Personal History III. My Education–Elementary and High School

III. My Education–Elementary and High School
    I was excited to begin my schooling in the Fall of 1943.  I was six years old.  Our Glenwood school did not have a kindergarten.  I got to ride the bus that stopped right in front of our home.  The school was a tall white three story building on the east end of Glenwood’s main street.  It was constructed in 1918.  My Dad and his siblings also had attended school there.  The bottom floor which was a sort of half basement but with outside windows just above ground level.  It contained the lunch room, rest rooms, and furnace and other maintenance items. The restrooms included dressing rooms and showers for athletic teams.  The main floor had four grade school class rooms.  First and second grades met together as did third and fourth grades, fifth and sixth grades, and seventh and eighth grades.  The main entrance was on the south side and had large double doors, then a set of stairs that went up to a large hallway running northward and ended with a short downward incline with doors into the gym which was a nearly separate building on the north of the main school building.  The four grade school class rooms were to the left and right down the main hall.
    High school was on the top floor.  It contained an office, a library room, a couple of class rooms, and a small auditorium that could probably seat 75 or 100 persons with folding chairs available.  The auditorium had a small raised stage at one end that doubled as the typing instruction room.
    There were some exciting features about this school.  One thing we boys loved was the incline ramps between floors.  There were no stairs or elevators between floors, but it really fun to run down the “Inclines,” as they were called.  Of course we weren’t allowed to run if teachers were close by.
    Even more exciting was the Fire Escape.  It was a slide that started from the high school level up by the office and ended on the ground on the east side of the building.  The bottom was round shiny metal.  There was a sloped wooden piece about a foot wide on one side of the slide, which a small boy could scramble up to near the top to slide back down.  The upper door to the slide which was near the office was well guarded as you might expect, and sometimes the faculty enforced rules about not playing in the slide.
    The gym had room for some limited stands for spectators, and also a full size stage at the west end.  The gym was used by the school P.E. classes, plays, musical performances, graduation ceremonies, dances, etc.  The school building was also used for community events, including PTA, Women’s Club, Ladies Aid, Rodeo Association, Volunteer Fireman’s Association, American Legion and Auxiliary, Hell Roaring and Frazier Creek irrigation associations, Four H Club, Boy and Girl Scouts, Glenwood Pioneer Association, Election voting, Glenwood Mountaineers Basketball Town Team.  I remember going there with my parents for community pinocle parties, square dancing, for a Sunday afternoon motion picture, and my dad acting in community theatre presentations.
    North of the gym there was a large field for athletics.   There was a baseball backstop near the east end of the back of the gym, with the outfield to west and north.  I do not recall there being any fences.  There was a farmer’s field to the north separated from the ballfield by a wire fence.  Way out beyond leftfield there was a drainage ditch, 4 or 5 feet deep.  The right and center field areas also served as the high school football field.
    One of the exciting things about starting school was that my Aunt Gracie was the teacher for the First and Second grades and we had a good relationship.  I remember that there were 3 or 4 rows of chairs running from the front of the room to the back.  First graders sat in the row or rows on one side of the room and second graders on the other.  This arrangement allowed the teacher to address one grade at a time if her or she desired.  There may have been 5 to 10 children in each grade.
    I think that I had come from home with some reading skills, and could quickly do the other things well that she was trying to teach the first graders.  About midway through the year, Aunt Gracie told my parents that to keep me interested she was giving me the second grade materials.  When the end of the year came, she advanced me to the third grade. 
    I think our home did a pretty good job of helping prepare us for our education.  This was in spite of not traveling to faraway and interesting places or taking exotic vacations.  Both of my parents were readers, especially my mother.  She belonged to a book club associated with some kind of Washington State library and read everything she could get her hands on regarding the history of our state.  She told us about the Lewis and Clark expedition and the Whitman massacre.  She had a love of good music.  We often listened on Saturdays to a weekly radio opera broadcast by the New York Metropolitan Opera Company, the “opera of the week”.  She also had acquired some records containing classical music.  I still recall the surprised look on the face of my 5th grade teacher, Mrs. Berglund, when she played a bit of record, and asked if anyone in the class had heard this music before.  I said very casually, “Oh yes, that is the Torreador song from Bizet’s opera Carmen.”  My mother also was a storehouse of information about the doctrines of the Church and especially the Biblical verses that supported these beliefs.  My mother knew the specific names of birds and flowers and many other items.  My father knew the names and varieties of trees from the time that he had worked in the logging industry.
    My father who had hoped in his youth to become a high school history teacher was especially interested in and loved discussions about the origins of our country, about politics and the Revolutionary and Civil wars.  He knew about troop movements in the important battles in these two wars, Picken’s charge, and the battles of Lexington and Concord and Breed’s (Bunker) Hill.   His schooling had caused him to memorize a number of pieces of old English and American poetry which he had retained in his memory and could still recite.  He had his political biases, intensely disliking unions and Pres. Franklin Roosevelt.  I remember hearing him report that someone had told him he was strange, in that he came from the South but had no racial prejudice against Negroes. 
    He also was a encyclopedia of baseball lore, and knew stories of many of the heroes of the game.  For example, I learned of Wee Willie Keeler, a little shortstop who was expert at placing his hits, he “hit it where they ain’t,” and Babe Ruth, who “hit it where they ain’t never going to be.”  He did not approve of the great Ty Cobb, because he “slid with his spikes up,” endangering other players.  I learned respect for players like Lou Gehrig, for his bravery in the face of debilitating illness.
    Here are the teachers I had in grade school:
4th grade Mrs. Warner
5th and 6th Mrs. Berglund
7th and 8th Mr. Perry
    I cannot recall the name of the third grade teacher.  I remember her as a fairly young and attractive lady, the wife of one of the young men who was raised in the Glenwood area.  They had returned to Glenwood as a young married couple, but them moved away, and then Mrs. Warner had the third and fourth grade classes.  She could play the piano and also took a few children as piano students, and taught them at the school in the late afternoon.  My mother enrolled me for piano lessons, but I was just too immature to benefit by music lessons at that time (age 6 or 7).  I had a couple or three lessons scheduled for during the time I waited for the second bus, then got preoccupied by play and forgot to go back into the school house, so the lessons were dropped..
    The Glenwood schools owned two school buses, a large one and medium sized one.  We were fortunate to have them because that enabled us to travel to high school out-of-town football, basketball and baseball games.  On school days both of them ran two routes.  The first routes both circled fairly close to the town out to the north and east.  Both buses arrived back at the school in 30-45 minutes to load the children for longer routes.  The second route for the littler bus went southeastward and for the full-sized bus west and south.  That was our bus.  The driver was Howard Patton, who was married to Amy, the sister of Ollie and Russell Kreps, who had large cattle ranches and were employers of both myself and my dad in later years.  The Pattons lived in a place called Laurel, which was at the extreme southwest of Glenwood valley, about 10 miles away, and not too far from where  the highway from BZ Corners and White Salmon entered Glenwood Valley.  Amy Patton ran a small grocery store in connection with a post office.  Their’s was the only house in Laurel.  It was about half a mile to Ollie Krep’s ranch house, and he owned land, farm ground for hay and pasture, all around the area.  Mr. Patton as we knew him, kept the bus overnight and started his route a little after 7 in the morning.  He followed the main highway along the hill above the Conboy Lake, then northward past Snake Island toward Glenwood, until he came to the intersection of our road, where our mailbox was located, then turned west toward our place then on west and north passing Aunt Lorene’s place, and turned west again a half a mile later by our grandparents old house to pick up kids whose families lived in Camp Draper (about 2 miles west of our grandparent’s place), the housing provided to families employed by the J. Niels Logging Company.  Arriving at the school about 8:15 am, he dropped us all off and then started on his second route.  I remember that generally he stayed around the school during the day and may have done some things to assist the janitor while there, until it was time to start delivering the children back home.  Then he and the other bus driver traversed the opposites of their morning routes.
    During the years of my childhood we always carried the address of Laurel, Washington, because Amy Patton did the last sort of our mail before it was sent for delivery, even though the actual town of Laurel consisted of only a single house. 
    We shared a mailbox with five or six other families. It was located about half a mile away at the turnoff of our road from the main highway to Glenwood.  The mailbox stood 5 or 6 feet tall with a shingled, peaked roof which sheltered a generous area for packages and letters.  There may have been slots for letters for each of the half a dozen or so families who received their mail there.
    The bus routes remind me of two significant school outages, the Great Snow Vacation and the Great Mud Vacation.  The first happened in January 1949 I think, when I was in the 7th grade.  When we made the trip into school that day, the weather was threatening snow.  As classes started I noticed vapor on the windows which then began to become frosty.  There started to be a howling wind outside.  Our teachers began to act nervously.  As noon time approached, the word came that a huge storm was hitting us and that school was being cancelled.  The two buses started their first routes.  By this time there was a foot or so of snow on the roads.  Our bus a took a long time to return to pick us up, perhaps an hour and a half or so.  When Mr. Patton returned with our bus, one of the snow plows manned by the County road crew arrived to lead us on our route home. It was one of the road crew’s standard dump trucks with a plow attached for the winter.  They were having a terrible time keeping the roads plowed and open, and priority was being given to helping the school buses to run their routes.  My dad was on one of the snow plows somewhere in the storm.  Dorothy and I were both on our bus.
    This was an unusual storm.  Most of our weather at Glenwood came from the west, from the Pacific Ocean.  Being in the Cascade Mountains, we were in between the very wet coastal climate and the dry interior, but on the less wet east slope we still got quite lot of precipitation.  At an elevation of about 2000 feet, we got plenty of cold weather and lots of winter snow (yearly average at least 60 inches).  But this storm came from the east and was driven by an intense East or Northeast wind, right out of the Canadian Rockies and plains.  I would guess that the wind might have been 30-40 mph or more with a temperature falling to no more than 10 or 15 degrees Fahrenheit.
    Our bus made the trip out of Camp Draper successfully although the going was quite slow and the snow had become several feet deep in places.  We kept following the snowplow as we turned south toward Aunt Lorene’s and then by the Bolt’s and the old airfield and the turn off to the cemetery.  Just beyond that turnoff and about a mile away from our home we ran into a big problem.  There was an open space with no trees nearby and the wind had created a drift across the road and the adjoining fields that appeared to be 7 or 8 feet high or more.  Our snow plow banged into the drift and came to a stop.  There was no place to push the snow aside.  He kept backing up, then banging into the drift and not gaining anything.  Our bus stopped.  Fortunately, Mr. Patton was operating with a nearly full tank of gas and was able to keep the engine running and the heater on.  We hit the big drift at perhaps 4 pm.  After a while it became dark outside, the wind still blowing and full of snow.  Our Snowplow kept banging into the snow drift, with no progress.
    At about 8 pm a light appeared behind the snowdrift on the road.  It got brighter, then appeared the county’s biggest snow plow knifing through the drift.  It was a truck much larger than the dump truck we had been following, and had a large V-shaped plow that seemed able to split the drift and push the snow away on both sides.  Our plow was then able to move through the big drift, our bus following.  Dorothy and I were safely home in about 5 minutes.
    The storm ended during the night but left about 4 feet of snow on the level in front of our house, with large drifts all about.  There was a drift just to the north of our house that was at the level of the eaves of our roof (maybe 10 feet tall).  I found that I could climb up on this drift and step over onto the roof of our house.  It was a lot of fun to do this, then jump off the roof on the south side into 4 feet of snow.
    Then we had the Great Snow Vacation.   It took a couple of weeks for the plows to clear all of the roads and for life to come back to normal.  In the meantime, school was closed.
    A couple of years later we had the Great Mud Vacation.  It was about February and as things began to thaw, the roads crumbled.  The road that ran by our farm was gravel, but the main road into Glenwood was paved.  I don’t know the reason, perhaps the county road builders had not adequately prepared the road bed before applied the asphalt, but when the start of the Spring thaw began to occur, the paving just crumbled and revealed soupy mud underneath.  The side roads also became muddy.  Cars could not run on the roads, and would high center in the mud.  Pickup trucks the same.  The road crew dumped crushed rock into the mud holes on the roads, but it was about 3 weeks until the roads had dried out enough for travel on them at all.  In the meantime, school closed again for that period.
    I don’t recall anything I disliked about school, except perhaps being a year younger than everyone else in my class.  I also got my growth and height a little later than some of the other guys.  When I was about 16, I passed most of the them up.  More about that later.  (And by the way, Dorothy also skipped a grade.) 
    I had good relationships with all my teachers.  I liked most all of my school classes and the their subjects.  Math came easily, and I especially liked geometry.  In English classes,  enjoyed learning about the parts of speech and thought it was fun to diagram sentences.  I enjoyed writing although I was slower than some in expressing myself in writing.  I found this to be true all though of my education, even when in graduate school.  I remember deciding that I was an A student if the tests were multiple choice or if the grade was based on a paper that I could prepare outside of class.  However, if the tests were short essay with a time limit, I was a C student.  I didn’t seem able to dash off something written, rather I had to compose it.  At times I was attracted to writing poetry to meet English class assignments.  I found that words had power with me.
    I found history classes interesting, especially when they dealt with the motivations of the people, or when things happened that were brave or inventive.  I also liked the geography classes. I was passive about science classes.  I took a couple of years of French, getting to the point of being able to read some things but not to converse.  I have still retained some ability to give a French pronunciation to things from that language, but not to understand.  In High School I worked with one of teachers on photography and learned how to enlarge and develop my own pictures.  In grade school I liked to draw and do art projects.  Starting about in the seventh grade, the school initiated a music program that I participated in and really enjoyed, with a band and also a choral program.  I also liked P. E. and sports.  
    In most school subjects I earned As and usually was at the top of the class.  In elementary school classes there were a couple of girls who were better spellers however.  In High School I took a typing class and got up to about 30 words a minute.  The girls were better there also.
    In several of the school years, I was class president or officer.  The year I was a senior in High School, I served as Student Body President.  My graduating senior class was the largest In the history of Glenwood Schools, twelve.
    As I write about my early schooling, and how small we were, the community and the school, I marvel at the breadth of education that was provided.  We always had capable professional educators.  I wonder how our school board was able to attract such people.  I think of Paul McNutt, the school superintendent when I was in high school, with a Ph.D, and vast experience in both instrumental and vocal music.  And then there was John Chilcott coaching our little 6 man football team after having been a lineman playing in the NFL (the old Chicago Cardinals).

