Today is Father’s Day. Oh how I wish I could call my dad and visit with him for a little while. Ask him how he is doing. Tell him that I love him. Thank him for being my father. But, of course, I can’t because he left us 10 years ago on January 6, 2000. I have no doubt whatsoever that he is much happier where he is, happily engaged in the work that needs to be done on the other side of the veil, but I still miss him.

How I wish there was a way to tell you about my dad so you could know him just a little. That he was a hard working man who quietly reached out to those in need. How he loved his family. How willing he was to work for the good of the community he lived in with a sure vision of the future that benefited so many. How the world needs men like him today. I can remember him teaching us that compromise was never an option. I must admit that I have struggled with this idea over the years as it would seem that the politically correct way to get something done when you have a group of people attempting to work together is to listen to all opinions in order to find common ground which then, at least in theory, leads to a plan of action that is agreeable to everyone which would lead to action benefiting the group as a whole, at least that is how I think it is supposed to work. I can’t help but wonder what happens when you have a strong personality, like Dad’s, as member of a group discussion. I fear that there would not be a whole lot of agreement resulting in the dread ‘failure to communicate’ with the weaker reduced to filling space while the stronger personalities battled it out for dominance.

This might be a good place to add that there are those who think the camel is the result of committee work. Did you ever wonder if Heavenly Father passed out the paper and crayons to a group of children one day and said, “Here are the things this animal must be able to do, now draw me a picture of what you think it should look like.” Naw, it was probably Heavenly Mother who did that with the hope that if the children were happily engaged she would have a few minutes to get some things done that she needed to take care of. I mean, a camel works and is really quite efficient when it comes to storing water in case one should run out between water holes but I hear tell that they have terrible tempers and won’t move if they think they are being asked to carry too much. But, hey, I have seen children do the same and everyone knows how cute children are, so there is nothing new there. (One of dad’s favorite ways to describe a child was, “Cute as a bug’s ear”.)

Like most things in life beauty is in the eyes of the beholder and, who am I to argue the point? IMO, however, I think a camel is an interesting critter and if I had to make the acquaintance of one or the other I would definitely pick a camel over an alligator . . . . but, hey, that’s just me. In Saudi Arabia camels are allowed to run free which would be okay if they hung out in the desert and never crossed paths with cars but they don’t and they do with the loser being the car and its occupants/s. They even rate their own warning signs just like deer or elk do in this country which, when you see one you should definitely consider taking seriously. As Poncho says in the musical “Man of La Mancha”, “Whether the stone hits the pitcher or the pitcher hits the stone it’s going to be bad for the pitcher”.

Ah, hem, I see that I have diverged from my original point and will now attempt to correct myself which brings to mind MGS Barbara’s class motto which was, “Sit on the tack of success and rise rapidly”. This, of course ranks right up there with the BYU fight song which has a line that says, “Rise and shout the Cougars are out”, which, if one thinks about it, makes eminently good sense.

Dad passed on to his daughters this bit of advice which was, “Don’t try to dodge a small animal on the highway in an attempt to save it’s life as you put yourself at risk if you do.” He was right of course but I have seen him/been with him, more than once, ignore this advice as he attempted to save some small critter’s life. He was also right when he said it was a dangerous thing to try as his efforts at avoidance would sometimes send his vehicle fishtailing down the road. How he managed to stay alive during these escapades I will never know (as he died in his own bed may-hap he knew a few things he didn’t tell us or maybe he was just lucky.) Even if he didn’t follow his own advice, I have which has resulted in my hitting a small dog and a large coyote, both of which I regret as the small dog was a beloved pet and the coyote damaged the front skirt of our brand new car which MGH had to tie up with a shoelace. Sigh.

Dad was never one to beat around the bush if he felt the need to speak plainly about a subject. He once was asked to be on a panel of community leaders (he was serving on the school board at the time) who were asked, by Miss Grace Randell the Home Economics teacher, to speak to the young women in our high school on the subject of waiting for marriage before becoming sexually active, although I believe the official title was more genteel, which she felt was needed as one of our classmates was expecting a baby sans marriage. Talk about embarrassing, I didn’t lose my bright red face for a week. I wonder now, if it might not have been just a little bit embarrassing for him as well as us as this was not a subject he had ever spoken to his daughters about. In fact, if memory serves I believe the closest he ever came to commenting on our sexuality occurred one day when Barb and I were sitting on the front porch with him after supper and chores were done for the day when a car full of boys drove by and honked. Dad made the comment that we should get used to that kind of notice because we were young ladies now and that was the kind of thing young men did. End of conversation.

The memory of a person slips away as they and their contemporaries slide further and further into the past until at last there is no one left who does. But, while my sisters and I yet live – we remember. I find comfort in that thought.

Ah so, time for update on continuing saga of One Woman’s Search as our heroine, that would be me, bravely tackles file cabinets and boxes that hold our rather eclectic collection of memorabilia. Some might say the contents are priceless while those not so inclined would be more likely to say unmentionable words as they throw up their hands in dismay and run shrieking away. Not that they wouldn’t be entirely justified, although I feel it is my duty to toss this thought out for consideration, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure as justification for our stash. To wit, I came across a file labeled ‘immediate action’ dated 1991 left over from the days when MGH was gainfully employed. Not to be outdone, for I too have a few things from bygone days that I have been unable to part with such as a white candle with a now quite smashed bow that was used in a ritual that could only occur at a university like BYU whose mission statement does not include finding the ‘one’ but might as well.

At the time I was going to school (1958-1962) I lived in Heritage Halls (Bowen which I chose because on the map it looked to be closest to campus) which consisted of 24 apartment style buildings for women with three bed rooms in each apt. This allowed six girls to live together in each apartment where we shared a common kitchen/living area. At that time we pooled our money and took turns cooking for each other which was a great learning experience in it’s own way. Not to long after I graduated this practiced was abandoned.

We were closely supervised with curfew at 10:00 pm on week nights when the front door was locked. If we needed to stay out later we had to ask our ‘dorm parents’ for permission. I know, I know, it sounds weird today but those who had problems with the rules soon transferred elsewhere for their schooling. At 10:30 pm. All who wanted to, and many did, gathered in the downstairs lobby area for family prayer. There was also the occasional passing of the candle to keep us up to date on who had just gotten engaged. The candle, which had the engagement ring attached to it, by means of a pretty bow was passed around the circle of girls until it reached its owner where it was claimed amidst hugs and cheers. This ritual was a sweet tradition IMO(In My Opinion) and a memory I have cherished through the years as witnessed by my reluctance to give up ‘my’ candle.

Please excuse the slight jog down memory lane which I just indulged in but if I hadn’t you wouldn’t have understood my reference to a candle I have held on to for 50 years. So now that that explanation is out of the way I will return to just why it was I was once more entering the ‘twilight zone’ of our past. Here, I feel I must insert the obligatory caution given by that paragon of virtue, Miss Grace Randell, who told her Home Economic students on more than one occasion that a good rule of thumb to use when deciding what or how long to keep an item was, “If you haven’t thought of or had a use for an item in a two years you can dispose of it”. Honesty requires that I add that MGH takes exception to this rule and has his own which is, “If you might ever need an item again, keep it”. This conflicting advice has been the cause of more than one heated discussion between us through the years, mainly, I must confess because I find it easier to ‘dispose’ than he does.

The unfortunate circumstance which necessitated my delving was made necessary by a desire on my part to renew my driver’s license as The Great State of Utah now demands to see proof of citizenship in the form of a genuine birth certificate as proof of citizenship. As MGH confidently assured me he had seen my BC just the other day in the one of the green file cabinets located in closet in his office I put off locating it until last week. Just as an aside, considering the flap in Arizona and the resultant uproar from those of a liberal persuasion one might think that there could be no more horrible request made than asking to see one’s identification which seems a little odd to me as I am asked all the time to show my driver’s license before a store will accept a credit card or cash a check or boarding a plane, or when stopped by the police. As a legal citizen this is okay but somehow becomes ‘that which must be done’ if one has entered the country illegally. Which is neither here nor there, I suppose, but it is a bit of a nuisance especially when one can’t lay one’s hands on one’s BC.

However, I do have a document which was issued when I was born by the state of Arizona called a Notification of Birth Registration which has the following statement printed on it. “PRESERVE THIS CERTIFICATE—IT IS VALUABLE” “This notification of birth registration will be valuable in proving the name, age, birthplace, and parentage of the child for school records, working rights, establishing identity, and other purposes.” Ha! What a joke. Unfortunately, this is not acceptable to the State of Utah which means I have to request a new birth certificate from the Arizona Office of Vital Statistics. This is a grim process as I was informed last time round in 1992, when I needed one for a passport, that my records were no longer in the active file because of my date of birth and that this would require a search to be made in the vaults. In my minds eye I could picture a lone figure equipped with a flashlight going up and down long rows of shelves stacked with dusty boxes hunting for the one that contains my record of birth. No wonder it takes longer—I wouldn’t want to go down there either.

