An expanded version of – Memories of My Father – as I recalled them at his Funeral.
Nearly 79 years ago (July 28, 1930 at the beginning of the depression) an 8 year old boy and his 6 year old brother sat on a large cement step in front of an evangelical boys home in St Louis, It was after dinner and they sat watching the corner down the street where they had seen their Dad turn the day he had dropped them off when he could no longer take care of them after the tragic death of their mother. According to a friend who entered the orphanage the same day, nine months into the depression, they sat there waiting for him to come back around that corner to take them home… The younger one, Ken playing with a toy car, Clarence sobbing as they sat on that step, night after night they waited, watching that corner until dark. Then someone would came and ushered them back into the home to go to bed.
It took over a year of what he didn’t know was mandatory separation, until he realized that their father would not be coming around that corner, and that “the home” would be his residence for a long, long time…It turned out to be , the next 10 years. Dad said that he felt a tremendous obligation to watch over his brother, an enormous responsibility, and it shaped his life. . I have pictured two little boys sitting there in that busy St Louis cityscape at dusk waiting…waiting…waiting…..gradually losing hope….wanting more than anything to have that simple blessing I have enjoyed all these years without really understanding how precious it is…I always knew that my Dad would be there to take me home. (He learned when he was 70 that his father wasn’t allowed to visit for many months and then only monthly or semi monthly after that, and what he had thot was abandonment actually wasn’t. Records showed that his father had come every time he was allowed to and even paid for their stay when he had a job. This gave my father a completely new outlook on the evangelical childrens’ home, AND his father)
In those days he learned order and discipline, organization and how to do hard work. He was educated in readin’ writin’ and ‘rithmatic with a heapin’ helpin’ of the bible which, he said, was pounded into him by the evangelical sisters who enforced a discipline with a meanness that few of us would believe. Had it not been for MRS SHIPEY his fifth grade teacher I don’t know if he would have ever been the man he was…she truly loved my father and instilled in him any of the self worth which those days provided. She was a woman he talked of often and who kept in contact with him thru out the years, following that one year she was his teacher.
He worked on the farm there, went to school, and participated in sports, joined the scouts and grew up. I would like to tell you a lot more about his feelings and thots about growing up at the “home”, but the truth is I only recently learned much about it myself. In fact it was just last December after his near death two days after Thanksgiving, when after having his heart shocked three times the doctor said to me, “I have seen this many times and you have about one to two hours with your father…I sat there in the hospital and just talked to him, telling him how much I loved and appreciated all he had done for me. After a couple of hours he opened his eyes and I asked him how he felt. “Good! The pain is gone, let’s get out of here!” From that moment he began a short five month recovery.
Once he was back home he told mom to go get his picture albums and we sat and talked about each and every picture in his seven albums.. I had only seen one of them in my entire life, and that was the day he moved from the his home on 3700 north to their new house on the edge of the hill where he watched over the place he had called home for 58 years. SO what did I discover? Well,… That his mom and a half sister I never knew he had had died of pneumonia …That he worked on a hay baler when HE was a kid TOO.. That he had a step mother his father married after he left the home…That his boat motor is EXACTLY the same model as the one I bought at a garage sale for 10 bucks.(he told me it wasn’t any good and that I should get rid of it)…That he lived in an apartment with friends after he left the home and went in the Marines when he was 21 as did his brother Ken. He talked about his war buddies, Mrs Berry the missionary lady from Provo community church who invited him to visit after the war…He talked about how his brother Ken loved animals and cared for them at the home…all about his scouting and sports adventures, his war adventures and his many many jobs, bosses and friends. How Mrs Shippy let him drive her car after he left the “home” and I saw pictures of a whole bunch of his girlfriends and he even showed me a letter he got after attending his fathers funeral…..from his father. Written the day before he had died.. I also saw about 15 pictures of my grandfather that I had never seen. Before that, I had seen only one or maybe two.