Personal History II. Glenwood, the Place Where I Was Raised

II. Glenwood, the Place Where I Was Raised
    I was raised in Glenwood Valley, in the State of Washington.  Glenwood was a tiny farming and logging community in the Cascade Range of mountains   These mountains run north and south from the province of British Columbia, fully across Washington and Oregon, and then down into California where they become called the Sierra Nevadas.  They split the states east and west, westward being very wet and the east being somewhat dry.  Glenwood valley was just barely on the east slope of these mountains.  Most of these hills in this Range are heavily forested.  On the east slope of the Cascades the trees were Ponderosa Pine and some Douglas Fir  rather than Cedar, Spruce, and Hemlock, and various Firs.  The pine forests tended to be open with little underbrush and the ground or floor  usually had a coating of pine needles.  Twenty miles to west of us the forest foliage changed, the trees were the second group and there were a lot of bushes and undergrowth. 
    The Cascades also had some threat or history of volcanic eruptions.  Mount St. Helens blew its top in 1980 while my parents were still living in the area.  It was 50 or so miles west of us.  Most of the hills and ridges in the Cascade Range topped out in the 5000-6000 feet range, but it is also punctuated by a series of high (at one time) volcanic peaks, that are snow capped and much taller, rising high above the forested foothills. 
    In Glenwood we were blessed to have the second tallest peak in the State of Washington, Mt. Adams,  in immediate view.  It rose directly on the northwest side of the valley.  Glenwood had an elevation of about 2000 feet and Mt. Adams was 10,000 feet taller.  Mt. Adams has been identified as a stratovolcano, which means that it has many layers built up of hardened lava, pumice and ash.   It could have a violent eruption, but has probably been dormant for many centuries.  It was snow capped or glacier coverede the year round and dominated all of our scenery.  The 12,280 foot peak of Mt. Adams is less than 20 miles from the town of Glenwood.  We also could see another high peak out our front windows, the very top of Mt. Hood, the highest point in Oregon.
    Beside the dominating view of Mt. Adams, Glenwood valley was a beautiful flat green valley surrounded by heavily timbered ridges.  Before civilization came it was probably an open prairie, and in fact an early name for the valley was Camas Prairie.  The Camas name (called Kamas in Utah) was for a wildflower with an edible bulb.  Several creeks drained into the valley and culminated in a large lake area in the southwest portion (sometimes called Conboy Lake–the Conboys were early settlers there).  The lake mostly dried up in the summer time, and early farmers (the first settlers came after about 1870) found that a wild hay grass grew naturally that could be used as a feed for livestock.  When I worked summers as a teenage in the haying for several farmers, I found this grass to grow to as much as 4 feet tall and to produce an immense amount of feed.  Early settlers also dug a canal to speed and extend the Spring drainage of the lake, so as to maximize the amount of wild hay that could be harvested.  The canal outlet was at the very east part of Glenwood valley and emptied into the Klickitat River, which ran just east of the valley and drained the entire southeast portion of Mt. Adams.  When the A. G. Lewis family first arrived in Glenwood Valley in 1908 from Virginia, they rented a house and small farm at a place called Snake Island which was on the very east end of the lake area right at the point where the drainage canal started.  In the summers, people used to fish the canal for catfish.  I have a happy memory of the lake filling and freezing in the wintertime, giving us miles and miles of clear ice for skating.  I don’t remember any place where the lake got very deep, maybe 5 or 6 feet at most, and I never felt unsafe when I skated.  Conboy Lake usage has changed and is now preserved primarily as a national wildlife refuge under the supervision of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.
    I would like to describe further how a person might come to or go from the isolation of Glenwood Valley.  First, about the surrounding hills.  There was a timbered ridge to the west of us that formed the barrier between Glenwood Valley and the valley immediately to the west, Trout Lake.  This ridge extended southward from Mt. Adams itself.  At the north end was a large domed forested hill we called Kings Peak or Kings Mt.  Then further along this ridge southward was Twin Buttes and then Meadow Butte.  The latter had a fire lookout at its top with a small cabin and the lookout itself (a small house or room with windows on all sides) was about 45 or 50 feet up the trunk of a huge pine tree.)  It had been constructed and was operated by the U. S. Forest Service and was usually manned (should I say womanned?) by a young women of college age for the summer fire season.  Dorothy’s good  friend Juanita Ward did this for summer employment and Dorothy sometimes would stay with her or sub for her when she needed a break.  You accessed the station by climbing up a ladder and entering though an opening in the floor of the lookout room.  The lookout person would spend the day in the lookout reading a book or whatever and from time to time gazing in all directions to detect smoke from a start of a forest fire.  They had the capability of radio contact with the Forest Service if smoke was spotted. 
    There also was a ridge extending eastward from Mt. Adams that was rocky and above the tree line.  It had two peaks along it, called Little Mt. Adams and the Goat Rocks. 
    There also was a wooded ridge running along the south side of the Glenwood Valley, but angling further south as it went westward.  I don’t think any part of this ridge was named except for a little mound toward the southwest end that also had a lookout on it, called Diamond Gap, where Dorothy had also spent some time with Juanita summers.
    There were several roads to access Glenwood Valley from the outside, but only one was paved when I was a boy.  This was the highway to BZ Corners.  It went across the valley south from Glenwood town, crossing the outlet canal from Conboy Lake, then to the edge of the wooded ridge on the south side of the valley, then followed the edge of the ridge in a southwest direction until it left the valley.  It traversed sone low foothills, passing over The Summit (which was treacherous in snowy winters), descended into Gilmer Valley, which was the home and headquarters of the Russell Kreps cattle ranch where my dad worked in his later years, and then followed a canyon down to BZ Corners which was on the White Salmon to Trout Lake highway.
    Trout Lake valley was in a similar position to Mt. Adams as Glenwood, but in a  southwest direction from the peak. The White Salmon River ran through Trout Lake from its origins on the southwest slopes of Mt. Adams and drained southward after leaving Trout Lake through a narrow valley and then a canyon into the Columbia River.  The town of White Salmon sat on a bluff just east of this overlooking the Columbia and had a companion town, Bingen, at the bottom of the bluff at river level.  Bingen got its name from a German immigrant, named after the German city Bingen-on-the-Rhine, except it hadn’t retained the German pronunciation.  The locals gave the G in Bingen a J sound.  Grandpa Lewis had his Grocery and Feed Store, Lewis’s Red and White, in Bingen and my Davenport ancestors also were living there during the period 1928 to about 1941.
    The city of White Salmon was an important resource for people of Glenwood and our family.  This was the location of our medical doctor, our dentist, and the nearest hospital.  It had the nearest movie theatre, the Cameo. Based on current numbers, the combined population of White Salmon and Bingen might have been about 3000 persons in those days, with about 2000 in White Salmon.  When TV became available in 1953, our dad had to go down to Hiway Hardware in Bingen to buy a set and the antenna in order to get reception.   The nearest branch of the Church was in White Salmon starting about 1950, first meeting in a Grange Hall and then in an old dance hall the members purchased (the Leaky Tepee).
    There were other roads to and from Glenwood.  There was a dirt road to Trout Lake that passed just below Meadow Butte. 
    The road to the county seat in Goldendale was graveled and not very inviting.  The Klickitat River ran through a deep gorge a few miles east of us.  It had its origins in the Cascades northeast of Mt. Adams, and ran southward into the Columbia at Lyle, which was about a dozen miles east of Bingen.  It drained most all of the east side of Mt. Adams, including Glenwood valley.  All of the waters in the valley (Bird Creek, Conboy Lake, Frazier Creek) flowed toward what was called Outlet Creek, which then ran north and eastward to the Klickitat River.  There was a lovely waterfall called Outlet Falls near where Outlet Creek emptied into the Klickitat about 5 miles east of the town.
    The road to Goldendale was gravel and graded and about 30 miles .  It descended into the canyon of the Klickitat, crossed the river and then meandered for miles getting up and out of the canyon.  We didn’t go there very often.
    Another poorly maintained gravel road went southward into a high plateau toward the areas called Snowden and Appleton and came out eventually at the towns of Klickitat, Lyle or White Salmon.  In both of these areas there were scattered farms and some logging operations.   In Appleton as one neared White Salmon, there were nice orchards.
    There was a dirt road that went northward from Glenwood into the Yakima Indian Reservation several miles north of town, but I do not know where it led.  I learned recently that there was some controversy with the Yakima nation over ownership of most of Glenwood Valley, which apparently fell within the designated original reservation area.  But mistakenly, this was not recognized and deeds were granted to non members of the tribe for most all of the land in the valley.  Eventually a compromise was worked out that provided the tribe with some financial compensation from the federal government.