I’ve also applied to the Social Security people for a new SS card which I also need to show. While I was at it I requested that my name be changed to Nellie Joanne instead of Joanne Nellie. Don’t even ask how that one happened because even if you ask I won’t tell.

The question of the day then, is this, will our heroine get what she needs in time? If not, what then? Will HGH emerge from retirement and act as her chauffeur as he did in Saudi Arabia? Stay tuned, this could get interesting. . . .

I suppose there was one good thing that occurred this last week as I dug through file cabinets and boxes trying to find my birth certificate. (All to no avail.) I did, however, find a few things that might be of interest to family and friends who knew my father. Here is a copy of a letter that MGSK sent me in 1991. It was written in 1982.

“Dear Brother Smithson, as I respond to your request of the Sunday just past to share with you on of the treasured memories of my youth. I bear humble testimony to you that I know the Gospel is true and has been restored in its fullness in these latter days for all those who will give heed to His teachings while living here upon the earth as well as those who have been called in death who would have accepted had they heard the Gospel preached in its fullness while alive and able to participate in the necessary ordinances that can only be performed here on earth.

Like Nephi, I feel that I was born of goodly parents and I received a christian upbinging from my staunch Methodist mother. My father was rather cool to all denominations and would have nothing to do with the various sectarian churches that we came in contact with while I was growing up in the Verde Valley area of central Arizona. Though we had very little in worldly possessions and my dad’s health was such that he could do little more than a minimum amount of physical labor on our small rented farm or in a wage earning capacity, he was kind and good to us and perfectly willing for us to attend church or Sunday school with my mother. With one exception I do not ever remember of seeing my dad in a church house or attend a religious meeting of any nature. The one exception remains vividly in my memory and on this occasion an evangelist was holding nightly meetings in the community little red school house located about a mile from our home and where my brother and I and my two sisters attended school during the week and were dragged off to Sunday school by my mother. The evangelist or preacher as we called him visited our community once every year and held nightly services in the little school house for five or six nights at a time. He had built the enthusiasm of his audience up to a fever pitch on this perticular occasion to such an extent that my mother was able to persuade my dad to attend the last meeting of the week involved. My father refused to dignify the occasion by sitting as the rest of the family did but chose instead to stand just inside the back door of the building, and leaned up against the wall. The eloquent soul stirring sermon that the preacher made and the subsequent “alter call” brought several of us younger folks and one or two adults up to the front of the room where we stood as examples of the faithful who were willing to accept Christ as our Savior while the pleadings of the minister continued in an effort to save the others from hell and damnation. As my dad had not appeared at any previous meetings, the minister seemed to direct all his attention onto him and walking slowly back to the end of the building where my dad was standing, he took him by the arm to try and persuade him to accept Jesus as his savior, especially now since his oldest son had let the way. But my dad was resolute and slipped out the door that he had kept so handily at his side when he entered the building for the sermon.

My Father passed away jut a few years after that occasion and I remember how sad it made me feel, when told by some ministers that he indeed was one of the many lost souls which the devil had claimed for his kingdom. I did not understand this reasoning but as I knew no better I put up with it with a very sorrowful heart.

With this preface you can understand what a beautiful thing I found the true gospel to be, wherein it taught me that my dad whom I loved very much, was not condemned to hell because he had not accepted the pseudo teachings presented to him and that he would have the the true gospel of the Savior preached to him in Paradise and that could act as a proxie for him in the necessary earthly ordinances and under the circumstances described be as efficacious as though performed here on earth on his own body. This indeed is a glorious truth restored in these the Latter Days and I rejoice that I could not only be baptized for my dad but also with the aid of my good wife was permitted to kneel across an alter in the Temple, House of the Lord, where one with the Keys to so do, sealed my dad and my mother for time and all eternity to themselves and to their children, who I hope and pray will accept this great gospel while here upon the earth, so that we can be a family together throughout the eternities. I truly believe that His sheep will hear His voice and respond elatedly to His Alter Call.
Sincerely, your servant in the Gospel

Bro. Ford Gano

MGH was able to be with Dad and Lucille when they did the proxy work for his father in the Washington D.C. Temple in 198_. I asked him to write about this experience which he did.

Washington Temple Experience

I was with Ford and his second wife, Lucille, at the Washington Temple when they were doing the work for Ford’s father Paul Elbert Gano. During the sealing I had the distinct feeling that his father was there in the room with us observing and approving what was being done. I also had the impression that I knew him in the pre-existence.
These were not just idle thoughts, but definite spiritual promptings.
I believe I wrote this in my journal at or near the time it happened when my memory of it was fresher, but I can’t put my hand on it right now.
DeVon F. Andrus
Cedar City, Utah
16 May 2010

Having been promised great and dreadful things to come due to a “serious” storm front moving across the great state of Utah I awakened this morning not to howling winds but a sunny sky and quiet outside. How nice! Yesterday was another straighten up the fallen as it was also trash day and once again our tipped over containers dotted the landscape which meant I again went into battle to reclaim what was mine before it slid on down the block which I am sure was the intent as ours had already abandoned the spot where I originally left it to make it’s way past the driveway where it paused for a few seconds in front of the mailbox thus allowing me just enough time to raise it from it’s prostrate position. Thank goodness the wind didn’t come up until after the trash man came and here I must leave it to your imagination to picture the grim result of flying debris all around the neighborhood if we had been caught with our cans full, if you catch my drift. Yuck.

Oops. Spoke to soon. Wind came as promised. Up North there was a gust strong enough to blow a semi over. We have been colder than normal by about 20 degrees this week which means that the plants I so optimistically purchased two weeks ago are on hold in the garage as the temperature at night keeps dropping into the 20’s and while I trust in the Lord with all my heart I also realize that he is not likely to perform a miracle in my behalf if I knowingly choose to ignore the effect of cold temperatures on tender plants.

Here’s a bit of trivia from the past. I found a little card with a handwritten note from mother that is dated June 26, 1962. It reads:

Dear Joanne & family,
Barbara says I should tell you about my success in getting rid of the bugs in the kitchen. We still have some of the little fellows but the population has greatly decreased. I got a pkg. Or box of D.D.T powder. I have sprinkled this dry under the drawers in the kitchen. I’ve sprinkled it on the shelves and put paper over the top. This keeps dishes or food from coming into direct contact with the powder. It is quite inexpensive and the most effective thing I have found.
Grants are coming this next weekend. We are planning a picnic in the park for Sunday.
Hollis is ready to be baptized but hasn’t gained the consent of his parents yet.
We got the car back Sat. It was a $750.00 job. It looks like new. We had $50.00 deductible insurance. I’m fast becoming an insurance believer.
Daddy is just about ready to plant beans. He wants to cut the grass fro hay down at Mt. Sterling this week too.
We are cleaning, sewing, ironing, gardening etc. Darlene does the milking in the evening.
Snort is having trouble with his feet again. This is the first time in quite awhile tho.
Fairbourns have had their closing out sale. They plan to leave next Monday on a trip to Ariz & Utah job hunting, I guess. Winters are going to the Temple. They are leaving this week.
Love, Mother

p.s. We are still talking Utah in August.
Nellie Juanita Waddington Gano

I believe this picture was taken around the time the above letter was written which would put mother somewhere in her middle 40’s. Sadly, although none of us knew at the time, she would be with us for only three more years. I have been taking a family history class at church and one of the things we are supposed to do is get all our materials i.e. letters/pictures/certificates together in one spot. This is a good idea and will no doubt be accomplished if the Good Lord is willing and I live long enough, which I will have to as I am so disorganized that it will take at least that long to go through all my boxes and the only hope for success I have is to live to a very old age. . . . AAR(At Any Rate) I keep turning up stray letters and pictures which I shall in turn share with you. Please return the favor and write what you remember about your years at home as a Gano Girl. We are rather unique you know! No one knows our story but us. Scary thought that, isn’t it.

P.S. They did come to Utah in the summer of 1962 to attend my graduation from BYU.

We located in a place back here in the Keosauqua area. There had to be a church, an LDS Church, where we could go to church, and we found out that there was a little branch located there in Keosauqua, so that part was taken care of. As far as suitable housing, why, I kind of missed the boat on that. I didn’t find on farm I’d contracted to buy, it didn’t have suitable housing, not according to what Nellie wanted, and the landlady that owned it hadn’t lived up to her part of the agreement, getting it suitably cleaned out so we could move in anyway. So we all three, Grandma Waddington, Nellie and I went out and started looking for a different place to locate.