Some men speak with words, some men speak with their eyes, still others speak by their actions. Clarence, or COS as I have called him interchangeably with DAD for the last 30 years, spoke by WHAT HE DID. He was never one to boast or overstate himself, in fact he was probably one of the best at the art of understatement of anyone I knew He abhorred boasting, arrogance or self righteousness. . Once when he accompanied me on a sales trip to Mesa Arizona he heard me tell the buyer for the largest school district in the state about our company. When she asked if our company was a big corporation, I drawled…”heck, we’re just a couple of farm boys who decided to make a little pizza.” I could see he liked my reply by the smile on his face. He believed that under-statement usually had people assuming much more than reality. I found however that with my father, there was always WAY MORE than he ever said, or than ever met the eye.
I had calculated that he became a Marine when he was 21. What I didn’t know, was that his father would not sign when the war first started… so he had to wait. Dad said he probably would have been killed as so many of the first enlistees were, had his father complied with is wishes. For Many years, the only reason I knew he had been a Marine was because he kept his Marine pins and hat emblem in his watch tray on his chest of drawers, and his knife, canteen and belt sat on the shelf above his tool box, before he let me use them when I was a scout.
People often ask me how and when dad arrived here, (see life sketch) married mom, a Mormon girl, and ended up in Happy Valley for life. After Dad enlisted in the Marines, he went to San Diego for boot camp. While he was there he met an older woman from Provo, a missionary from the community church to the soldiers, Ruth Berry. She told him that after the war he was invited to visit her in Provo, so after he got home to St Louis, he decided to get in touch with her and she asked if he could come out to Provo to help her with a business she planned to create, I believe it was to be a retirement home. It didn’t work out but she asked if he wanted to live in her upstairs apartment and use his GI bill to go to BYU, which he did. He lived just two blocks north of what is now the Marriott center in a white house with three red brick colonial fire place chimneys on the outside end walls, which she called Berry-Muir. She sold the house to the James Family in 1948 and it is said that Clarence went with the house. He loved the James’s.
Mom, Deaun Ashton, who he always called kiddo, lived just One block west of the Marriot center just to the south of the BYU Baseball field, about 3 or 4 blocks from where Dad was living. They had crossed paths at Cluff’s market, but she hadn’t paid proper attention to him so when they met at a dance he asked her out and as they say, the rest is history, by the next year they were married. They lived for a while in the lower apartment at the James’s house before they built the home where they lived for 50 years in the riverbottoms on a piece of the old Stubbs homestead that my grandparents gave them. I was born 4 years later.
In the ATTIC— Most of you knew my Dad from when he lived in that little house he build on land right next to where my mother’s mother was born and grew up. He built and landscaped it with his own hands and tended it until just 8 years ago, Our Modest brick rambler, was home, complete with all the common elements…hallway, garage, and a basket ball standard on the east side of the driveway, near the Summer Queen apple tree. As a small boy there were a few unsolvable mysteries in my life…Was there really a chipmonk that kept a pipe in the box elder tree as he had told me?.…
(Digression) Dad smoked until I was 8. I remember the day he QUIT a two+ pack a day habit, cold turkey, I saw him throw away his cigarettes, two trips with his arms full, he just dumped them into the ash pit, He never smoked another cigarette. I think it was the cause of his heart problems though. After that he said he didn’t cough as much in a year as he did in an hour before he quit. I used to hear him in the kitchen coughing when he made his lunch, or while he got my breakfast when he was between jobs…the difference between when Mom made me breakfast and when dad did was that he always made my eggs sunny side up…hers were over easy.
….another mystery was why my pony ALWAYS wanted to bite me, and yet another was WHAT was thru those two trap doors (actually not so romantic…they were simply framed access panels) in the ceiling in the hallway and at the back of the garage. They were storage places…, my father had made our attic a place to store seldom used items and keep them out of the way.
