In Memory of Grandma Lange

A blog posted by Eliza Cleverly Challis on Sunday, February 24, concerning her grandmother, Barbara Jean Fraughton Lange (1928-1994)

Grandma Lange died fourteen years ago today. Boy, did I love her! I was in the fourth grade when she died, and she was the only grandma I ever knew. My dad’s mother passed away when I was baking in my mama’s belly. Grandma Cleverly and I may have had brief hellos and hugs as we each slipped through the veil.

My Grandma Lange was an extraordinary person, much like my mother is. Grandma certainly loved to laugh and she loved deeply. I imagine the charity that comes without any second thoughts or reservations to my own mother, grew in my mom under the example, love, and care of her mom (and Grandpa too!).

Grandma was a college graduate (from the University of Utah, I might add. See, she had great taste!). Back in public school days when you had to fill out those sheets that listed how much education your parents and grandparents attained, I loved that I could fill out college graduate for all the women and so even at a young age I knew that I wanted to be a college grad too.

I ended up in the emergency room at Lakeview Hospital on April 27, 1994 (two months after her death), with a kidney infection. My Grandma died of kidney failure after many, many years on dialysis. Grandma was my guardian angel that day. You see, April 27th was her birthday. She was taking care of me and making sure that I was taken care of. I’m sure later times in my life she was also there to help me too. That’s what grandmothers do for their grandchildren after all.

I was quite young when Grandma died and I only ever knew her through the eyes of a child. I wonder sometimes how it would have been and what my relationship with her would be like now as I’m an adult, if she were still alive today. But then again, I don’t wonder. She was my Grandma and I was her granddaughter—we’d love each other. And I still do!

An Interview with J. Marvin Lange

An account of John Marvin Lange’s life from his birth in Salt Lake City until his love affair with compost piles in his backyard in San Gabriel in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This account was written from a 1996 interview conducted by his oldest grandson, Michael Adam Cleverly, when Michael was a history major at Brigham Young University. The account was published in the September 2004 issue of the Family Journal in honor of Grandpa Lange’s 80th birthday on Sunday, September 12, 2004. His older sister, Helen Lange Amundsen, has told me there are inaccuracies in this account, although she has never specified exactly what they are. They could result from their differing perceptions of what happened in their long-ago childhood.

Marvin was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, on September 12, 1924. He married Barbara Jean Fraughton on June 15, 1949, in the Salt Lake Temple. Elder Ezra Taft Benson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles officiated. Marvin and Barbara were the parents of two children, Claudia (born February 6, 1951, in Utah) and David (born September 14, 1954, in California).

In 1987 Grandpa retired from the Southern California Gas Company, and he and Grandma moved to Bountiful, Utah, to be closer to their Utah grandchildren. She died from complications of nephritis (a kidney disease) on February 24, 1994, following 14 years on kidney dialysis. Grandpa married Venna Watkins Swalberg on June 23, 1995, and continues to live with her in the home he designed and built in the Bountiful foothills. For his 80th birthday, he rode his bicycle 80 miles (from Bountiful to Willard Bay and back to Layton) with some of his granddaughters.

I was born in Salt Lake City. I don’t know exactly where, if it was in a hospital. I don’t know where a birth certificate is. My first memories are not of Salt Lake, but of Great Falls, Montana. We must have moved when I was two or so, because my sister Ruth, who is two years younger than I, was also up in Great Falls. I think she was born in Salt Lake.


I was the second Lange. The oldest, my sister Helen, was a year older than I was. We lived with my mother and my grand­mother (her mother) in a house up in Great Falls some­place. I never did know my father, though I sort of vaguely remember that a man came one day while we were up there and played with the balls. Mother always told us our father was dead. It turns out that later on we discovered that he’d been in a veterans’ hospital—I don’t know where he was at that time; he spent most of his adult life in a hospital, something to do with World War I, but I don’t know.

He emigrated from Germany with his family when he was a young boy. He was born in Stettin, which is now Poland, I think, but it wasn’t Poland at that time. Then sometime later we got in a car one night and drove to Salt Lake, from Montana. I can sort of remember that old car. It had a seat and a back seat—I can’t remember if it had removable top or not. It may have been a convertible.

I don’t remember anything except that it was a long trip. I can remember we started in the nighttime, so I probably slept most of the way. I don’t know if my mother drove or if we came with one of her brothers.

We lived in a little home at 645 Grand Court in Salt Lake. That is where my maternal grandfather owned that little house; he lived in a little house kind of on the same property. He had a shop and was divorced from Grandma. A finish carpenter, he had all kinds of tools and other things in his shop. We never did get acquainted with him. It’s strange. There we were right next door living in his house, and we didn’t see him. I don’t remember if Grandma lived with us at that house on Grand Court. (If she did, that would explain why we didn’t see Grandpa much.)

I started in Douglas School on 13th East and about 6th South. I may have started school in Montana, but I don’t re­member it. It’s kind of crazy. The first school I remember is Douglas School in Salt Lake.