    There was also a dirt road that went northeasterly from Glenwood toward Mt. Adams.  It gave access to picnic and camping areas and eventually ended up just below the mountain in an extraordinarily scenic area called Bird Creek Meadows.
    My grandparents, Aubrey Gordon Lewis and wife India Agee Lewis, migrated in 1908 from Floyd County, Virginia.  There were some others who came to Glenwood from this same place.  One of the first to come was my grandmother India’s older sister Olivia, and her husband Ben O’Neal.  They were married in Floyd County, Virginia in February 1893 and came west almost immediately, because their oldest child, Fred, was born in Glenwood that November.  My grandparents followed them some fifteen years later. 
    It appeared that there was a perception in their Virgina community that things were better financially out west away from the Blue Ridge.  I recall that my grandfather originally made his  living in Virginia (probably a marginal one), by loading goods on a wagon to peddle as he traveled to farms in neighboring communities.  He seemed to have acquired a belief that to be truly successful financially, a man needed to own and run his own farm.  Perhaps that was not possible where they came from, but he soon acquired farm land in Glenwood Valley.  But he also wavered throughout his life between farming and retail business.  My dad thought that the latter was his father’s true calling.  Early in his time in Glenwood he partnered in the ownership of a grocery store with Ty Bolt.  Ty also had migrated from the same area of Virginia, and married one of Olivia’s older daughters, Lilivan.
    Then A. G. moved the family to Centralia, Washington, for several years where he also managed a grocery store.  Centralia is a community west of the mountains and about half way on the direct route between Portland and Seattle.  According to my dad, his father had this pattern of succeeding financially with a grocery business and then using up his gains on the farm in Glenwood, then getting back in the grocery business to recoup his losses.  About the time that my Dad graduated from Glenwood High school (1924?), his father acquired a grocery and feed store in Bingen, Washington, leaving the farm to be run by a O’Neal relative.  (Bingen is located about 30 miles away from Glenwood on the Columbia River, and was also where my mother’s family, the Davenports, were living.  My dad helped run the store.  Then when my parents got married (1931), A. G. asked them to manage the farm.  After several years he decided he wanted the farm again, and my parents were able to acquire a small farm of their own in Glenwood, where we lived through all my growing up years.
    There were several other families in the area who had come originally from the Blue Ridge area of Virginia, living either in the Glenwood area or in Yakima Valley.  I remember our family attending a yearly Virginia picnic in a park just north of Goldendale on the highway to Yakima.  The meal was “Pot-luck” which meant that each family brought one main course item and one dessert.  My main recollection of the meal was the abundance of fried chicken.
    We also saw people of our Virginia connection on Mother’s Day.  There was a tradition that no church meetings were held in the Glenwood Community Church on that day, but rather there were special services held at an old unused church building in an area called Lakeside.  It was on property owned by the Hathaway family, who were among those who had a Virginia connection.  This church was about 5 miles south of the town o f Glenwood at the spot that highway from White Salmon turned north away from the wooded hillside and then passed by the Conboy Lake and drainage canal in the direction of Glenwood. 
    The meeting was usually conducted by people from a church from Yakima valley.  I recall the agenda being first, a Sunday school at about 10 am, then a preaching service, and then finally in the early afternoon, the inevitable pot-luck dinner with a lot of adult visiting time.  There seemed to not be a lot of pressure on the youth to be in the church, especially when the preaching service was happening, so there was time for an extended baseball game until and after the food was ready.
    The preaching was usually performed by ministers from the church attended by Aunt Olivia.  She and several of her children had moved to Sunnyside, in the Yakima valley, one of whom became a minister, and was on the faculty of Biola University in California.  The denomination was called the Church of the Brethren or the Dunkards.  This church was brought to America by German immigrants and also sometimes called German Baptist Brethren.  They were conservative, Calvinistic and strict in their beliefs and practices.  The word dunkards (dunkers/tunkers) referred to their insistence on baptism by immersion. 
    It was interesting that some of the Virginia relatives would affiliate with Dunkards.  In their Virginia origins the Agees were Primitive Baptists.  Earlier the Agees were Huguenot settlers in Manakin Town, Virginia, coming to Virginia through England and Holland after being driven from France by conflict with the Catholics.  The Huguenots were originally Calvinist Protestants in France.  Some of the family also had Scots-Irish ancestry.  The Scots-Irish came to this country as members of the Scottish national kirk, or  Presbyterians, again a Protestant variation of Calvinism, but gravitated toward being Baptists in this country.
    Primitive Baptists, sometimes called “Hard-shell” Baptists, were likewise conservative and strict and Calvinistic in their beliefs and practices.  This denomination probably originated in America, was followed largely in the upland south, and became differentiated from missionary Baptist churches, who were less strict in practice, and emphasizing proselytizing the world.
    I suspect that the O’Neals probably could not discern much difference between the beliefs and practices of the Dunkards versus the Hard-Shell Baptists and affiliated with whatever church that was available in Sunnyside, Washington.
    Going back to the origins of Glenwood Valley people, the 1910 census showed the population to be very diverse in its origins.  Reviewing census numbers for that year, there were 566 persons living in the Camas Prairie Precinct of Klickitat County, Washington (that is, Glenwood Valley).  Of the 206 adults, 42 (20.4%) were born in foreign countries, including 26 (12.6%) from Germany.  Of the 164 who born in the United States, only 38 had their births in Washington (22) or Oregon (16).  The numbers born in Illinois (21) and Virginia (20) were approximately the same as those born locally in the State of Washington.
    Those who were immigrants from Germany were interesting.  I do not recall hearing about their motivation to come to America, except I perceive that it was not religious.  Perhaps like our ancestors, they were trying to better themselves economically or maybe they were escaping from a situation that was oppressive politically.  I do question the latter, however, because I have recollections that several of these persons had difficulty in siding with their adopted country in its decision to enter either of the World Wars. There seemed to be some German pride or sympathy remaining.
    My dad thought there was a divide in the community between those of German ancestry and others.  He was on the Glenwood School Board just prior to the second World War, and the board felt the need to have a bond passed to make some physical improvements in the school.  The German element in the community seemed to be the place where the most of the opposition to this proposal was generated.  They seemed to have less commitment to the educating of their children.  When the bond election passed, my Dad called it “the year we licked the Germans.”
     There is a fun and fascinating story about some marriages in the German community in Glenwood, that was part of the community folklore.  There was the time when three bachelors in the group wanted to marry, Oscar Bleiler, William Schweighoefer, and Max Ladiges.  The latter was an uncle of Hank Ladiges, who married our Aunt Lorene.  For their own reasons they wanted to marry German girls, and were able to do a sort of “mail order” back to the old country to get three women sent to them to marry.  The year was 1906.  The day for the ladies to arrive was approaching and a decision needed to be made as which girl would become the bride of which man.  The three got together and reached the decision that they would run a race.  The finish order of the race would determine who got to pick first, second and third.  Why the other two agreed upon a footrace was always a mystery to me.  I would have suggested a hand of pinocle.  Anyway, Max (pronounced Mox) was younger than the other two and more fit and so won the race.   He still wanted other advantages.  So he traveled down to the town of Lyle (I suppose by horse or buggy) a day early and caught the east bound passenger train. Lyle was the closest station then of the S P & S (Spokane, Portland and Seattle) railroad which ran along the north side of the Columbia River.  The ladies had traveled from Hamburg, Germany, across the ocean on steamship to New York, then by train to Chicago, then to Spokane, and finally to Lyle    Max met the women some hours before and got acquainted with them as they approached the Lyle station.  I understand that he selected the youngest and prettiest to be his bride.  After arriving at Lyle, the three couples then took passage on a stern wheeler that used to ply the Columbia River before the dams were built, and rode down to Stevenson where the marriages were performed.  When I was a little boy, the couples were a part of the community and these marriages were still intact.