But as a small boy, as I looked up there I could only imagine its mystery!! Was it a place where some bandito or boogieman or the UKIDUKE was hiding out? A secret passageway into a another universe (we didn’t have the word wormhole back then)…maybe, it was where the stairway to heaven began. The Garage attic actually contained suitcases, Christmas decorations, and twenty to thirty boxes of such things as my parents’memories, books, even clothes that held some meaning. The Hall attic had fewer boxes but those, I later discovered, contained boxes of letters, newspapers articles of note, and a few trinkets…it may have even housed an envelope with a few hundred in emergency cash.
And so it was when I was 11, that on a day when my mom and dad were gone, probably visiting my mom’s parents down the street. I got out the ladder, pushed the "lid" away, and climbed into the unknown. What I found was almost a disappointment…every box was marked with the contents and a date…seeing the passage between the two parts of the house was just a tiny opening, I had a "ford moment", when the light comes on – I understood why there would need to be TWO exploration expeditions into each opening.. and since I was UP there, ..I crawled around with my tiny flashlight in my mouth, carefully avoiding putting my feet in the spaces where the insulation was…first so I wouldn’t ITCH…and second so I wouldn’t crash thru to the floor 8 feet below…sheet rock as any true "hut" builder knows, will NOT support anything, especially not a boy who should not be up there creating havoc in the attic in the first place…
As I started to go thru the boxes I realized that my adventure was turning out to be extremely boring… Suitcases with sewing patterns, recipe books, instructions and warranty materials, WHAT?…why are there boxes of KERR jars up here?…I guess the fruit shelf was full. I rummaged thru some boxes of Botany and Horticulture books from my fathers days in college…and moved on to the last two boxes on the east wall…the first was a small box that had been taped closed….the second one larger with the four flaps interfolded… I pulled the tape off the first one and opened it….there were Six books…"Normandy High School 1940…Lincoln High School 1946…my parents YEAR BOOKS… My flash light was still pretty bright as I explored the other contents…my dad’s letterman’s LETTER…a Green N…there were a few pictures of friends and
other people I didn’t know…some love letters, (oh my heck) and a few shriveled flowers…I spent about a half hour looking thru the books to see their pictures from so long before (at the time just 18-23 years) I saw pictures of my dad playing basketball and baseball, of my mom with her friends…and wow, they looked so cool when they were young…..Who’da ever thunk it?…
After I had exhausted my curiosity about that box, .I turned to the next one…and pulled open the flaps…only to find some shoe boxes neatly stacked in the corrugated box. the first one I opened made my eyes pop out…it was a JAPANESE flag …with rust stains on it…and stacks of Japanese money….and other items clearly from Pacific Island culture…one shoe box contained a bunch of Marine Corps stuff, buttons, belt buckle, insignias, ribbons, official looking awards, ..Marksmanship insignias…I fingered each and everyone of them… another contained an ammo belt…and the same names on some of the boxes as were written on his scabbard —names of the islands where he had fought the Japs, carved into it.., Treasury Islands, Peleliu, , Okinawa…I then opened the bottom box…it was full of black and white photos…of beaches filled with dead bodies scattered about, and flags like the one I had just held… lying on the sand. There were pictures of the wreckage of landing craft…gory battle scenes…others of crashed planes…big artillery guns….living quarters…friends…other marines either in photos showing serious battle fatigue, or other pictures of them shirtless playing baseball or volleyball with weapons and helmets nearby…I kept going back to those scenes of death and destruction. HAD MY DAD BEEN THERE? …Oh, my gosh! Later that year I told him what I had discovered, and asked him if he had taken those pictures. (of course, he had)…he laughed and said, no I bought those from a guy…oh…I didn’t know whether to believe him or not…he changed the subject abruptly, letting me know he wasn’t going to say anything more, and nothing more was said…
When the roundabout replaced most of his front yard, and claustrophobia set in. He needed his space! That’s why he bought the house on the hill where no one could obstruct his view with a Garage Mahal, or a supersized McMansion. But on his little spread in the riverbottoms, , he gardened and tended a few cattle and horses and he watched over mom and he watched over ME.
