten. We got to play "kitchen" and we got to take naps on mats. I loved the playground and the merry-go-round thing to spin on. It was a fairly dangerous piece of playground equipment that they outlawed later, but I sure loved it.

In Murray, we used to go sledding down a hill near our house. It was the most fun, but we had to be sure to dump off the sled before it hit either the fence or the creek. But the snow held a major terror for me. Anne and her friend used to tell me and my friend (the friends were sisters) that the devil lived under the ground, and sometimes the ground was very thin between him and us. They would show us tracks in the snow (I decided later they must have made the tracks) and say those were the devil's footprints. It really scared me. Then they would walk along, and suddenly fall down on a knee and say the devil was trying to pull them down. They always escaped, but I was sure scared of what lay beneath the snow.

We had a hay loft that Anne & Lynn used to jump off into the soft hay below. It was so very fun until they got covered with fleas. I remember Mom putting them in the tub and the water was almost solid with floating fleas. (Or else I remember Mom telling us the story)

It was in Murray where Dad started working for Philco. He had to know how to repair the new thing called television, so he was "required" to bring one home so he could get familiar with it. So even tho we were very poor, we were one of the first in the world to have a TV! It was, of course, black and white, and the horizontal & vertical holds were so difficult to control that it had to be one person's job to sit right next to the TV and re-adjust the holds each time the picture started to roll. TV shows started and stopped and there was nothing in between. Programming did not run all day and all night. I remember the National Anthem at midnight and then the TV would go blank until morning. It was all very new and exciting.

Course radio programs were very good before and even after TV was invented. There were programs on the radio that were very entertaining. We used to love to listen to The Shadow Knows! It was a very suspenseful series, but at my young age, I thought it was called The Shadow Nose, and I couldn't understand why a nose was so smart.

I remember the bed in the back freezing room where the 3 of us girls slept and one morning we woke up to see the cat had had her kittens on our bed during the night! I remember Mom had such headaches that she used to get us all up and dressed and then go back to bed. I remember Dad sang in the Ward Choir, and Mom loved to sing too, but with 5 kids, she couldn't. She used to stay home from Church when the choir performed so she wouldn't have to sit through the meeting trying to manage 5 little kids all by herself. (The choir members were required to sit on the stand through the whole meeting.)

It was fun to live near our grandparents and go visit them. They had so much interesting stuff everywhere! I loved looking at stuff in the shed and root cellar and all over the house. They had one kitchen chair with wheels, and I remember pushing each other around and around the house. We must have driven grandma crazy!