Personal History I. Birth and Early Childhood

I. Birth and Early Childhood
    Here is an 1976 oral history interview with my mother, Hazel Lewis, that gives a lot of insights about my early childhood:
    Bob:  I wanted to get you to recollect some of the things that happened to me when I was very small.  Maybe we could start with what you recall even before I was born, even when you were expecting me.  Where were you living, could you tell me something about that?
    Hazel:  Well, we had bought a place out in Glenwood, a 30 acre place on Bird Creek and we were living there.  We had been living in Glenwood about 5 years, on a place which had belonged to Clarence’s father, a mile west of Glenwood.  They had an 80 acre ranch up there. Prior to that we had been living in Hood and it was hard there.  Daddy was working awful hard at a saw mill and got continually wet in the job.  He was working at the end of the flume, where the lumber would come off.  When his dad found out that Kemper O'Neal wanted to move from the ranch and there they were with pigs and it was in the spring, and cows too.  They had a bunch of cows.  Daddy wanted to go back there and farm again.  He had never lived any place that he'd had more fun than in Glenwood and it was home to him.  They used to have community get-togethers and parties and ball games and everything.  So that was alright with me, because I was glad to have him get out of that mill.  He was getting a bad cough from being wet so much because the lumber was wet, and the flume was right there.  He had to stoop over to run the saws. He was getting about the highest wage of anyone there, running the re-saw. They didn’t have much of a market so they had to run the lumber around several times.  It just kept him so busy there on the re-saw because they were really manufacturing the lumber there.  They'd bring the big cants down on the flume.  It was a 9 mile flume from up in the mountains up at Willard.  Then he'd have to re-saw them, and he had a fellow helping him line it up.  It was hard work.
    So we decided to go out there to Glenwood.  After we got out there, in one year, we realized that it was a mistake.  We stayed on there until his dad had sold the store and was ready to come back to the farm in Glenwood.  The reason it was a mistake, was, that he couldn't run the ranch alone.  His dad wanted remote control of it.  One time for instance, we were so over stocked and had no pasture, except the woods and that was mostly just sagebrush and little scrub pine.  There was hardly anything for the cows to eat to eat except for early in the spring there would be some buds.  The rest of the time they would wander around and get themselves all scratched up so that it was awful hard to milk them.  It hurt them to get milked.
    Bob:  What sort of arrangement did you have about finances?
    Hazel:  The strange thing about it was that after all those years he trusted his dad to and we were supposed to have half of' the increase of the cattle, and half of the milk.  We were milking several cows, and that's about all.  Half of anything that was extra produced, such as the young pigs.
    We had 18 baby pigs.  One sow had 9 and the other 9 also.  And then the second sow died, so he had to feed the other 9 pigs.  I guess the one mother still nursed her 9 pigs, but these others had to be fed quite a lot.  I remember when it was time to feed them, that they would follow him around and there would be the whole 18 pigs running after him, single file, squealing and squeaking.  It was a lot of fun for us.
    When we first got settled out there and he got the crop in and was just irrigating, he could rest and come to the house and it just seemed so really nice.  We thought we'd like farming.  And we did.  But we couldn't get anywhere financially.  The great depression was going on.  The first thing happened, the market in the pigs was rather strange.  The government was paying people to not raise pigs.  Anybody that sent pigs to market had to pay a big percentage of it as a processing tax they called it and then that was collected and paid to people that didn't raise pigs that had raised the year before but didn't that year because of the superabundance of pigs.  They thought that would help the market.  This was the government working this out.  By the time we had paid for all our ground barley and other food that we had given them and paid the processing tax, there was nothing left after we had sent the pigs in. That was quite a loss.
    But still we had fun.  We enjoyed living out there.  The meadowlarks singing, going after the cows down in the woods, in spite of there being hardly any pasture.
    Bob:  You had lived there several years when I came along, hadn't you? ·
    Hazel:  Yes, we lived there five years, and then in 1937 his dad sold the store at Bingen and came back up to the ranch and we moved back down to Bingen and Daddy got a job in the mill down there piling lumber.
    Bob:  How old was I when you moved, or was that before I was born?
    Hazel:  That was before you were born. You were just on the way.  We moved down about the first of April, and you weren't born until the 24th.
    Bob:  You were living in Bingen before I was born?
    Hazel:  Yes, I came down about a month before and stayed with my folks, because we were worried by the heavy snow up there that year.  You couldn't even see anyone walking along the highway.  If they were on a horse you could just see the top of the horse's head and the person, the snow was piled so high when I left up there.  So we just decided that I had to stay down in Bingen.
    Bob: Then how long did you live in Bingen?
    Hazel:  One year.
    Bob:  In the same house?
    Hazel:  The same house.  It was a little, tiny bouse.  We paid $10 a month rent.
    Bob:  Then you were able to purchase your own farm?
    Hazel:  Yes we had saved some money and we put a down payment on it.  It belonged to Grace and Wallace, that little 30 acre ranch.  They had got it from Mrs. Bordie.  Well, in fact, all they did was have a down payment on it, so we just took that over and paid them.  And then we paid Mrs. Bordie $200 a year or something like that.  It was supposed to be $100 a year, but we finished it up faster.  It made her a little bit upset.  She didn't have anything in writing that we couldn't pay it quicker.  She would have liked to have the interest.
    Well, I had been down there a while and one morning I woke up and I didn't feel too good. It was about the time you were due. But I wasn’t having any labor pains.
    Bob:  You were living in that rented home already?
    Hazel:  Yes. This was the 24th of April.
    Bob:  What time was it?
    Hazel: It was about... Daddy had to be at work at seven, so he left and I was still alright although I didn't feel too natural.  So he went on to work and then labor pains started a little bit so I walked down to my mother's.  It was just about 4 blocks.  By that time I definitely knew it was coming, so we got Kenneth.  He lived across the street catty-corner, to take me up to Mrs. Seaton's.  She had a maternity home.
    Bob:  What time was that?
    Hazel:     About 9 o’clock.  This maternity home was a pretty good sized rambling house--two story-- a white one, with a big white fence around it, just west of the Columbia High School gymnasium, across the street.  She usually had from two to seven or eight mothers there, who either had just had a baby or were waiting.  There was one girl who lived way out somewhere.  She was just boarding there until she had her baby.  I remember it just cost $50 for her.  And they kept you 10 days.  In those days, maybe the life was harder and when they’d go home there was so much hard work to do.  They didn't have washing machines or all the things like that.  So they did figure that 10 days wasn't too long to keep a mother there and let her recuperate.
    My doctor was Dr. Russell Baker.  He was a fairly young man.  He seemed to specialize in babies.  He had had a lot of experience.  He used calipers to measure you and a lot of things that Dr. Donnahue, our doctor we had with our first baby didn't do things like that.  He had you come in and get checked, he was more modern.  I remember Mrs. Seaton telling him that I was there and how far the pains were apart and I think that they were about five minutes by eleven o'clock.  Naomi was working at the bakery, Warneke's Bakery.  At noon I called her.  I was standing there in the kitchen and the others were there eating.  I was standing there.  They had the telephone on the I wall and all of a sudden I felt something---the waters had broken.  It was good I was in the kitchen. So Mrs. Seaton called the Dr. immediately and he came over.
    Bob:  The Dr. was real close?
    Hazel:  About three blocks.  It was in the noon hour.  Anyway he got over there within a few minutes.  By one o'clock you were here.  So I think that was quite fast.  You came rather quickly.  I didn't have very long to wait.
    Bob:  It sounds like a rather fast and easy birth.
    Hazel:  I don’t remember very hard pains.  It would just be like you had a stomache ache, colic, or someth1ng, cramps.  I wasn't really awake when you came.  I don't remember anything because he had given me some ether, because he had to cut me.  I wasn't big enough for your head.  He just did a neat little job.  He was left handed.  Mrs. Seaton used to say that all the mothers had a neat little place that he had helped so they wouldn't get torn.  I remember him stitching a little bit.  I remember hearing that it was a boy.  I guess I went to sleep for a while after that.  I nursed you, so there was awhile that they were bringing you in every 3 or 4 hours.  At first oftener than that.  I just had so much food that I had to have hot packs on.
    Bob: So what time was I born?
    Hazel:  About one o'clock.
    Bob:  Do you remember how big I was?
    Hazel:  Not the number of ounces.  Eight pounds, and some ounces.  It is written down in the baby book though.
    Bob:  What did I look like? 
    Hazel:  You looked a great deal like most any nice-tooking little baby, sort of red and you didn't have hardly any hair, just little strings of hair.  They put quite a bit of oil on your head.  That made your hair darker.
    Bob:  What was Daddy doing at this time?
    Hazel:  He was down at the mill.  They got word to him.  I don’t remember too much, except that he came in.  He was happy about you.
    Bob:  He didn't get there until after the birth?
    Hazel:  No.
    Bob:  Did he have to work his shift out?
    Hazel:  I wish you could ask him that.  I think he quit and came up, at least during the noon hour.
    Bob:  Tell me about deciding on a name.
    Hazel:  Well, we talked about it a great deal.  He didn’t want the name Clarence or any name like that, because when he was a little boy all the sissies were named Clarence or Percival or Harold, especially in the silent movies.  He didn't want to be called "Old Clarence”-- you'd be "Young Clarence”.  I’d like to have had you named Clarence.  But then next we thought of Robert.  We talked about other names and we ended it for one of those ordinary names that lots of people have.  Robert sounded better to us than any other.  I had picked out Patricia Ruth if you had been a girl.  The funny part of it was that Ruth Akerill had a girl and she named her Patricia and of course Ruth's name there, that just spoiled it.  I never would name my next baby Patricia Ruth.
    Bob:  How about the Eugene?
    Hazel:  It was partly for Uncle Eugene, Daddy's uncle, his Dad's brother. 
    Bob:  Did you have special feeling for him?
    Hazel:  Daddy thought Uncle Eugene was a pretty nice fellow. He'd stayed with us. He came out from Virginia when the folks came back from the trip they took in 1921. He stayed with us for a while out there on the ranch.  He had asthma pretty bad. 
    We thought Robert E. Lewis sounded good. We liked Robert E. Lee- It sounded good to us.
    Bob:  I think I had a blessing when I was small.  Why don’t you tell me a little about that?
    Hazel:  Papa had the Priesthood.  He was a Seventy.  So I just naturally asked him to give you a blessing and name you.  The Hood River Branch was our Priesthood headquarters, yet I know they sent the report into Portland, into the mission.  Whether it was sent in by the Hood River President, I don't know.  They contacted him quite a bit.
    Bob: How old was I?
    Hazel:  Oh, within a month.  You have the date there, but I thought it was just as soon as we had a chance.  I think at that time they were holding Sunday School in Bingen in our home.  There were a couple of Elders that came now and then.  I don’t remember their names-- Elder Spendlove I think was one.  I can't remember the other one.  It was about then or a little later that they went all over the area and found different members of the Church that they didn't even know each other.  Eventually it ended up that in 1948 when they started the White Salmon Branch.
    But before that they had Sunday school, when we were living there in what we called the Henderson House.  When Daddy and I were living in Bingen, I always went down there on Sunday mornings because they had the Sacrament because Papa could bless it.  The boys hadn't been ordained at all.  I think this was too bad.  Mama would have liked to but she wasn't able to do anything about it, except just encourage.