Well, we looked at quite a few places. We found many of them that were just too high priced, way above our budget we had allowed for settling in. But on Highway 2, which was about 5 – 7 miles, somewhere around there, from Keosauqua we located a house that was vacant and on 110 acres of land, all farmable, at least mostly all farmable. It had a creek running down through the middle of it, which was not farmable, but outside of that there was at least 90 acres of it that could be farmed. It had a nice big Midwest two-story farm home on it. The only trouble was, the owner lived in Nebraska, so before we could make any kind of a deal there, we had to drive back to Nebraska, after we had found out who owned the place. We thought maybe that would be a good place to have, because of the nature of the house; with four big bedrooms upstairs, a big living room, a big kitchen, and a smaller bedroom downstairs which we figured would be a good place for Grandma to live, because she didn’t like to climb stairs anyway. We realized we would have to make a lot of improvements to the house in order to make it in any way comparable to the house we moved out of, as far as the kitchen was concerned, and in general. But we decided that we would see what we could do about it, so we took off to Nebraska and locating the lady that owned it. She was very reluctant. She wanted to sell it, but she didn’t want to sell it at the price we would give it to her. So she was a very reluctant seller. So we went back, and told her to think over our offer there for $13,000 for that 110-acre farm.
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I believe I ended off with while we were trying to buy a farm out here on Highway 2, that belonged to a lady in Nebraska. As I think the last words I had was we had kind of left our offer to her and told her to make up her mind. She decided to go along with it, so we immediately produced the cash to buy it from her.

To sum it up, she did change her mind, after about 4 or 5 months, maybe, she called us up and said she was willing to make a deal. So we did and bought the farm. We’d always called it the Jamison Farm, that wasn’t the name of the lady that owned it when we bought it, that was the name that was on the barn out there. So we always called it the Jamison Farm, three 40’s on one side, south side of Highway 2, split in half, about, by the creek, which took away some of the inconvenience of farming right straight through. Well it made a pretty good little operation to start right out with, and I’m going to just leave that part for a later time, and come back up to the house situation.
We had quite a bit of work to do on the house, in order to make it suitable to live in. Nellie wanted the kitchen, all the cupboards remade in the kitchen, and other things that had to be done to make it a suitable place that she was happy with. So we started working on doing that, we did re-wallpaper the whole house, and I worked in the kitchen cabinet work for, I guess, at least 6 weeks or two months, to get those straightened out and new cabinets on the wall. They weren’t fancy, or anything, but they did have latches on them, and the doors swung open and shut, etc. So we had a good sink in it on one side, and we put in a bathroom. Although it had a full bathroom upstairs, it didn’t have any facilities downstairs for bathing. So I put in a half bath downstairs, and that made it so Grandma Waddington could take care of her cleaning needs right down there on the same level as her bedroom was located.

[Break]
For the first school year and a half, the girls had to go to a country school. I don’t think they thought it was too big a punishment, although Joanne went to the Cantril High School, or central school. The other girls split up to other locations. We never did think the Cantril School was very high quality, so we switched them over to the Keosauqua district as soon as we were able to do that. So we lived there in Iowa on the old Jamison Farm from 1953 through the rest of our school life for the girls. They all graduated from the Keosauqua High School, and I think all had a good time doing that.
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The church facilities in Keosauqua, were not very, you might say, high standard. We met in a rented building downtown, the library building that the church rented, on Sundays only, we had to go in on Sunday morning and clean up, start the furnace in the basement, etc. It wasn’t an ideal place to be having church, but we managed. It was an LDS church. I don’t know just what year I was made Branch President, but I think it was 1955, sometime in there. Merle Fairbourne was called to be on the district presidency. We were in the East Iowa District, with headquarters in Chicago. He was called to be the District President at that time, and when he was called, I was made the Branch President. During those years, several years of time there, all of us were determined that we were going to have a building of our own, and pulled whatever strings we could work to bring that about. The mission president came to visit us two or three times. In fact, we had three different mission presidents during that time, but the third one finally got us permission to start a building, a building of our own. In the meantime, we were having a lot of families that were going to church there, we had about 34 or 40, faithful families, faithful members. We needed the facilities, we needed the building very badly. We were given permission to buy a lot, and we found one up north of Keosauqua, which was priced so that the church was interested in it. With the permission of the District President, we
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With the permission of the Mission President, we purchased there a two-acre plot of land in the location that I mentioned, on the north end of the Keosauqua town itself. Still within the city limits, but we had to provide our own facilities up there, sewer system, because the town did not have a sewer up there that far out of town. But we managed to get the building built, with the hard work of the Relief Society, and all the Brothers. I guess there are many stories written about the Donuts, and all the food manufacturing process the Relief Society went through to get the goods to sell to the local people to get the extra cash to build. So I’m not going to delve much into that.
We finally hired a contractor to start on the building, and it took quite a while. We were allowed to help on it as much as we can. It was 1960 before we moved into our new building. We moved into it before it had been dedicated, in fact before it was completely finished. But it was much more suitable for our use, with classrooms and bathrooms and meeting room available for our use. It was really crowded though, even for the number we had coming here in Keosauqua, so we determined somehow or another to get an addition to our building. And we did, but that’s a later story.
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I had come in to about a farmer-sized dairy system, which I had about 15 or 16 that we’d milk by hand out there at the Jamison farm, with the girls helping me, and I’ll tell you about that later on, too.
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Cash funds were a little short when we first started out. Nellie decided she would try teaching school, so she applied around, and finally got a job down in Missouri, down on the way from Mt. Sterling, where she taught along with another teacher from Keosauqua, she taught a little two-room school in Missouri. Her salary was not real great, but nevertheless it amounted to a little something on the side. She made an exceptionally good teacher, I think, and applied herself 100%, and finally was given a job in the Keosauqua system, where she was teaching the children that needed extra schooling.
[Long break in the recording. Apparently he was speaking without the microphone plugged in, because the narrative abruptly resumes several minutes later on the tape.]

…we cannot take care of her here, you’ll have to take her to the hospital in Iowa City immediately. Do not waste any time at all. So that very afternoon she was loaded into an ambulance and taken into Iowa City for treatment. Well, that entailed me making the trip up there daily, even while I was trying to take care of the farm, milk the cows, etc. The only one, all the rest of the girls had gone off to school, some of them graduated, some of them still going, but Kathy was home to help me, and we did the best we could. She did a wonderful job, you might say, a fourteen or fifteen-year-old girl(note 1). I was really proud of her. The day that Nellie was taken to Iowa City in the ambulance, somebody had to go along with her, and she and I, you might say, pulled straws to see who would go with her, and she got the assignment. She didn’t want to milk the cows. So she got in that ambulance and rode all the way to Iowa City with her mother, and helped get her settled up there in that location. Of course, she came home later on, just as quick as she could get away free to do so.

I made it a point to drive up there every day that Nellie was laying there, in the hospital, with the diagnosis of a very difficult case of leukemia. The doctor told me when he called me in for a special session, “I don’t know whether we can help your wife or not. We’re going to try the best we can, and it’s going to take a lot of endurance and patience on her part.” She did that very well. She was 100% all the way.

But to no avail. Only thirty days after she entered the hospital, I called up early one morning to find out how she was, and the hospital doctor told me “Well, I’m sorry to tell you, but your wife died this morning about 4 o’clock.”

Well, I’d been up there late the day before, and at that time, I talked to the doctor, and he said “We’re going to switch her over to a new medicine right now, to see if it will do any good.” But it didn’t, so we lost her that night.
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…had done several things on the farm, planned to make a little side money while we were living there. She had bought poults one year, I guess it was a hundred of them maybe, and put them up in the top roof loft of our hay barn that we had there on our farm, to raise them up there. Poults, these were chickens that do nothing but just sit down and eat, and drink water, and make very delicious chicken meat at the end of about six weeks. But they had to endure one summer in the heat of the loft of that barn; it turned out to be a very costly proposition. We lost a great many of them. Nellie was very sad about that, because she was striving to do her best to help out at all times. In the meantime, she was still teaching school, taking care of the poults when she’d come home, as far as everything we had done here.