My earliest memories are countless, but I would like to tell you some of those I treasure most. When I was 6 he gave me my second baseball mitt, it was the real deal. I still use it today when I have a chance to play ball. He left it on my bed with a bat and ball. He had tried out for the Cardinals at 20, and could have entered their farm system, but chose instead to enlist and join the war effort. Baseball was one of his great loves. He took our irrigation canvas and painted a square on it with white paint, so he would have a target to throw at, and would hang it against the west fence then from our bucket of baseballs, he would throw hundreds of pitches as I learned to hit. I can’t describe the joy I felt the first time I drove that ball over the middle fence and the ball rolled half way out into the big pasture…which means it rolled to a stop just about in the middle of what is now this church’s west foyer, as I calculate it based on the only two trees over there>>>> that are still standing from all those he planted.
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Dad was not LDS. Before my mission, I told him I would somehow get him into the church and so true to my word, (pointing at the casket)….I think this hour of his funeral will be the most time he will have spent in a chapel since the day I was blessed 54 years ago. The reason we decided on having his service at the Edgemont 1st ward building is because this is the very land where he lived and worked for so long.
After he sold our house, I came one day to take pictures of it before they knocked it down. While I was standing by the white fence between the church parking lot and middle pasture snapping pictures of “the place” COS came down the street in his white pick-up truck and drove down the road east of the house, turned around and parked along the new west sidewalk just where our coal shed and the old storage shed used to sit over the ditch. He didn’t see me but I watched him thru the telephoto lens as he just sat for the longest time watching them remove the doors and windows from the house…that was the day before they knocked it down. When they demolisihed Wilf’s and Zelta’s home up the street, he said to me, it is a damned shame that they can tear down in 15 minutes something that has taken a man a lifetime to build…Our little home represented a lifetime of love and labor, in fact it probably symbolized to him the man he was. .
Dad made living here an adventure for a little boy growing up! In the HUGE box elder tree a ¾ pipe had grown into the tree in a limb about ten feet up.. when I discovered it while climbing that tree with our retarded neighbor boy, Dennis Ferguson, we asked dad what it was, he told us it was the “chipmunk’s pipe” a descriptor that Ferg probably still uses to this day.
Clarence was a kid at heart, he loved to antagonize the neighbors to our east Raymond, Melvin, and Dennis were the recipient of many an APPLE, Snowball or rock in the various “apple wars” between Dad and I and two or three of them. He especially liked to bounce a rock off of their barns, or the outhouse roof when he knew it was occupied. I think he liked to hear them cuss him, but they all loved going with him to see Krusher Kawalski or Karl Von Brock fight Ox Anderson and Bill Melby at the “wrassles” or just out to the café for a cup.
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Whenever I went with him in his pick ups, he always kept his Marine blanket folded on the seat. Once we came upon a wreck in Orem when I was eleven. We were the first on the scene and he put his blanket over a lady as she lie there on the sidewalk to keep her warm before the ambulance arrived. I remember him soaking that blanket in cold water in mom’s Maytag suds saver to get the blood out when he got it back, almost as vividly as I remember sitting next to that moaning lady as she lie there with blood pooling up by her head and soaking her gray hair. I was just doing what dad asked me to do, to keep talking to her, so she wouldn’t go into shock… telling her it would be ok . He told me later that she had died…in a way that I could deal with it emotionally.