    Bob:  So Grandpa Davenport did the blessing and was helped by some Elders?
    Hazel:  They weren't there. He did it by himself.
    Bob:  Do you have any recollection of anything he said?
    Hazel:  It wasn't anything unusual.  I remember him blessing you with health and a clear mind.  And that your parents would be able to raise you and help you to grow and mature and be righteous.  These were the main parts of it.  It wasn't a long one.
    Bob:     Can you tell me something about my early development, like learning to crawl, learning to walk?
    Hazel:  I remember that you didn't crawl very much.  The folks had an old walker and fixed that up and you used the walker.  I felt like it was really the wrong thing to do, because when you would try to walk, to take your first steps, you wouldn’t just sit down.  You’d fall flat, the full length.  If you had learned to crawl first either you would probably crumple down when you'd lose your balance like most children do that don’t have walkers.  You were strong.  We didn't have a jumper but this walker made your legs strong.  You went everywhere in it in the little house where we lived.  You were walking before we got back up to Glenwood.  You'd walk if we'd hold your hand.  You could walk around holding onto something for a long time.  I think you were about 10 months when you first started to walk alone.  But you still would go in the walker quite a bit.  When you'd go through a door you would bump you head if you lost your balance.
    Bob:  I have a recollection of your saying that I took a kind of a bad fall and quit walking for a while.
    Hazel:  This was Dorothy that did that.  We were in that first little house up there on our ranch, that old house, and the floor was up and down.  She was walking at about 8 or 9 months. She went hurrying across the floor and came to that uneven part and fell and made her nose bleed.  It must have been 2 or 3 months before she really got to walking alone with confidence. Yes this was Dorothy, because I don't remember you ever stopping once you got started.  I remember when we moved back to Glenwood, your first birthday.  We went back there the first of April.  We moved into a little house in Glenwood village.  The folks were out on this ranch.  It was a mile and a quarter out there.  We had this big wicker buggy.  We took you in that and walked out there on your birthday.  We got you an all-day sucker.  That was the first time you had had that.  And on the way back, we were walking along there about halfway between the ranch and our place in town, and you didn't want to ride any more.  You got out and walked part of the way and helped push the buggy.  You weren't about to spend all your birthday riding in the buggy.
    Bob:  Which house were you living in in Glenwood?
    Hazel:  It was across from the school.  You know the corner where the house is that the janitor lived in?  Well it was right across south from that.
    Bob:  Wasn't that the house Hank and Lorene lived in? [NOTE: This was much later]
    Hazel:  Yes, Hank and Lorene.
    Bob:  You go right down the street [NOTE: go east on the Glenwood main street] and if the road hadn’t turned you would have run right into it.
    Hazel:  Yes, there is a jog there. It was called the old Parrott house.  Grandma Parrott used to have it.
    Bob:  How long did you live there?
    Hazel:  Just a few months because Daddy was working for Orie Conboy helping them put in their crop.  That was in April. Then in May he got a job on the "steel gang" for J. Neils logging company.  That was a steady job and we felt that we could buy our own place.  We got a chance to do this.  Grace and Wallace had made a down payment on a small ranch but didn't want that place.  They were living over at Fulda.  He was working in the mill over there and she was teaching school.  It was just an investment.  Gracie had put her money in it mostly.  The cost was only $1,200 dollars for the 30 acres and an old house and an old barn.  So we decided to buy that from them. We were able to handle it when we got the steel gang job.  They were building logging railroads.  We moved down there in May.  We weren't in the Parrott house very long, probably less than 2 months.
    Bob:  How about my learning to talk?
    Hazel:  You started in saying words, I know, before you were a year old.  We made a mistake of repeating them.  I remember you’d say "cow", "cow", and the first thing you know you were saying “cow-cow" and "car-car.”  It seemed as though we had to correct that.  I think cow was one of the first words you could say except "Mama" and "Daddy.”  You could say "Water" pretty soon.  I don't think you ever said "Wah-wah".  You just kept on learning words.  I would always talk to you.  I never did anything else but just reason things out.  Even when you were six months old or younger, it seemed as though I could just talk to you and you could understand what I was talking about.  Mama used to say that I didn't have to discipline you.  I'd just explain something to you and you seemed to understand it.  You seemed to be a happy baby.  Of course, I don't think there were things you wanted that I didn’t give you, but I don't think you wanted too much.
    Bob:  What sort of philosophy of discipline did you have and how did you arrive at that?
    Hazel:  Well, it just seemed like you were a part of me and I could just talk to you.  We just had a real good relationship all your baby years.  Daddy played with you a lot but he didn't take any part in that.  He wouldn’t even think of slapping you or spanking you.  He swung backward the other way.  We just explained to you and you could do it.  One time, after Dorothy was born, you wanted to go out to the barn and climb in that loft above the horse stall. At that time I did explain to you that you might fall but you had such confidence in yourself that you did go out one time when I was getting her to sleep.  I think you cried.  You weren't more than 3 years old then.  I went out and got you.  You really had learned your own lesson, because you never tried to do something like that that I told you not to again.  It was only for your own protect1on, of course.  I just don't remember having to spank you.  I don't think I ever spanked you.  I don't know if you can remember it either.  But it was because we had this relationship from the time you were born.  I think talking to a child, like you and JoAnn do, and Dorothy and Ed, they talk to the children like they're adults.  Don't use baby talk.  They just begin to understand and pick it up as fast as they can.
    Bob:  Did you find that your other two children were the same way when they were little?     Hazel:  Yes.  Except Dorothy was a little different temperament.  And I could talk to her and all but she still wanted to do what she wanted to do.  And at times she wanted to do something, I didn't spank her.  We told her to go in the bedroom and she'd go in there and shut the door herself sometimes and stay there until she had cooled off a little bit and quit having this temper tantrum.  I remember one time Daddy came home from work and I don't remember whether she had one or two, but she said when she greeted him, "Daddy I just had one tantrum today.”
    Sometimes you would tease her.  I remember the first words she ever said was, "Bobba, Bobba."  You were doing something she didn't like.  You were on the bed and she was trying to get you to stop whatever teasing you were doing.
    Bob:  What sort of relationship do recall me having with Dorothy when she was a little tiny baby?
    Hazel:  Oh, you thought she was pretty nice. You were really proud of her. When she was born you were just 20 months old.  A little while before she was due, we took you down there and you and I stayed at my Mother's.  It was probably a. week or two.  You really had a good time with their dog.  The kids took care of you-- Myron, Naomi took care of you quite a bit. 
    Bob: There's a picture that we have with a dog out in their back yard. Is that from then?
    Hazel.  Yes.  That was taken a that time.  And there was a little black rabbit on a box.  You played with this little black rabbit and they took your picture.  But when I went up to Mrs. Seaton’s for Dorothy, you stayed there for a few days.  Then Daddy took you up to Glenwood and you stayed at Grandma Lewis' the rest of the time.  Probably a week up there.  Daddy would go up every day and see you.  He had the cows to milk down at the place.
    He would go up there and would say you were so anxious to see him when he got there. Grandma took care of you but it was sort of lonesome there.  When he brought Dorothy and me back to our place, then he went back and got you and brought you back home, and when you first came in you wouldn't have anything to do with me.  You'd just stand off and look.  I'd had the baby at first.  When I put baby Dorothy aside; then you came and I could pick you up. You were just a little leery, where I had gone off and left you and didn't explain to you.  I didn't even think of how to explain those days.  Even that wouldn't have helped I guess.
    Bob:  Did I have any other playmates, in my first three years?
    Hazel:  Well practically every Sunday, we went up to Grandpa's and Grandma's and there were Marylin and Evelyn.  I don't know if Virginia was there or not, but soon, you had Judy.  She was there and Morrie.  Judy would come when they would come over.  Sometimes Edna and Wig would come and Roger would be there.  There was always something going on at Grandma’s on Sundays.  We always went up there on Sunday afternoons.
    Of course the Davis' were over at Horn's Mill (they called it Fulda). They would come over.  Evelyn stayed there when she was five, when they were at school.  They'd bring her over there and she'd stay all week at Grandma’s and Grandpa's and then they'd take her home or come and see her or something.  She finally started school when she was five because she didn't want to be away from her family so much.
    This place we lived on, Bird Creek ran right through it.  I can remember when we'd go up there, through the fields.  We used it mostly for pasture although part of the time we planted some oats in the field.  We had Roy Feller come and combine it.
    I can remember you kids riding in the wagon.  I guess you can remember when 'd cut the hay.
    We went to Sunday School quite regularly at the community Sunday school.
    Bob:  Starting when I was how old?
    Hazel:  Soon after you were born.
    Bob:  Did you have a car all the time?
    Hazel:  No.  We didn't have one all the time.  We didn’t have one at all on the other place where we lived except right towards the last when we got a little Model T Ford.
    Bob: How did you get to Sunday School?
    Hazel:  Aunt Olivia picked us up.  She was living down where Bolts lived, with Lillivan.  Every Sunday morning she'd drive around that way, bring the Bolt children that wanted to go, and stop and pick me up.  Oh, this was when we lived at the other place [NOTE: Grandpa Lewis’ farm].  That's how I got to Sunday School.  After we were down to this place [NOTE: our own farm], and you were born, I guess Daddy took us up and then came home again.  He didn't stay, for a long time.  But before that I had ridden with her.  But I know that I was teaching these Sunday School classes, and while you were in the little nursery classes on up, I was your teacher all the time.  I just wanted to make sure that you weren't taught anything but what I believed.  I taught the Bible from the outlook of my beliefs of the Church.  I tried not to teach anything that would offend anybody but we generally didn't get any teaching that was against our beliefs in the Uniform Bible Lessons that they were using.  The same thing with Dorothy, but generally we didn't have so many children that you couldn't be in the same class.
    That's the way we worked that until you got up into Junior High.  Then I didn't teach you after that.  That's about the time that most of the kids quit coming to Sunday School up there, until McNutts were there and then they started in again.
    Bob:  This is a question that I’ve never asked before.  Would you tell me a little about what your philosophy of toilet training was and how that had occurred.  How early or how late?
    Hazel:  I'd read not to hurry  it too fast.  If you did, you were just training yourself.  When a child was ready, they would train themselves-- as soon as they were old enough to understand or didn't want to wear pants that needed changing.  But you couldn't do it very well, at first.  I remember your rhythm was different.  Instead of being the same time every day, it might be two hours later.  But otherwise you were pretty easy to train.  I didn't really push you.  I just explained and we worked it out.  With both of you.
    Bob:  How early, do you remember?
    Hazel:  I suppose at a year and a half, or so, you were being dry in the day-time. And it was about at two years before I was sure that you didn't have to go to bed in your pants.
(recorded 18 September 1976)