Now in the meantime, I had made arrangements with FHA to build a Grade A milkhouse out there alongside of the road on our farmland, and it adjoined all the farm barns and buildings there. We had put up a pole barn we had to keep hay or keep cows in the wintertime. And then we had to put up a nice brick building to house the milking operation. The milking operation of course, if you know anything about a Grade A setup, was done by herding the cows into a holding corral, and then letting them in one at a time alongside of a working chute, which was 3 or 4 feet lower than the level of the ground. We had facilities for washing them off with hoses, and then attaching milkers to them. The milk was sucked up, pumped by vacuum, up glass tubes into the milk house itself, which contained a big 1000 gallon tank, where the milk was finally deposited and then held until it could be picked up by the truck from St. Louis. We sold our, we had decided to sell our milk down in St. Louis, to a dairy down there, and they had a truck up here about as often as every other day, sometimes every day if the herd was producing well.

Well, the milk house had the facilities that made milking a lot easier. It had the facilities for the holding pen, the cattle corral, and feed overhead, it was just a pretty neat operation. The girls helped me very much. They’d help me quite a bit, in fact they did a lot of the milking in the old horse barn when we first started out, bring cows in to a stall, four cows at a time, and there we washed them off with a bucket of hot water carried out from the kitchen, cleaned them up and got them ready, and then milked them by hand. Dumped the milk out into a 5-gallon can, and then carried the can into a holding tank that was electrical cooled, until they hauled it into town to the Creamery. We sold our product at that time at the Keosauqua Creamery, and got our egg money and everything at that location.
Well, that was the start of our dairy business. We got into that a little more thoroughly. DeVon Andrus, my son-in-law, had gotten into the operation, in 1960, wanted to get started in the operation in 1960, brought his family… well, I shouldn’t say brought his family, he brought himself out here, and left all of his children behind him that first time. He had six children at that time, but his wife had died, and he came out here kind of seeking a new life. He taught in high school; he was a good math teacher, and got a job in the Keosauqua math department, where he taught school, as well as he would come out and help a little on the dairy farm when he could find a bit of time to help milk and one thing or another.

Well, we were in a kind of a partnership deal there. I did most of the milking, and he did most of the managing, working while he was teaching school. He just simply had too many school operations to take care of to do much actual milking out in the milkhouse. He savvyed cows very well, though, and he understood the milking operation very well. But while he was here, he wooed my oldest daughter, and they decided to get married.

Well, that’s a different story, too, and I’ll leave that to another department.
DeVon was here, then, and Nellie and I let DeVon move in with his family, when he took Joanne to wife (note 2) and came back here. They first lived in Utah, where he was teaching school there when he first came out. But they decided that they’d come back here to live, and brought his girls back, or brought his whole family with him, which consisted of the four girls and two boys, all very intelligent kids, girls boys and all. They all went to school in Keosauqua, and did very well there. I have an interesting story to tell, sometime, about Mark, who is DeVon’s second son. Hey, Devon had 3 sons, and Mark was the youngest one. Well, I get mixed up pretty well, all through these things that I’m trying to remember.

When DeVon first came to live here, and bring his family here, Nellie and I decided that we would let them live out in the farm house, and we would move into town. So we came into town, and we couldn’t find a place suitable to live that we could afford, so we decided then to buy a trailer house, so we bought a very nice little two-bedroom trailer house. Kathy was still with us, so we needed to have at least 2 bedrooms in it, and this little trailer house had just that. So we set it up in Keosauqua. But after living in that trailer house for about 6 months, I called it the Dodge house, I got so tired of that, that I said, “We’ve got to find some other place to live.” And then the Shag Place, which just was about a mile north of the Jamison farm came up for sale. So we bought that place from him, when he sold out, and moved into the house that was there on that farm.

Now, I guess the best way to describe the place where it was located was simply just about a mile and a half from the farm house on the way in to Keosauqua along the park route, going in to the Keosauqua Park. At that time, we could cross Indian Creek, and go directly into town from farm, down by the Shag house, on in to Keosauqua, and that’s the way we usually traveled, going into town.
Later on, when Lake Sugema…(note 3)
[end of tape]

1 This note deleted to preserve privacy of living persons. However, the date of this event would have been spring 1965.
2 DeVon and Joanne were married 1 June XXXX, in the Salt Lake Temple.
3 Indian Creek was dammed in the early 1990’s to create Lake Sugema, now one of Iowa’s premier hunting and fishing spots, and a major tourist draw for Van Buren County. The large lake covered the old Park Road, making it necessary to travel first east on Hiway 2 and then north on Hiway 1 to get to town from the Jamison place. The old bridge over Indian Creek was removed, and the point where the

So, Elizabeth, you asked in your letter, you had the one question there: why did I choose to move back to Iowa, to bring my family back here. Well, some of the reasons of course, I have touched on. But there were many negative factors about it. The house, as I had mentioned, was practically brand new. We had lived in it only two years. It was a beautiful house, not great big or anything like that, but it had four bedrooms and big bay window out facing the side of the house, into the back yard of the neighbor’s yard. But Nellie had planned it, and we were very grateful and very happy with it. Why did we want to leave that?

I mentioned the sickness that I was getting, the dizziness that was bothering me. It did not seem like to me that I was capable of taking care of business like I should at Western Milling Company. On top of that, Mr. Hayward, David E. Hayward, was his name, was having to come over from Phoenix to kind of fill in for my being unable to miss work there. He did not appreciate that. When his son came back off of his mission, he decided that maybe he’d let him learn the milling business, and the selling business of the goods that were milled, the materials that were manufactured there at Western Milling Company. So Dave Jr. went out with me at the office for perhaps 2 months, and I kind of felt that maybe that was the way the apple cart was running anyway, that eventually Dave Jr. would take over there.

On the other hand, I’d always wanted to be a farmer; I’d always wanted to get in to farming. I started out my agricultural training, my schooling, with that idea in mind. I wanted to be in agriculture. After having come through and visited in the Midwest, when we came back with our new car from South Bend, Indiana, we had seen some beautiful cornfields, bean fields, some fairly cheap land there back here in the Midwest. It was practically impossible to get into farming there in the Salt River Valley, because land was going from $2,000 to 5,000 an acre. A beginner, unless he had somebody to finance him, could just not take over and get into it right off the bat.
So, we thought about it a lot, and Nellie and I decided together, that perhaps this was the way to go. She gave up her new home, which was the first new home she had ever lived in, and she really enjoyed it there. However, she did have a health problem, and we didn’t know for sure how that was going to be taken care of back here in the Midwest. But we were trusting on the Lord that maybe things would work out in a positive fashion.

We also had to take the girls out of school. All of them but Kathy were enjoying the schools there in Mesa. They enjoyed their training, their teachers, their circumstances there were all very well. So it was really a lot of negatives attached to this.

One of the other negatives was trying to get enough money out of our new house, even though it was only 2 years old, to pay more than the equity we had in it. Now, Grandma Waddington had helped us with buying the lot our house had set on. We had built the house. We had financed it in order to get it built, constructed. But we decided that if we could make the trip back here to the Midwest, and get a suitable location, that we’d come back into the Midwest and try out farming.

There was also the alternative I had of farming one of, or all of Grandma Waddington’s farms in Nebraska. She had several hundred acres of land there in Nebraska [chuckles]. It was up in the Sand Hills, it was neither very productive, nor very expensive. And the environment, I didn’t think, was very livable, and neither did my wonderful wife Nellie. But I did go back there one summer, while I was still working at Western Milling Company, and I did put in a crop there by borrowing equipment from neighbors, and from other renters of Grandmother Waddington’s, just to see what it was all about and what it was like. Well, there was a great deal of wind all the time, the sand would blow, and I didn’t like the climate. Neither did Nellie like the climate, because she had to dust off the windows every day the time that we were there, and so on and so forth. So at the end of that one summer that I went back there just to see what I could do, I was not very much in favor of staying in Nebraska.
So we decided to head for “Ioway”.

We settled up with Western Milling Company Management Company. And much to my surprise we found out that I had done well enough there at Western Milling Company to have a little equity in the company from my partnership arrangement. They in turn, although they did not have cash to pay me off, they said, “Well, would you settle for some of the equipment we have here? A tractor, a plow, some of things you might need back there?” They also had a ton-and-a-half truck that I thought could be used very well for moving. So with that arrangement, I made a settlement with Western Milling Company, and took out for the new quarters in Iowa.

Now, we could not all come at once. The two girls and I came ahead. I had been back here several times anyway, in the pick-up that I owned, and knew what the roads were like, and knew what the situation was like back here. So we decided that Nellie and her mother… In the meantime, I kind of left out here, in the meantime nanny Waddington, the relative that we’d brought over from England, had found her husband up somewhere up around Logan Utah. And figuring out that she had earned her keep (actually, it was paying for her ticket we’d bought for the steamship and the cost of her moving from England over to the United States), we decided we were about even on that, and she went up with her husband. And we were taking out on our own to come back here.