Clarence was a Carpenter and worked hard at any job, I remember him coming home from work at 6 pm after a 12 hour day driving pilings on the 6th south bridge ramp in SLC so dirty that when the bathtub drained the dirt was sticky thick up to where the waterline was and tho exhausted he seldom asked me to clean it. He never left anything dirty. He was a white glove Marine, neat as a tack, and insisted that everything be clean and kept in order like a footlocker. Just to illustrate…
Sometimes in the summer Mom would take me and a friend to SLC to play while she would shop and visit friends in Salt Lake for three days. One year we went with my Aunt Leora Calder, and my cousin Keith. We played golf, went to movies, swam at the Motel 6 pool, bowled, and had a great time. In a conversation about Dad who stayed home worked and batched it for three days, Leora said to mom that she would probably find the house in shambles when we returned, My mother shook her head and said NOT A CHANCE. In the end they had bet twenty dollars whether that the bathroom sink and the bedroom would or wouldn’t be a mess. My mom completely sure that the porcelain would glisten and the bed would be made, shoes and sox in the closet and the dishes washed and the sink clean. I can still remember my mother taking that twenty dollar bill from Aunt Leora when they peered into the sink and could see their reflection on the pop up drain at the bottom of the sink, and not only was the house clean, bed made and the kitchen floor waxed, but dad had installed a new carpet runner in the hallway. He required that I be just as neat as he was…truthfully, that has always been an mpossibility. I recall how ordered he was. Once he had a box of nails that were all mixed up, so he dumped them out on the garage floor and had me sort them all and put them in the ten separate sections in his nail box, teaching me the difference in sizes, and shapes of box nails, common nails, double heads, finish nails, horse shoe nails, cement nails etc….If he opened one of my drawers and it was a mess, he would dump it on my bed and have me put stuff back all folded and organized. Dad always insisted that my clothes were hung up, my shoes polished or waxed, (in fact I got some new Kiwi shoe WAX and polished my shoes today in his honor) sox tucked neatly inside them and my bed was made. When I was 45, after an embezzlement, our business moved out of our buildings where we had 41000 sq feet of space AND an outdoor equipment bone yard, I was forced to move some of it into my back yard. When he saw all that equipment stacked there, he asked me how I could live with all that stuff cluttering up the place. …I just sighed and said–.Dad, I’m rebelling!!
Kids remember most special gifts their dads gave them, usually a first bike or some electronic gadget, for me it was TWO bikes, my red Schwinn, and my first three speed that came with the 1964 ford pick up he got after his terrible accident at the point of the mountain where he rolled the 57 Chevy pick-up four times… was thrown out and lived to tell about it…
I still remember him walking up the cement driveway border wall that day when the police car dropped him off …he walked past me, brushed his fingers thru my hair, and said to mom…take me to the hospital I was in a wreck and I am really hurt. It turned out better that time than this last time he asked her to do that. It was a life changing experience. To rehabilitate his legs and hips, he took a job with the post office where he could walk every day.
But, I do digress, Lets see… My best present from dad was when he brought home the best little Shetland pony ever….. Jack had bought TEENY from Cliff Brererton for Keith and Jim (my cousins) and when grandpa wasn’t riding him to irrigate.. I loved to ride that pony even if it did throw me off like clockwork. (grandpa would say, “ah get back up there, and show him whose boss!) One day I was headed home from Grandpa’s, as I rode toward home, I could see my dad with TONY a stout little PINTO pony. He was standing beneath the Summer Queen apple tree with the curry comb combing him out…As soon as I could make out exactly what it was, I broke land speed records and my bike got parked for months. Instead I rode that little Injun pony….. everywhere!
Dad even built a two wheeled cart bought a harness and taught Tony to trot…Then he worked a deal with ole Hen’ Jones to buy his four wheel buggy and dad bought Smokey, HIS Shetland pony, and we would hitch them up and go ridin’…sometimes twice a week, for hours. I don’t think there is a ditch bank in all of Provo or Orem that has asparagus or sunflowers on it that I haven’t ridden past. That led to pony shows and awards and ribbons and trophies. I think he would have taken up Shetland chariot racing after we saw them at the last pony show at the old Provo fairgrounds. If he had seen them when I was four years younger we might have gone the Ben Hur route. But I had started thinking about cars and girls…He said he’d lost his ridin’ partner, and I had outgrown the Shetlands.
It was time for a car and a HORSE. Both, he and mom gave me the money toward the purchase of my first horse, Tawny, a Mustang mare I got from the Faulkners, and she was about 5 months from having a colt, Prince, and later she had a little philly, I named Ginger. I was riding Tawny the day I got hit by a car on Carterville road just north of where Orem center comes over the hill. Fortune smiled down upon us and luckily neither I, nor my horse, nor Ted McCallister’s daughter Judy was killed..