Let Us Be One, and Not Be Deceived

    There is a growing consensus among religious scholars of the Church that the great apostasy (changes in the ordinances, straying from the covenants, loss of Priesthood authority, rebellion against church authority, etc.) of the church organized by the Savior must have been complete by about the year 100 A.D.   More and more, the causes of this apostasy are being seen as internal to the church itself, not from outside pressures (Noel B. Reynolds, Ed., Early Christians in Disarray: Contemporary LDS Perspectives on the Christian Apostasy, Provo, UT: Brigham University Press, 2005). 
    This is entirely consistent with the statement of the angel to Alma as recorded in the Book of Mormon:
     "Nevertheless he cried again, saying: Alma, arise and stand forth, for why persecutest thou the church of God? For the Lord hath said: This is my church, and I will establish it; and nothing shall overthrow it, save it is the transgression of my people [my italics]."  (Mosiah 27:13)
     One of the warnings the scriptures give us, for our day, is to be aware of false prophets:
     "And many false prophets shall arise, and shall deceive many;" (Joseph Smith--Matthew 1:9) 
     False prophets will succeed, in the Church context, if they can deceive members that they have the real word of God, the teachings of God that are correct.  This may be an example of what was called Gnostisicm in the early church.
     Gnosticism was one of the several movements in the early Christian church that helped propel it into apostasy.   Gnostic means esoteric or hidden/secret knowledge.  A Gnostic movement would tend to arise as a subgroup of the larger Church.  Gnostic ideas would identify members of the group as having special insights and understandings that are correct but are unknown (not revealed to/ignored/not appreciated) by the general body of the Church.  Gnostic ideas may have a special appeal to persons who have a high level of commitment or who have an extra need for validation. There is an attraction to being one of the chosen, enlightened  few.  Sometimes a charismatic leader may appear to present these new ideas.  Gnostic movements tend toward creating divisions in the larger group.  From the perspective of persons inside the movement, members in the larger group might often be viewed as apathetic, uncommitted, or even apostate.
    Do we have any Gnostic movements in the God’s latter-day church?  One example may exist in claims of modern polygamist break-off groups, including the claim that they were authorized by revelation or instructions of one of the prophets of the Church (John Taylor/ Wilford Woodruff) that they had special, perhaps secret authorization to violate the Manifesto.  And you commonly see the negative attitudes toward regular members of the Church that we referenced above.
    At an earlier time, we had Word of Wisdom fanatics who may have gone too far in elaborating of what it meant to really keep the Word of Wisdom.  They may have stepped over the line into Gnosticism.
    In the last few years, there is the rise of the survivalist “prepper” movements both inside and outside Church membership.   We have seen a couple of examples inside the Church.  The first is described in a New York Times bestseller memoir by Tara Westover (Educated, Random House: New York, 2018).  She was raised in an isolated farming community near Malad, Idaho in a large dysfunctional family, including a dominating schizoid father, enabler mother, and abusive brother.  The family norms included a prepper mentality, a paranoid aversion to schools, modern medicine, specific foods, and government control.  They had a background in the Church (the father had served a mission in his youth, and the parents temple married)  and attended meetings at a local ward but were quite cynical about the standards of its members.  In this case they did not appear to be a significant part of an organized group but had Gnostic attitudes referenced above.
    As a second prepper example of possible Church-related Gnosticism, we have been following detailed news reports of the Chad Daybell/Lori Vallow missing children/possible murders situation and see in it an extreme Gnostic belief system.  Without going into the bizarre details of the relationships in this case, we learned (from internet news reports) that Daybell who was a returned, but excommunicated, missionary and widowed father of 5, has been pursuing for a number of years a set of beliefs about preparing a group of 144,000 persons for the return of the Savior.  He had self-published more than 25 doomsday books for Mormon audiences including fantasies of a dystopian world wrought by bioterrorism attacks and catastrophic natural disasters.  He had a set of regular followers with which he communicated by podcast.
    As another example closer to home, some of our friends from the temple have been excited about the special insights and teachings of group that has been giving firesides about a location in the United States for all of the Book of Mormon lands.  Their vision of the Nephite lands is that they were located north of the Ohio River, that the Sea East and the Sea West were Great Lakes, the narrow strip of wilderness was the hills of Kentucky, that the Sidon river was the Mississippi, and so forth.  The sponsors seem quite adamant and even argumentative about this concept which they call the Heartland model of Book of Mormon geography.  They sponsor conferences, sell guided tours, write books and have some websites, and advertise even in the Deseret Book’s LDS Living magazine.  Their Book of Mormon conferences include presentations on America (that is, the United States), that it is God’s Land of Promise, about signs of the times, with perhaps some mild Prepperisms.  They seem to get upset if someone suggests that any Latin American locale might currently be populated by Lamanite descendants.  I think all this might have special appeal to Americans who are quite patriotic and America-centered and perhaps politically conservative.  This group makes me a little nervous, especially in the “true-believers” reaction of their adherents.
    Wendy and I say to be careful in who we follow and do not let latter-day Gnostics divide us.  There is safety in “following the prophet.”
     Another warning regarding our day has to do with priestcraft.  According to the Book of Mormon, priestcraft is when "men...preach and set themselves up for a light to the world that they might get gain" (2 Nephi 26:29), that is, when they profit from their take on what the Gospel is all about.  At an earlier time, I felt wary of a brother who made his living taking tour groups to Mexico and Guatemala where he and his books pointed out specific Book of Mormon sites.  We may be seeing some of that also in Chad Daybell's publishing efforts and in tour groups sponsored by the Heartland promoters above.  We might want to be suspicious of a persons's motives and their take on Church doctrines and teachings if they are profiting financially by their activities. 

Nurture and Admonition

       Here is an insight from this past week’s Book of Mormon Central’s weekly Come Follow Me instruction that I found worth sharing.  Enos was brought up, raised, taught by his father Jacob in the “nurture and admonition of the Lord.”  These two descriptive words, nurture and admonition, would seem to encompass the range of what needs to happen in effective child-rearing.  Nurture suggests providing an affirming environment, full of love, concern, gratitude, appreciation, and compassion.  Admonition suggests that there also may need to be an element of guidance and correction in parent-child relationships. 
       This makes me remember some instruction we received in a MSW class, where we were discussing how to create a therapeutic environment or culture in a group home for troubled youth.  The instructor called it the 80% Rule.  It was that these youth would not profit by their experience in the program unless at least 80% of the interactions with staff were positive.  It was as if these young people would not assimilate and internalize any corrective instruction from persons unless the majority of their interactions with these persons were positive.  It was as if love was the basis for having influence.  And without love, any attempt made by staff to correct problem behavior was irrelevant.
       I am grateful the loving nurturance and admonition that exists in our families.