[recording ends]

Ford I. Gano History – Tape 7 Side B
Well, I sure did a miserable job on the other side, side one, Elizabeth, or you can straighten it out the way it should be by simply saying that the Western Milling Company office was located at the main ranch on the Tremaine Farm at the railroad crossing, and was simply an office building in which I was headquartered, plus the working operations, which I tried to describe on the other side. The big grinding mills, seed house, and etcetera, as well as corrals that housed the feeding situation that Western Milling carried on with the animals that were raised to be fattened out. This was simply cattle, it was no other animals raised here. They did not handle sheep, they did not handle chickens, or rabbits or etcetera.

Now, I don’t know whether on one of the other tapes I described the operations of the milling company or not. I simply supervised and managed the four divisions of the company, which included the hay operation, the milling operation, and the cattle operation, the marketing operation, with the help I had there in the office, which included the girls who weighed the products as they were brought in from the fields or the farms, the [break]

The Tremaine office was located on the railroad siding, where cars could be brought in from the main line in Mesa, and placed out there on the siding for the products were shipped out. Sometimes we were shipping cattle, most of the time we were shipping the hay, and the byproducts of the hay were taken to the milling company, were sewed up in sacks, and loaded up on the railroad cars, and shipped to various people who wanted the ground up feed
[break]

My primary responsibility was to market the products that we produced at the milling company. The girls took the phone calls, and passed on the information or hooked me up to clients that needed to talk directly to me as manager of the company, etc., etc. Now, in marketing the products they’re in, I had to travel quite a bit to the West Coast and the East Coast. I think I described it at one of other place along the line, one of the trips the former manager of the milling company had taken me to kind of break me in, to show me how to get along and how to meet the people who bought the products. These of course were very important clientele. So most of this kind of an operation was made by plane. On one operation, Stanley and I had gone by car, traveled around the areas we were marketing in, and made a trip. One operation we had gone out to New York, that was when I was learning to operate the situation, and while in New York, we took in a few sights. It was a big trip, and quite exciting for m
e. I got Stanley, he took me to all the beautiful areas of that big New York City, I think, the Ice Capades, which I can still remember to this day, and the trip down there to the seashore, ocean to New Orleans by boat. We left the upper East Coast by a
[break]

…the Atlantic ocean side, and actually this ocean liner we were riding in, did not get out into the ocean. Most of the time we could see the land, so we always felt safer. I always felt a little safer, riding down there, I never did get over the feelings I felt from the seasickness I got on that trip. But I got over that in a hurry because of the fun I had on that trip.

Well, we came clear on down to New Orleans, and we took the railroad train back in to the other areas we wanted to go to. Well, that was my biggest trip as I got broke in to that business. I never did try to make that trip again by myself, but I took several trips to many of the points back there, which included Chicago, and Boston, clear on down to St. Louis and New Orleans and again back by car. I usually had someone along with me to help do the driving when we went by car.
We had cars that were leased to us by the company for our travel needs.
[break]

… West Coast area that we sold to, I usually traveled by plane, leaving Phoenix and landing at Los Angeles, using that as a sub-headquarters, I would rent an automobile and go to the different locations I needed to go to.
[break]

I really enjoyed the 10 years I spent there at Western Feed and Seed, which was the name of the company we were in, that I was operating. The last year I was there, I had some health problems that had come up. This was on top of Nellie’s tuberculosis problem, which came, was very depreciating to all of us. Her doctor had to put Nellie into a health resort there which was between Mesa and Phoenix, where she spent 3 months of her life. During that time while she was there, well just before she went into that facility. Kathy was born, our last daughter. She was a charming young lady, too. I’ll have to tell you more about her later on. But in the meantime, it was very, oh I had some of the most low feelings, low periods of my life, while Nellie was in the sanatorium.
I was enjoying my time in the church there, and while living Mesa, going to the fourth ward, I was called to be a records clerk. They had a financial clerk that took care of the financial part of the bookkeeping, but I was the records department clerk. I kept track of and care, and met with the bishop once a week to see that this department was going the right way it should. So, it was a very enjoyable time, except for the time that Nellie was in the sanatorium. It was very hard on her. She missed her new little daughter, as well as all the others, very much. Her mother had come up to live with us and of course help take care of the children. Actually, she had built a house, up there adjoining the lots that we were on, so she could be near to the family there, and she took care of the children during the time that Nellie was in the sanatorium. It was a pretty big job though.

After Nellie got out of the sanatorium, we learned that there was a member of the church living in England who was a relative of the Waddington family, who would like to come to America, if they could find a sponsor over here for this sister. So Nellie volunteered for that sponsorship, with the understanding that she would be able to work off the costs of the trip and one thing or another, by helping us in our home while Nellie was recuperating, getting her health back. We did this, and the girls got a real big kick out of having a nanny living right there in the house with us. She was a real interesting character, and we all enjoyed her very much, and she took care of the girls in very good fashion, and so relieved Grandma Waddington and a lot of the work that Nellie was doing at that time.
Nellie and I were both busy with church callings. Of course, we had moved, I should say that at one time, oh I’m getting mixed up here again [break]

I confuse myself sometimes and I don’t know what I’m saying. We were living at about 600 block on 4th street, which was an old brick house when the first Mormons came into Mesa. It was owned by Ralph Fuller, who lived in an adjoining house, and who had sold the old house to us, very cheaply I might add, so we could afford it, and while we were living there, the ward was moved out on 4th avenue. This was a new ward which was put up, called the 9th ward. And while we were getting ready to move into the the 9th ward, we were in the 7th ward which was out there also. So we’d been in 4 different wards while living there in Mesa. And in the 9th ward, the bishopric was the same as it was before, and I was again called in as record keeper in the recordkeeping department [break]
I was an official part of the bishopric, although I didn’t have any say in the operation of the ward. At one time, none of the bishopric could go to the general conference in Salt Lake, so Bishop Allen suggested that I make the trip if I possibly could. Well, I, in fact, he sent me out there as an official representative of the 9th ward, and I really felt important, and I really enjoyed for the first time in my life listening to the President of the Church, and all the officers of the church speak directly to us in that great big house.
[break]

To meet in that big tabernacle with all the other bishoprics and etc of the various wards that came in, it was a tremendous sight and a beautiful experience to wander around that building and see all the flowers and all the tremendous adornments that they had put up for those meetings. David O. McKay was the president at the time that I was out there, and I did get to shake hands with him on one occasion.
[break]

… at home in Mesa. As I said, the last year that I was there in Mesa, and operating Western Milling Company as manager, I had some poor health of my own. I was getting hard of hearing, I couldn’t hear very good, so I went to every doctor, every clinic both in Mesa and in Phoenix, to see if I could get it cured, but they could never do any good for me, although I had some of the best medical services that were available at that time for that situation. I just couldn’t keep myself upright, I wasn’t able to walk straight without falling over or something. I was getting dizzy quite a bit of the time. So the last summer I was there, Brother Heyward, my supervisor from Western Farm Management Company, said, well, maybe you’d better take a vacation for a while. Why don’t you just go up to Snowflake for the summer, and see if you can’t get over this situation. So the family and I did that, we rented a house in Snowflake, and my girls and wife and I really enjoyed that trip up there. Grandma did not go with us on that trip. We rented a house, and went to the ward in Snowflake, and enjoyed our lives very much while living there. We came back and renewed our acquaintances that we had made there prior to our becoming members of the Church. So I always amazed everybody by meeting them, whom they had known as Mr. Gano, by now becoming Brother Gano.

But I enjoyed the situation very much. Much of the time we spent up at the mountains there at Show Low, at the lakeside, up above it, where Nellie’s relatives had a cabin rented, and we would go up there and visit, and I would go fishing. I enjoyed a lot of good trout fishing while up there. Well, so much for that.

In the next to the last year, in other words the 8th year with Western Milling Company, I had a chance to buy a new car direct from the factory, in other words I had to take possession of it back at the factory. This was a cooperative deal where the Western Farm Management company, who bought all their cars from one company, which were Studebakers, by the way, I bought a car from Studebaker in Mesa to be delivered
[break]

So in 1951, I’m not positive about that date, I made arrangements for Nellie and I to go to South Bend Indiana, to pick up a new Chevy touring car. We saved about $500 I think by picking it up back there, the freight we were saving, and some kind of dealer cost that was knocked off. Well, Nellie and I had a nice trip by train from Mesa Arizona back east to the midwest, and at that time, we came in to Kansas City, the place was just about floating in water, the Mississippi river backed clear up into the Missouri river, and the whole midwest was just under water almost. So we just had to creep along with the trains, because many times it was actually traveling in water as we traveled along the banks of rivers. But we made it through all right. We finally reached South Bend, and made arrangements to have that car delivered to us. And boy did we feel free and happy when we took off in that car of our own, brand spanking new. Well, we had had a brand spanking new car earlier, because I had bought a new Ford passenger car after Nellie and I got married. So we had that new, and used it a good deal until it got old enough so we would want a new one. This one really felt good.