When I wanted a mini bike dad wouldn’t buy me one, so I bought a USED one from George Garner up where the fox and peacock pens used to be. Today it’s where the boys’ school is, about 4600 N. Univ. Ave. Anyway, I brought that piece of junk home and Dad suggested I convert his grape arbor and picnic table into a work place to repair it….(but you had to put every tool, bolt and nut away every nite). When I got it going he was very pleased, probably because I had learned enough to help keep his David Bradley garden and snowplow tractor running. He would ride along on his bicycle sometimes when I went over to the Lutheran Church parking lot to ride it. We would ride round and round and round that parking lot…If I had a dollar for every lap around that lot we took, I’d be a rich man.
Dad really did watch over me… maybe it is because no one watched over him. There were so many times when he surprised me. I recall once sitting at table #4 in the Edgemont elementary school lunch room. That was where I was sitting the day Karl announced that President Kennedy had just been shot, where I held hands with Diane Baum, my first real crush. And that is where I buried my head in my arms so no one would see me crying when Greg told me that he was no longer my bud, and that he had decided to invite Keith to the BYU basketball game instead of me. Ah, how it hurts when the world of a 4th grader comes crashing down like a shattered backboard.
In 1965 there was nothing imaginable that was more important than attending that BYU basketball game except rooting for the Cardinals to win the World Series. I had not only lost my opportunity to see John Fairchild, but also the chance to go out on the catwalk that led to the press box where Greg’s dad worked during the games. I was devastated!
That night as I sat eating spaghetti at Clair’s Café where dad and I often met mom on her lunch break. As I sat stirring my food, my sadness radiated from me. Clair laid an old BYU basketball program down in front of me. That was the last straw. I burst into giant crocodile tears and spilled my heart out right there on the counter. I told him how I had lost my chance to see the game from the overhead press box, how my friend had taken someone he liked more than me, and worse how he told me we were no longer buds. Then I sobbed, that I just didn’t think I would ever recover and asked how it could have happened after I had planned to go for three whole weeks.
My dad listened without a word as Clair tried in vain to console this distraught, little eleven year old. You see he could say that stuff, Clair had seats at mid-court 7 rows back on the Public side of the field house, and went to every game, after leaving his café a few minutes early on game nights. That night as we left, he whispered something to my dad, and on the way up University Avenue, instead of turning up Canyon road, we pulled into the field house parking lot, walked over thru the snow to the field house ticket windows and dad bought tickets for the game.
That night we watched the game from the rafters on the north east side, but dad took me down onto the track on the south side of the court so I could touch the players as they came off the floor for half time, and so I could see how gianormous a 6’ 11 inch guy really is. He bought me popcorn that came in a blue Y yell horn and we looked out on the crowd and saw lots of people we knew. The highlight tho, was when Craig Raymond came down on a fast break and smashed into the chain link wall at the end of the court. And his sweat came showering out over us, dad might not have liked it much but for ME it was heaven! I swore I wouldn’t ever bathe again….I had at that very moment been baptized a cougar fan for life. I got to not only see that game but Dad and I went to MANY games after that. In the fall he would always drop me off at the football games so I could slip thru the fence from Stadium Ave as part of the Knot Hole gang, just a bunch of kids who sat near the end zone. . He took me to see fast pitch softball games at Harmon Park too. The most memorable was the second game of a double header when I was 12 or 13, when Morris Motors played Christensen Construction from SLC. It was midnite when the game went into extra innings and dad, tho he had to go to work at 6 on that Saturday morning, wanted to see the end of that game. When the player dad said would get the winning hit for Christensen’s team, FINALLY hit the ball out of the park, over the street, RIGHT OVER OUR TRUCK over the house and into the back yard of the house west of the park, Dad looked at his watch and exclaimed, its nearly two o’clock what are we doing out so late!
The Adventures of Thotman 