The God of Progress

    Early in my college time at BYU (perhaps about 1956), I took a religion class from Henry Nicholes on world religions where he taught a concept that I have not forgotton.  Dr. Nicholes was an old but highly respected chemistry professor.  He taught us that the communist movement of those times had a lot of characteristics of a religion, even though it claimed to be atheistic and to dislike religions.  He pointed to the fact that Communism seemingly had prophets (leaders who should be revered and followed without question, Marx, Engels, etc.), scriptures (writings to be accepted without question, such as Das Capital), dogma (basic doctrine to be followed) and a belief system requiring a faith commitment of its followers.  Its dogma included belief that it was inevitable that the proletariat (working class persons) would rise in rebellion against their masters (capitalists) and establish their own ideal or utopian system of government (with a dictatorship of the proletariat), including the collective ownership and management of all vehicles of production/business/sources of wealth, in which all of the workers of the world would share its benefits.  Communist Party members were like converts and were brought into associations (cells) with other disciples, to spread the faith.
    What really sold me on the idea that communism was a pseudo-religion was the faith commitment that there exists some kind of higher power or rule or law of human nature that drives human societies to create a certain type of government, in this case, a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” for all workers to share in a utopian dream.  The “arc of history bends” in a particular direction.
    In an op-ed piece published by the Deseret News, BYU-I history professor Hyrum Lewis (no relation) finds applications in current political thinking of this same kind of magical thinking, having characteristics of religious faith, that there is some overarching power that drives political and societal trends in particular ways.  You might think that he goes too far to make his point, yet I think there is some validity in his argument.  Here it is.

Op-ed: Latter-day Saints — beware the false god of 'history'

“If man stops believing in God, he will start believing in anything.” — attributed to G.K. Chesterton
    The Judeo-Christian tradition has many prohibitions against idolatry but few against atheism. Perhaps early theists understood that humans are homo religious — religious beings by nature who will always seek out an object of worship. Joshua did not say, “Choose you this day whether you will serve,” but, “Choose you this day whom ye will serve.” According to novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “If a man rejects God, he will have to worship an idol of wood, gold, or ideas.” Since we all need meaning and higher purpose in our lives, there is no way out of worship, there is only a choice of what to worship (something even evolutionary biologists are now acknowledging).
    In our current society, worship of the Judeo-Christian God is being replaced by the worship of a “God of History,” the deity of the “Religion of Progress.” This religion permeates our culture, largely shapes public discourse, and has a major impact on popular thinking. It can be summarized in a three-part creed:
    1. History is unfolding in a pre-determined direction
    2. The enlightened know what that direction is
    3. That direction is good
    In the past, the Religion of Progress was embodied in movements and theories such as Marxism, fascism, and Hegelianism; today it is alive and well on both sides of our political spectrum. The “left” pays overt homage to the God of History with the “progressive” label, while many on the “right” believe history inevitably points to peace and prosperity under the free market or to universal democracy through American military intervention. In the Religion of Progress, History is an omnipotent, omnipresent force that acts in and through all things, and will bring eventual salvation to society. The “arc of history,” we are often told, “bends towards justice.”
    But unlike other deities, the God of History makes few demands; just make sure you’re “on the right side of history.” Individuals can’t change the God of History’s doings, they can only align themselves with his will, thereby proving themselves to be among the elect.
    For most versions of the Religion of Progress, another sign of virtue is powerlessness. This view replaces the mistaken 19th century imperialist maxim — “might makes right” — with the opposite but equally mistaken maxim — “might makes wrong.” People who belong to historically powerful or advantaged groups — males, whites, the wealthy, Americans — are often viewed as inherently evil by virtue of their perceived position of privilege, while anyone who belongs to a historically disadvantaged group — women, racial minorities, the poor, inhabitants of the Third World — are righteous by virtue of their perceived lack of power. Being born into “privilege” is the Religion of Progress equivalent of original sin.
    Those willing to approach the question of power rationally rather than dogmatically realize that belonging to a group does not, in itself, confer any moral standing on someone — there are good and bad people in all groups — but the God of History denies agency. People are saved either through identification with an oppressed group or through identification with the Religion of Progress — being on the right side of history.
    Like most religious believers, history worshippers don’t arrive at their beliefs through rational inquiry, but through a faith commitment. The doctrines of the Religion of Progress are final, absolute and closed to further discussion. Just as Christians don’t question the will of Christ, history worshippers don’t question the will of history. Since those disagreeing with any of these dogmas are clearly “on the wrong side of history,” they are not to be engaged and debated, but marginalized and silenced.
    Since young adults are particularly given to religious zeal, it’s understandable that the most fanatical history worshippers would be found on college campuses. The high priests of the Religion of Progress (the faculty) convert and instruct their acolytes (students) in seminaries (classrooms) and then turn them loose to stop anyone from polluting the church (university) with blasphemy (dissenting ideas). You can’t debate God (history), you can only shut down those who oppose his will.
    Accordingly, Charles Murray, Heather Macdonald, Christina Hoff Sommers, Bret Weinstein and others who dissent from the Religion of Progress are heretics to be driven from the temple — by violence if needs be. The same religious zeal that led Puritans to persecute innocents as witches in 1690s Salem is leading students to persecute innocents as heretics today. The problem with colleges is not — as is commonly believed — that they have become secularized; the problem is that they have become temples of a new religion.
    History worship is attractive and growing for two primary reasons: permissiveness and popularity. As a matter of doctrine, the Religion of Progress denies human agency and therefore absolves people of responsibility for their actions. Since virtue comes from being on the “right side of history,” rather than from repentance, adherents to the Religion of Progress can freely indulge in substance abuse, sexual promiscuity and general hedonism. Anyone who condemns such behavior is clearly an opponent of the Religion of Progress and can be accordingly dismissed as, “intolerant,” “bigoted,” “reactionary,” “racist,” “sexist,” “fascist,” “imperialist,” etc. This gives history worshippers a sense of moral superiority to go along with their hedonism.
    The Religion of Progress is not only false but also dangerous. The great bulwark of religious freedom in America has been pluralism, but history worship is approaching dominant status and we increasingly see it imposing itself on society. People who dare “defy history” (by, say, opposing same-sex marriage) have been harassed, threatened, persecuted and fired from jobs. God’s will must be enforced, they believe, and once a majority concurs, religious freedom will be subject to majority whims.
    Since it does not acknowledge itself as a faith, history worship poses dangers that other religions do not. History worshippers, seeing themselves as the enlightened vanguard for a better world rather than the religious zealots they are, feel justified in oppressing and silencing those who disagree. While other religions are subject to legal constraints, such as the separation of church and state which (rightly) denies them public funding, we are all compelled to subsidize the Religion of Progress through taxation (e.g., public funding of universities, media and art).
    Because the Religion of Progress combines the authority of reason with the zealotry and dogmatism of faith, we should all be concerned about its growth. History worship threatens to make our society less rational, more politicized and, ultimately, less free.
                        Hyrum Lewis, Deseret News Aug 22, 2017

    Although he focuses primarily of the political left, there is some reason to believe that the political right has also erred in the direction of believing that there is an inevitability about some of its hopes, such as, if we could just get rid of that dictator Saddam Hussain, the people of Iraq would quickly move to an American style democracy and freedom.
    I would like to add something to Hyrum Lewises three-part creed for the Religion of Progress.  I think for some there may be a fourth part, and I see this in some of the anger and frustration on the left. 
    4. Persons who are enlightened about the Religion of Progress are ordained and entitled to rule.
    Somehow this reminds me of Laman and Lemuel in the Book of Mormon “For behold, your fathers did wrong their brethren, insomuch that they did rob them of their right to the government when it rightly belonged unto them. (Alma 54:17)  Is there somehow a sense of entitlement among some of the progressive politicians in America, given their enlightenment about the Religion of Progress, that they were robbed of their rightful position to lead our country in 2016?  Does this possibly help explain the frustration and anger on the left to be denied the Presidency of our country in 2016 and their obsessive focus on non-cooperation and removal of our current president?

Solving Puzzles in My Spare Time

    With the temples closed, along with the Family History Center, along with all ward meetings, plus trying to limit social contacts, I have been left with a lot of time to fill.  I have always liked to work puzzles, crossword, jigsaw, sudoku, but I am finding the biggest challenge right now in trying to solve family history puzzles.  One problem that is bugging me right now is, What happened to my grandpa Lewis’s little baby daughter by his first wife after he left Virginia to move to Washington state?
    Get on FamilySearch, find the record for Grandpa’s first wife Laura Belle Justice and read the Memory entitled Laura Belle’s Child.  It has been bugging me that I may have a person as close as a aunt that I know nothing about.  She sits in our family history as “Lewis”, girl born January 1903, and nothing else is known.  For that matter, about the only thing we knew about Laura Belle was that her mother’s name was B. Justice.  No father was listed on Laura Bell’s marriage record.  Did that mean that Laura Bell’s parents were unmarried or ??
    I thought. “Maybe I have missed some clue.  I’ll look some more.”  Who were possible Justice relatives living in the area of Vesta, Patrick county, Virginia, that might have been the recipients of the gift of a small girl child, in the years 1903 to 1907?  I began to search for Justice families.  The name appeared, with several spellings (Jestes, Jestice), in a few individuals.  There was one Justice family who had been living in the county area for several generations, the family of John Justice and wife Mary Ann “Molly” Justice.  They had a large number of children starting about 1840 through 1860.  The youngest daughter was shown in the 1860 and 1870 censuses, born about 1859.  Her name, Elizabeth.  I thought, Hmm.  Elizabeth.  The penchant of these southern families for using nicknames.  Betty.  Betsy.  Beth.  Could this be Laura Bell’s mom?  I can’t find an records for Elizabeth after 1870.  Her father died in 1861 and there are no records for mother Mary Ann/Polly after 1870.  Where was Elizabeth after 1870? With older siblings?
    So, I am hypothesizing the Elizabeth is Laura Bell’s mother and baby girl Lewis is with one of Laura Belle’s cousins or more likely the next generation, children of her Justice cousins.
There were some incomplete and messy records on these people in FamilySearch.  So I began to document the descendants of John and Polly Justice one by one. 
    I worried a little about doing so much research on basically non-relatives, FamilySearch not recognizing a relative connection beyond Laura Bell as being an in-law of a direct Lewis relative. And I hate to do my best quality research on people for whom I cannot justifiably reserve and perform temple work.  (They are supposed to be relatives.)  So out of curiousity I checked my FamilySearch relationship.  It turns out that Elizabeth Justice is my 9th cousin twice removed through, not my dad’s line, but connected through my Grandpa Davenport’s Badger ancestry.  And one of the Justice daughters married Daniel Fain, who is a 6th cousin twice removed from Wendy. So not to worry.  And I am finding that there is quite a lot of temple work needed for these people.
    I have identified 12 children belonging to John and Polly Justice.  I have been working on these lines for about a month, and have now worked through 8 of their lines.  I few days ago I found a possible fit.  Their third daughter, Louisa J. married Daniel Fain.  They had a large family.  Their daughter Jerusha Ada “Addie” Fain  married Joseph N Wilson in 1896. This appeared not to have had any children of their own but in the 1910 census had acquired an adoptive daughter Louellen, who was said to be 6 years old.
    That age seemed to be pretty close to a fit for baby girl Lewis.  Unfortuately I cannot find any other records for Louellen:
     1900 U S Census for Blacksburg, Montgomery, Virginia (Sheet 16A, hh# 288, 21 Jun)
Joseph N Wilson  Head W M Mar 1876 age 24  Mg for 3 years  b.VA   Fa b.VA   Mo b.VA  Carpenter
Jerusia Wilson   Wife W F Nov 1878 age 21  Mg for 3 years  0 children  b.VA   Fa b.VA   Mo b.VA
     1910 U S Census for Blacksburg, Montgomery, Virginia (Sheet 16A, hh# 200/210, 17 May)
Joseph N Wilson  Head M W age 35  Mg1 for 13 years   b.VA   Fa b.VA   Mo b.VA  Carpenter, House
Ada G Wilson     Wife F W age 31  Mg1 for 13 years 0 children   b.VA   Fa b.VA   Mo b.VA
Louellen Wilson  Adopted-Dau F W age 6   b.VA   Fa b.UNK   Mo b.UNK
    Jerusha died in 1918, her husband remarried, and there was no further sign of Louellen that I could find.   
    Keep looking.  More puzzles to solve.