Well, to make another long story short, while we were back here picking our car up, we made a trip back home through the Midwest, and remembering the Flake people whom we knew in Snowflake, we thought maybe we might stop by this area, and get acquainted maybe, and re-meet and enjoy some of our old acquaintances. So we made our trip back from South Bend, through Keosauqua.

Here in Keosauqua, we met our old friends that we knew back there in Snowflake. They showed us a good time, and we stayed here a couple of days, and then headed on back home. But while here, I was quite impressed by the farming situation, and I was even thinking quite a bit at that time about getting into farming in some way or another, because of the health condition that I had there at Western Milling Company. I couldn’t stay upright sometimes to take care of my business. But driving on back to Mesa we had a lot of time to think about it, and when we got back to Mesa, after hugging our kids, and loving them and so on and so forth, being back with our family and showing off our new car, we decided at that time, and talking it over with Grandmother Waddington, she decided that she might want to come back with us.

To get back to the straight of things, while living there in Mesa Grandma Waddington had bought two lots right next to our own rented house on 604 4th street, and she wanted a house built, so I made arrangements to have the contractors build a nice little 3 bedroom bungalow type house that would just fit her in good shape. The 3rd bedroom was made into a sewing room, she liked to sew and do things like that. Well, we had that built, and she moved into it. Also, Nellie and I had decided to have a house built back here. This was before thinking about getting into farming, of course, so we contracted and made arrangements to have a house built there in Mesa Arizona, on the lot next to Grandma Waddington’s. Now I say Grandma Waddington had bought two lots, one of which she gave to Nellie, and we had our house built on that.

I also might mention that at this time, this location on south Hibbert Street, about 342,344 South Hibbert Street was only about one block away from the Mesa Temple, and while in Mesa we spent a lot of time in the Temple, doing Temple work there, which we enjoyed because that was so new to us. Well, that wasn’t the only reason we enjoyed it, but we did enjoy it because we didn’t have that privilege down there in Yuma, or in any other place, like Gilbert. Now, our house was located right next to Grandma Waddington’s, and Nellie planned it out room by room, window by window, and went over it with the architects stem to stern, and finally had it set up so the contractors could get it started. We’d only lived in that house…
[tape ends]
1 Kathryn Elberta Gano was born 14 March XXXX, in Mesa Arizona.

I hope I’m not trying to record this over the first part I started out on this tape. I’m probably making a real mess of it. To continue on from where I thought I was…
The Emery House was a home there on the Emery Ranch there south of Mesa, and the manager of that 400 acre farm was supposed to be living in that house, so that’s where we were living. We didn’t have any modern facilities in that house, we had to go out back to the outside, stool, outside toilet, and we didn’t even have a shower. We had to rig up our own, which Nellie insisted on that we could take a bath without climbing into a tub. I had accepted the job there at WFM whose headquarters were Phoenix. It was just a big management company that had several farms in that area, up in the mountains too, that they oversaw, watched over. It was their responsibility to take care of them. They were paid by the owners for so doing.

But anyway this Emery House was not a very nice place to live in. It was a nice looking house, but it was an old-time house without modern facilities. That’s where I was located at this particular time. Darlene had a very bad illness right at the beginning of her, while she was a baby. Neither Nellie or I knew what to do about it. She was having spasms, and so we called up the hospital in Mesa and made arrangements to bring her in there. So we rushed her in to the Mesa hospital. It was really an awful feeling in my old heart, when I would look over and see Darlene in Nellie’s lap there, as those spasms were prevailing.

Well, we got her into the hospital, and the hospital got the spasms calmed down, got the spasms under control, and they said we’d just have to leave her there that night. We’d have to leave her there for a while so that they could check her out and find out what was causing the trouble. Well, it was very hard for us to go off and leave that little baby there in the hospital, and go back to the farmhouse to live. But of course we found it necessary to do so.

We came back the next day, and the doctor told us, you’d better leave her another day, we’ve got her spasms under control now, and it’s a matter of her diet that brought this about. So we left her there another night, with very tearful eyes, and went back to the farm. We got her the next day, and brought her back to be with the other two girls. Well, so much for that incident in our lives.
I’m going to skip several years now, and bring ‘er up to Mesa Arizona. Well, we’re not far from Mesa now, but I had moved from the farm into Mesa, city of, and was renting a house there for us to live in. Darlene got a bicycle for Christmas, and she just zipped it around town and to school and anywhere she wanted to go. She was a very energetic young lady. But one street she had to cycle on coming home from school had gravel on it. She got going a little too fast, going around a corner, and the wheels slid out from under her, and Darlene went skidding out across the gravel. She was really a kind of a bloody sight for a while until we got that taken care of.

[break]
The first thing that I knew she was a senior in high school, and I guess it was the year after she graduated. She took up debating in her Junior and senior year, she was on the Debating team. She learned through that effort, she was also on the band, etc. etc. etc. she probably got the most good from the school out of the debating exercises.
[break]

…east about 5 or 6 miles. Darlene brought Hollis in, and they were acting very, you might say, kind of coyly, they were holding hands. And Darlene said: “Hollis has something that he wants to say to you.” So Hollis came up then and said, “Well, I would like to marry your daughter. We would like to get married.” So I asked Hollis how he was going to support her, and he said they were going to school. Well, I guess I’ll just sort of jump that story up all together. Hollis was [break]

Hollis had been going to college at Ames, and was majoring in electrical engineering. Darlene had been going to school out at BYU, and while they were home that summer, this event came by, and they decided that they wanted to get married. So when I asked them what they were going to do, Hollis told me what he was doing, that he would graduate that year from the college of engineering there at Ames, and Darlene was going to, I think finish up her education at BYU that year also.
Well, that looked like a good situation. Except for one thing that Darlene knew that I didn’t like, that I didn’t want, and that was that Hollis was not a member of the Church. But she had worked on Hollis, she had converted him, and had told him that if he would convert over to the Mormon Church, that she would be able to marry him, and that she would like to go to the temple for that marriage. Well, believe it or not, Hollis wanted Darlene badly enough, and he was a good man in college engineering, EE was the degree that he obtained there, electrical engineering.1

[break]
Well, forgive me Elizabeth, I’m getting all mixed up here. You could probably tell me more about what I’m talking about than I can myself. My memory is just beginning to fail me something terrible, and I’ve kind of got mixed up there when I was ready to start moving from Yuma, up to the Mesa, up to Phoenix area. I’m going to stop the babble I was going on there, about Hollis, who of course you know, was your dad, and you probably know more about the history of what all I was saying than I do. I can’t remember all the details of what was going on. So I’m just going to quit right there, quit that part of my history right there, and maybe bring it up at a later date after I’ve got some of my facts straightened out.

But I accepted the job with Dave Heywood in Phoenix, while Darlene was being born down in Yuma. That entailed a move from Yuma, from one city to another. Well, so much for that,
We had moved I don’t know how many times now, and I guess Nellie, your grandmother, was willing to move again because that’s what I wanted to do. So up to Phoenix we went. I should say, Mesa, rather than Phoenix, because Western Farm Management, although they had their Headquarters office in Phoenix, had farms scattered about over the valley there, as well as in to other areas of the state, up in the mountains and etc. These farms, they were responsible for their operation, the income that came from them, and the expenses that were involved with them. So it brings me up to the fact that I was assigned as a foreman of a ranch by WFM, which was located just south of Mesa about 7 miles, in between Mesa and Gilbert Arizona. We found out when we moved in to it that the house we had to live in was not modern. There wasn’t any way I could get along at that time except to talk Nellie and family into moving into that old time house. It was a very nice looking house, it just wasn’t modern. So with all the un-modern facilities, we took a whack at it. We were promised by Mr. Heyward and company that we would soon be able to do something about that. So on that promise we moved in. To describe some of the facility, Nellie had to do her washing by hand, with a wringer washing machine, and then take the clothes outside on the washline to get them dry. Well, it wasn’t hard to get them dry, in the Arizona sun. There wasn’t any shower in the house, so we rigged up one of our own, there was a big water tank up overhead not far from the house, which would be filled by a windmill pump, and I rigged up a temporary shower under that tank that the windmill pumped water into, and made us a facility that we could have protection in and take our baths in. Well, it was a lot better than trying to take them in a tub in the kitchen or something, which I had to do of course when I was young, and I suppose Nellie had to, too. But nevertheless, we thought we’d outgrown that kind of life. So it was a real step-back there. Well, we made out the best we could. And I went about my responsibilities and Nellie took care of the girls right there at the farmhouse.
And that was the incident that I first got into with Darlene, in which she became ill one night and we rushed her off to the hospital in Mesa, to find out enroute that she had a spasm; she got stiff, and her arms flailed out and her eyes rolled back, which just scared the daylights out of me. Nellie held her and hugged her, and held her still until we arrived at the hospital and there the nurses took over. Well, we found out that these spasms were caused by some particular item in her diet, or lack of items, or something, but we had to leave her there all night, and that was a real problem for us. To have to go off and leave that little girl there by herself and go back out to the ranch, which we did for a couple of days, until she got to feeling better.
OK, so much for that. Now, [break]