Personal History March 2020 "Things they be a’changin.”

    It was a full week but things they be a’changin.”  On Monday morning, I spent a few minutes with Dr. Cook,  my chiropractor, then picked up Nathan and took him to the Provo temple where we did a temple session.  We finished off our time together with lunch at Panda Express.  Wendy was with a friend for lunch. 
    Tuesday Wendy and I spent most of the day at the Payson temple and did two endowments each.  That evening I attending the monthly Family History Center shift leaders meeting, where we largely reviewed plans for our yearly family history Discovery Day, which was to be held on Saturday (today). 
    On Wednesday, Earl and Diane Mullennax came to visit.  Earl had recently a request from a church member in St. Louis, asking for materials about E2/PLC.  Apparently he has some responsibility for YM programs in his area and was looking at what we did in the PLC program as a possible model.  Earl and I spent some time going through a boxful of PLC materials that I had located in our garage.  I also shared documents that Quin had sent to me about their stake’s Aaron’s Camp.  We finished the visit going together to lunch at our new Spanish Fork Olive Garden restaurant.  Late in the afternoon I drove over to Provo and Nathan and I went to the Provo City business office where he initiated changing the Provo City Utilities account to his name, and where we found out the process to change the utilities bill to auto-pay.  In the evening, I went to my regular Wednesday evening shift as a consultant at the Family History Center. I spent most of my time working on my own research.  No patrons came in except for a group of young teenage girls to get some help in finding names for baptisms.  I wasn’t directly in charge of this, but spent a little time help some of them to print out their cards and particularly in supervising their use of our paper cutters to trim their cards.  The latter seems to be becoming my specialty.
    On Thursday, Wendy did our regular shift at the Payson temple as ordinance workers.  Our main assignment was the 10:20 endowment session.  I have been helping train a young worker, Elder Davies, on mastering the endowment-related assignments.  He is an interesting young man to work with.  He had to come home early from a mission due to health problems and now is finishing his two years in a service assignment.  He works mostly in the BYU Motion Picture Studio but also has this temple worker assignment.
    When we finished our shift and got back to our car and phones, we had messages about a bunch of Church-related cancellation, starting immediately.  These included the announcement that all Sunday meetings had been cancelled, which for me meant that I didn’t have to finish my preparations for teach the 12 year old Sunday School this Sunday.  We also learned that the Family History Center was closed starting this very day, and that our big Discovery Day on this very Saturday had been cancelled.
    With my Friday morning shift at the Family History Center cancelled, Wendy and I decided to go back to the Payson temple doing another endowment.  When we were dressed and back to our car and phones, we learned of the Church’s decision to suspend work at all its temples no later than next Monday.  With two other couples who are our good friends, we had an appointment to do sealings Friday evening at 6 pm at Payson.  Wendy and I decided that we wanted to spend more time yet in the temple before they closed and so we went back and did the 4:20 endowment session, before meeting the Lyons and the Whites at the sealing office.  We got some of our Lewis family sealing backlog out of the way, but still some daughter and couple sealings left over.  After we got home, Wendy and I thought about not having a temple available for who knows how long, so we decided to go back today and try to finish all of the sealing cards that remained.
    Today, Saturday, we got a start at the sealings but found ourselves waiting for our turn in such a large group, that we left the group and did an endowment session.  When that finished we went back to Sealings and got assigned to another group.  We had a big surprise when in walked Kimberly.  We were then able to finish our sealing cards and also help Kimberly to get her's done.
    Altogether, Wendy and I each did plus 6 endowments, plus helped Nathan do one more.  We also did sealings for about 20 couples and 20 children, and helped Kimberly with about 6 more couples. 
    Its odd not to have Jazz and Cougar basketball, and some baseball, to follow.  What do we do next week.  Wendy is voting for Spring cleaning.  And hibernate.

Insights about our Relations with our Children

     I was grateful for your statement in your letter of last week.  You say you are blessed to have been sent to Bob and JoAnn Lewis.  I was thinking about that statement, about how unique a church doctrine that concept expresses and its implications for family life.  In no other religion would people know that we all existed before our earth lives and that we are all siblings in the spirit family of God. The birth of a baby into a family is like a reunion of pre-existent friends.  The veil of forgetfulness about this earlier life, which has been drawn across our minds to allow the testing component of our earthly experience, limits our recollections of specifics in pre-existent relationships.  However, I do not recall any baby of ours who seemed like a stranger when they were born.  I think this familiarity and joy of association is characterized in a line in my patriarchal blessing which says that in the resurrection, I will be able to mingle with my loved ones again as I did before I came here to earth.  It is no wonder that Latter-day saints seem to be becoming unique in having a positive desire to have children. 
     The notion that your children are pre-existing equals, even siblings, is significant.  Birth suggests a three-way partnership with God in providing a way for one of his spirit children to receive a body and have a family for nurturance.  The idea feels good to me that each baby comes with its prior developments, that their personality is not just tabula rosa [meaning, a blank slate]for the parents to shape from nothing.  It suggests that parenting is akin to raising a delicate and beautiful plant, with primary responsibility to provide a supportive and stimulating environment.  The plant supplies much of its own direction for growth.  The unique personality of the child can unfold and enlarge in such a setting, and move toward its own special potential. (From a letter to Emilie, August 3, 1995, while she was serving a mission)

How the Forbidden Fruit may have tasted

    Wendy and I were reading from 2 Nephi and I noticed that Lehi spoke concerning Adam and Eve and then described the bitterness of forbidden fruit which they had eaten:

    And to bring about his eternal purposes in the end of man, after he had created our first parents, and the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air, and in fine, all things which are created, it must needs be that there was an opposition; even the forbidden fruit in opposition to the tree of life; the one being sweet and the other bitter.  (2 Nephi 2:15)

    I thought, “Wait a minute, didn’t Eve say that this fruit was good or even delicious?” (Moses 4:12; Genesis 3:6)
    And she concluded that in the end, taking the forbidden fruit was a great blessing:

    And Eve, his wife, heard all these things and was glad, saying: Were it not for our transgression we never should have had seed, and never should have known good and evil, and the joy of our redemption, and the eternal life which God giveth unto all the obedient. (Moses 5:11)
 
    Lehi also concluded that this transgression was necessary for the progression of mankind:

    And now, behold, if Adam had not transgressed he would not have fallen, but he would have remained in the garden of Eden. And all things which were created must have remained in the same state in which they were after they were created; and they must have remained forever, and had no end.
    And they would have had no children; wherefore they would have remained in a state of innocence, having no joy, for they knew no misery; doing no good, for they knew no sin.
    But behold, all things have been done in the wisdom of him who knoweth all things.
    Adam fell that men might be; and men care, that they might have joy. (2 Nephi 2: 22-25)
 
    So, does all of this contradict Lehi’s original interpretation that the fruit was bitter?  I thought that the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden and the loss of association with God must have painful to them along with many other things, such as the disobedience of their children, the need to acquire their food by the sweat of their faces, and so forth.  On the other hand, it opened the door to having family and to the joy of redemption in the Gospel.  I thought that perhaps the taste of the fruit was both bitter but also sweet.
    And then I had another image.  I thought of one of my favorite places to eat, Panda Express and especially the menu item SweetFire Chicken Breast, the deep fried white meat chicken nuggets in a succulent spicy sauce with a mix of pineapple, peppers, and onions.  It is so wonderfully bitter sweet.
    So, both Lehi and Eve may have been correct.

Grandson Eagles

Here is the final tally of Eagle Scouts among my direct descendants.  Shown on Grandma JoAnn's Eagle Mother scarf.

2019 Christmas Books

Thank you all for my favorite gifts--books

President Nelson Story

We heard another fun President Nelson story at our temple shift preparation meeting on Thursday.  President Christianson reported that Elder Oaks had been in the temple the day before to set apart some sealers.  His wife was with him and they came early enough to be able to attend an endowment session before they met with the new sealers.  As they arrived they met briefly with the temple leadership, then were preparing to perform the endowment.  President Christianson told us that Elder Oaks has a bad back, so he offered to direct the Oaks to the elevator so he wouldn’t have to walk up the big staircase that leads to the chapel.  President Oaks thanked him but said he would still take the stairs, “President Nelson would be very unhappy to learn that we took the elevator.”