The ranch of which I was foreman was devoted to alfalfa, so my responsibilities there was just simply to get the hay, the alfalfa irrigated and harvested property. It was a new role for me [laughs]. But we hired all the labor that was needed, and which was mainly Mexicans that could come up across the border and were used as cheap labor for farm work. Many of them would come in there without being able to understand English very well, so I had a little problem in that particular area, trying to get the alfalfa cut, mowed down, laid up into big windrows, and then bailed by an enormously big bailer. It laid eggs, the big bails, out behind it, then a trucker would come by and pick them up and haul them in to the milling company or stack them up there on the farm. So that was my primary responsibility. The fun was trying to get Mexican help that did not understand English to do the job that I wanted to have done, and act as a foreman for them, as a boss for them. Boy, I learned some Mexican words there that I had never heard before, which I don’t dare repeat at this particular time. I also enjoyed, you might say, teaching those Mexican laborers how to operate a tractor, how to operate a baler, and how to pick it up and how to stack it. One of the places it was stacked was over at the farm outlet, which was Western Milling Company, which provided an outlet for all the farm products of Western Farm Management’s business. It was about 5 miles away from where I was located. Well, I’m not going to try to describe my motions, it was highly interesting, to keep the driver on the tractor in the right gear, and three or four laborers on the bailer behind, trying to operate the bailer so it would bail the hay up, stringing out bails out behind the machine.

[break]

I did not think that the job was I was having here at the Emery Ranch was a very learning proposition for me, although of course it was a new experience, working there on the flat lands and borders. In the fall of the year when there wasn’t any hay on the ground, we rented out the hay land to sheepherders, and they would bring their sheep down from the mountains and wherever they were running them there in the summertime, and they would bring them in for grazing. Although I never had to do any tending of them, the sheepherders would have to get up early each morning and go along the borders of that alfalfa land, and get any old ewes who had turned over on their back there, the borders of the alfalfa field were so big the ewes couldn’t get back up again. So they’d lay there with their feet stuck straight up in the air, until the herders came along and got them straightened out, and got them turned over and got them going again.

Well, that was another thing I learned there. Well I protested, I was kind of at odds then with the company because I was kind of wanting to do something more than what I seemed I was progressing at there. So they had another idea in mind, and later on when the Western Milling Company manager quit them, or was getting ready to quit, they propositioned me about working with management of the milling company. Now that was purely a different situation there. After I’d sat in the office for a while, and learned all the details from the manager who was a very able young man named Stanley Fagg, we had made several trips back east, and over different parts, and out west too, to the California coast, to the areas where we marketed the farm products that we had there at the Western Milling Company. I decided to take that, and it was offered to me at a little better salary, and a chance to move from the Emery Farm into Mesa itself. We did that, and I tell you, we were a happy family to be able to get back into regular housing again.

I had to drive back out to the Tremaine ranch, which was the name of the area the Western Milling Company was located on. To describe it, it was simply a place where big barns and hay and equipment were stored, cattle corrals, cattle feeding areas, and all that goes with the operation of such farm business. The big barns are just open barns, with a roof over the top with all the equipment in them, where they had grinding mills, and hay from the farms ground up, and put in the sacks, again by Mexican labor, trained this time for this purpose by the former management company and by the Mexican foreman who they had there for this particular situation. I didn’t have to deal with them much except put a mask on in order to go into the milling company, grinders, that were making a lot of dust, etc.

Most of my work was there in the office there at Western Milling Company. Everything from all the farms was weighed there, we sold the gasoline for all the equipment there from the pumps we had, and we had big scales there that did the weighing, and we hired usually two girls in the office, or three girls, and a bookkeeper, to take care of the business there at Western Milling Company. Mine was purely the job of managing it, taking care of the company, to make it a profitable operation. I realized at that time that I was given a chance to own part of the company for part of my salary, still maintaining a part of my salary equal to what I had as a foreman in the ranch. So I was glad to have that incentive there to take up and learn that business. I never did try to learn bookkeeping very much, that is to say the operations of it, because we had a very capable individual doing that in the office. We also had the girls there that took care of all the correspondence, typing, and filing of everything that needed to be done. Well, everything but signing the checks. I signed the checks.

[break]

Stanley and I had made trips both ways at least twice. Most of the time it was by plane; one time it was by a car. We came back east on that particular trip, and ended up in Baltimore. New York and Baltimore, and decided to take a boat, a steamship down the coast in order to get down to New Orleans. All of these were marketing areas that our products [tape ends]
1 Hollis Edward Hervey married Darlene Gano on 3 July 1963 in the Mesa Arizona temple

But we also went down to the cavern, took the trail. This time when we went down, we had many electrical lifts that took us down much faster to the location we wanted to go, but still highlighted all the goodies in the cavern as we went along, stopping at different locations. Again, we stopped down there at that tremendously big cavern, and they did the same thing. Now this was some, maybe 6 –8 years later from when I had been there before, and they did the same thing they had done my previous trip. They turned out the lights to give us a taste of complete darkness. But then this time, they had allowed smoking to go on, so the darkness was ruined, all the rangers had told us that if you lighted up a cigarette, it would readily be seen and take away some of the illusion of darkness that we’d get without. But this time in the darkness while the lights were turned out, some of the die hards who couldn’t quit their smoking, had to light up their cigarettes, and as we sat around that big stalagmite, we listened to the same song that had been sung directly by the voices farther back. But this time they had recorded it, and the record had a crack in it, and it wasn’t quite nearly as beautiful as the first time, where it just seemed to get almost in some kind of heavenly location. Nobody else would never be in it again. Well, this time we had the crack in the record the rangers sang, which wasn’t nearly as beautiful as it was the first time, and also around the great stalagmite in the amphitheater, there were those glows of cigarettes. I also used that many times later on as an illustration of what the truth of the gospel was like as compared to the ‘illuminated world’s’ version of it. Nevertheless, all the students that I had along with me really enjoyed the whole session.
I just mention that now because later on, when I accepted the gospel, as part of my new accepting Christ in my life, after my conversion to the True Church of Jesus Christ, I had later on while doing some of my work in various areas of the organization in which I was involved I had opportunity to compare the trueness of that first trip – with out the cigarettes, without the smoky smell of the cavern and with the tremendous vocal addition that the rangers had sang for us (they told us that the rangers that were doing the singing were at least a quarter of a mile back up the trail – the voices were coming through so perfectly clear, you could hear every tone and every voice clearly). The second time it was marred by the crack in the record, and the cigarettes that you could see flicking on and off there in the cavern darkness there.

Back to our Snowflake days, now for a little bit. I guess I stated before that I had received a letter from my brother Frank, when he found out that I was teaching school among the Mormons of Arizona. He sent me a terrific letter telling me what a culprit Joseph Smith was. A religious fanatic, he called him, and that his followers were just followers, they didn’t know any better.

Well, as I lived there with the Snowflake-ites, and became acquainted with the families of the Ag students that I was teaching, and getting acquainted with some of the people themselves in Snowflake and the surrounding towns that all made up the Snowflake district, I could not help but be aware that they did not fit the description my brother Frank had said of them. I found them very educated. I found the people very well informed about the natural things, the general things in life. I found them very interested in all the areas of living. Nellie, on the other hand, was kind of aggravated, or annoyed by the fact that some of the lady missionaries, in their zealous ambition to convert anybody, when they came home off their missions, knowing that Nellie was not a member of the church, visited her once or twice in our little apartment that we were living in and tried to convince her that the gospel was true. Nellie ended that in a hurry by telling them, no, she was not interested, and telling them not to come back any more. Well, she didn’t show that in her life. We had some wonderful acquaintances there in Snowflake. We went to various parties and associations, and had a little group that kind of went together, 8 or 10 couples, and it was just a wonderful group to be around, no smoking, no frivolous joking, and very serious about honoring the principles of the gospel that they belonged to.

I was asked to teach in the church in the High School, I was called to be a member of the Agricultural Welfare committee of the church there, and strangely as it might seem, Nellie was called to be a teacher in the MIA group that was there. She did a good job in that, I know, because Nellie had many compliments. Of course, Nellie was a trained teacher, and she didn’t ever try to bring up her gospel antagonism, or even mix it in with her teaching callings. But I did have some opportunities to mix in with the group there, the priesthood holders in Snowflake. At one time, I was called, along with that committee, to go over to Pima Arizona. Pima was the home of our later President, who at that time was president of the stake over in that area, the Thatcher Stake. I guess you know who I’m talking about, I can’t remember his name right now [Spencer W. Kimball].

I relaxed for a few minutes, and I was listening to my book of Mormon tape when my memory was jogged and I remembered that the home that we met in Pima was Spencer W. Kimball, who later became president of the Church. But that was beside the point, of this meaningful meeting to me, as I sat beside of the chair in which Harold B. Lee, who had been called by the church presidency to revise the church welfare system, down in Arizona. Brother Lee, was a native Arizonan, and was well qualified to take this over. He was not a general authority at that time, I don’t think he was called as one of the apostles at that time, but nevertheless he was well suited for this job. The welfare system at that time had just about pretty well died out. I had been originated, and followed very closely and did a wonderful job in its dimensions over the period of time it was meant to cover. But now, as the Church was progressing and growing, it needed to be revitalized, so Harold B. Lee was given that job to do that down there in the Arizona stakes.

Well, what was interesting to me was that, while that program was discussed there by those leaders of the Northern Arizona stakes, Harold B. Lee happened to just drop his hand over on my leg, and I felt a shock, electrical, if I ever had an electrical shock, I sure felt it at that time. It almost made me jump. That came back into my memory very vividly. I’ve related it on previous occasions, so there’s no use taking time again to do that. My final reasons for moving from Snowflake down to the Salt River Valley schools, at the end of my second year in Snowflake, because in the meantime, while at Snowflake, we had two beautiful daughters born into the Gano Tribe. Joanne first, on June 4th XXXX [removed in online version for privacy]. Barbara was born about 15 months later in Snowflake, in the Snowflake hospital, so called. I will mention that a little more completely, after I get Barbara located here, at August 16th XXXX [removed for privacy]. They were just 15 months apart.

Joanne was a very curly-haired gal, and she was really sweet and adorable. We have some good pictures of her as she was growing up. I guess that’s characteristic of firstborns. Also Barbara came along 15 months later. Nellie’s brother Willie used to always twig her about having her children born 9 months and 15 months later, and he says, “You should have waited longer than that.” And “You’re slipping; what’s the matter?”

Well, enough for that. Anyway, they were both born in Snowflake, Dr. Junius Heyward was our physician, and did a good job, I guess, along with the nurses there in the little two story building, a house that had been converted into a hospital. They didn’t have any extra nurses, they kept it open only when it was necessary, so it wasn’t very much of a hospital. But it was used for burns and emergency situations.

If I remember right, Dixie Flake was the nurse that took care of the birth of both of my first two children. She was the wife of Vernon Flake, who was one of the group that we kind of kicked around with there in Snowflake. So at the end of the second year there in Snowflake, although we were enjoying ourselves very much, and I kind of wanted to learn more about the church, and learn more about Joseph Smith, and in other words, I wanted to go to the Mormon Church. In order to do that, I had to be converted to Joseph Smith. Well, in order to get away from the confusion, and perhaps from the antagonism that was caused by such feelings in our home, I decided to accept a job teaching down in the valley. The first job was at Gilbert Arizona, with the Mormon Church down there. So we moved down to Gilbert, and found a little house to rent, and attended a sectarian church while we were down there. So I kind of forgot what was going on in Mormon-land at that time. I did have one or two of my students, though, who were enrolled there at Gilbert, who were Mormons, and very good ones. One of them was the champion state farmer, the FFA State Farmer, the highest award that could be given to any member of the FFA clubs around the state. Another one was also very high. All of these students were there in Gilbert.

Well, Gilbert wasn’t a very large school. I stayed there just one year, and I had a chance to go down to Yuma Arizona as an Ag teacher down there. Now this was in the high school at Yuma. As I said when I went down before to visit out there, it was out in a suburb, some 16 miles away from Yuma itself, so I wasn’t too thrilled at the proposition. But I was thrilled at the opportunity to go down and teach in Yuma. It was the 3rd largest high school in the state of Arizona, and the 3rd largest Agriculture department, also, out there at Yuma High School. So I was happy to have that opportunity. I accepted a contract down there, and went down there to teach.

When we went in there to Yuma, if I describe the scene of our move down there, it would be just like trying to describe how the Okies felt when they moved from their homes in the midwest or wherever they were, out to the western states. We were truly an Okie group, moving down there. All of our belongings on top of a hay wagon, pulled by a pickup down into the location I had rented to live. As we were unloading our household goods there in Yuma, Nellie decided to go into town to get some groceries so we could have something to eat after going through that move, and she went into town for that purpose, and I continued clearing off the wagons and the trailers that we had to move us down.

When she came back from that trip into town, she had a very big surprise for me, at least it turned out to be a big surprise. She said, “You know who I met up in town?” No, I don’t know who you met. “I met one of the Flake girls.” Now, the Flake girls were the two twins who lived up in Snowflake, I had become acquainted with. They weren’t Ag students, but they were popular girls at Snowflake High School, and I had become well acquainted with them, Laura and Lorna, I think it was. And one of them had found Nellie there shopping and started up a conversation with her and found out what was going on and said, “Listen, if you aren’t going to church anywhere, why don’t you come up and go to church with our Mormon group?”

Nellie was all, you might say, changed quite a bit in her attitude about Mormons after going to a regular church, a sectarian church there in Gilbert for over a year, so she came back and asked me “Would you like to go to a Mormon church down here?” And I kinda reluctantly said, “Yeah; where is it?” and she told me the story then, and we decided that we would try it out. And that was the sum of that story, on how we first got started in the little Yuma branch, there in Yuma Arizona.
It was a small branch, that was for sure, only about 15 members I think, but very desirous of having a place to worship every Sunday morning. We met at the front end of a typewriter shop that was owned by one of the members of the church. In fact it was Laura’s uncle, Sam Flake, and he owned a typewriter shop, and he loaned it to the church as a meeting place, which we had to clean up in the morning and push the stands back out of the way and set up chairs and get ready for the regular church schedule we had in those days. Nellie and I also met the branch president and his wife, and were very impressed with them. We met another family, a returned missionary, and almost as old as we were, in fact I think he was a little older than we were, just youngsters at that time. He was operating the creamery there in Yuma, and he was a very, you might say, very enthused member of the church. He had an excellent testimony, and the branch president had set it up for us to start taking some beginning classes in the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants from this brother, this returned missionary. I can’t remember the names right now, and I’m not going to try to remember them, but he was sure a good teacher. He could explain any part of the Book of Mormon, get it in a very interesting manner, to where we really became interested in the church. Nellie wanted know every turn and twist of why the church and who the church etc., etc. In other words, she wanted to investigate the church very thoroughly before she began to even think about becoming a member. Of course, I had already decided that I wanted to be a Mormon, wanted to be a member of the Mormon Church; I didn’t use the same enthusiasm that she had, but I was always quite interested. We listened to those lessons quite avidly. Enjoyed them very much. It wasn’t but about 6 months after that, the branch president asked us the question, would you like to join. This was President Shumway, he took us up to Mesa Arizona, and we were baptized in the Mesa Arizona Temple. Since that time, baptisms for the living have been done outside of the temple, and temple baptisms are only for the dead.

At other times I have pretty well reiterated our conversion, our acceptance of the gospel and our baptism there at the Mesa temple, and went back to Yuma, and went back to Yuma to live for a few years. I think we took two, maybe 3 years, I’ve almost forgotten now. But at the end of that time, I was getting itchy feet again, primarily because Brother Heyward from Snowflake, who had a business in Phoenix, had contacted me about becoming part of his organizational group there, Western Farm Management. Knowing that was available, at the end of what I think was my third year of teaching in Yuma, I went up to see him. And the reason I mention this was because while I had an appointment with him on a certain date in the end of the school year there, and went up to see him. Well, while I was up there being interviewed, lo and behold, our next child, Darlene, was born. Well, I wasn’t there and couldn’t help Nellie, and one of the neighbors had to take her to the hospital, and they didn’t have a hospital there in Yuma. She was born on the 31st of [May,XXXX.]
[tape ends]

1 Joanne’s given name is Nellie Joanne Gano. Apparently, she always went by her middle name, perhaps to avoid confusion between mother and daughter.