There was a big hill to climb to go to school, up near Judge Memorial High School. In the winter time we used to go skiing on those hills and down those slopes. We used to go sleigh riding down 7th South. We’d start up by Judge and go down till about 11th East, 11th to 10th, from 10th toward 9th. That hill was pretty good, a great hill.

We went to church at a chapel near our house. I guess it is still there on the corner. I remember running around the church and making a lot of noise, getting people upset. I can remember going to Primary. We went to pretty much all the meetings. We had to give talks and do all those fun things. Primary was during the week in those days.

I don’t remember any conflicts between my sisters and me. The neighborhood kids used to play neighborhood games at night on the street, like kick the can, run sheepy run—things like that. That was a lot of fun, as I recall. A couple of kids who lived close were pretty close in age, and we all did the same things, like roller skating down from 10th to 9th East on 7th South. We’d get going pretty fast. I fell once, and to this day I have a gash in my knee.

While we were there, the boundaries for the school were changed, so when I was starting the 6th grade I had to leave the Douglas School and go to the Hamilton School (down below us a few blocks, west and south from where we were living.) I think I was in the drum and bugle corps there. There is a pic­ture of us somewhere, all of us in the drum and bugle corps, 30 people or so in all. I played the bugle (though not very well). I think we mainly just posed for our picture. Maybe we were there when the flag was raised. I probably wouldn’t remember the drum and bugle corps if it hadn’t been for that picture.


When I was going to start the seventh grade, we moved from that little house on Grand Court up to the Avenues—on 7th Avenue between E and F Streets. It was an old adobe house that had been plastered over inside and outside. It had a fairly large yard in the back. The house was really quite comfortable, cool in the summer and warm in the winter. We had coal stoves in the living room and the kitchen. The kitchen did get a little hot in the summertime. The house also had a partial basement, just earth filled (like an earth cellar). To get into it you had to go outside, and there was a cellar door on the slant. We had a garden and planted vegetables. I think Grandma (Karen Hansen) lived with us at least part of the time. Later on she got a little one-room apartment on the Avenues, over by J Street. She’d stay with us during the day while Mother worked, then at night I’d walk her home.

I remember during the wintertime when I would walk Grandma home, it was often snowing. The hill we would come down had arc lights, and the falling snow made a halo around the lights; there was a kind of a mood about it.

In the summertime I used to put on my roller skates and catch onto the back of a bus and ride over to Grandma’s. Usually the bus would stop about every intersection, when someone would get on or off. I don’t think the bus driver knew we were hanging on, because the back window was kind of high. All you had to do was hold onto the bumper. The last time I ever did this was one day when nobody got on or off the bus—it really got going pretty fast. I soon lost control of my skates (I was tumbling around in the middle of the road) and had to let go of the bus. I ended up getting all skinned up— road rash. My skates weren’t like today’s modern skates. I probably could have hung on with a good pair of inline skates.

I went to seventh grade, my last year of elementary school, at Ensign Elementary School. (When I was a student, elemen­tary school went through the seventh grade.) Later I think they did away with the seventh grade and made it an “articulating unit.” I don’t know what an articulating unit was; that is just what they called it once they didn’t have the seventh grade any­more. After attending seventh grade at the Ensign School, I went to Bryant Junior High and later to West High School.


When I was in high school I bought a little Model A Road­ster convertible for $50. The first day after I had gotten pos­session of it, I had all my friends in it and was speeding along 11th Avenue until I got stopped by a policeman for going too fast. I had just barely gotten my driver’s license. They didn’t have radar guns in those days—the officer just saw me going by too fast. I ended up having to go to court. As a punishment the court revoked my driver’s license for 30 days.

I didn’t date at all in high school. There were some neigh­borhood boys I played with, but no girls at all. Gene Spencer lived down on F Street just below 6th Avenue. He and I built a little crystal set radio that we listened to with earphones. I don’t think we had a parabola—just a little wire running along this crystal. It may have been a tuning condenser, but we didn’t have enough stations. Anyway, this gave us the idea of putting in our own phone line. We ended up stringing a wire from his house to my house along the telephone poles. We had to cross 7th Avenue and 6th Avenue. We’d climb the telephone poles and put up our little wire. Sixth Avenue was pretty busy, and it had a bus line that went by all the time. Fortunately, it wasn’t a trolley bus or we would have had to cross the trolley wires. We used the earphones for a mouth piece (you could talk in one end and listen in the other end). We must have had a bell to ring. I don’t think anyone knew about our little phone system but us.

We also built a kayak in his basement. We made the frame and covered it with canvass and painted it. It was a lot of fun to build, although I don’t remember ever using it.

At that time junior high lasted two years, and high school was two years. In those days you got out of school earlier (at age 16), but you had the option, if you wanted to, of electing to go a third year in high school. I had elected to go to the third year. That December the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. I dropped out and took an aircraft instrument training course which was given at West High in the shop area. That led to a job at Hill Field, which was just getting going. There at Hill Field we worked servicing instruments on airplanes. I only worked there for about six months. After that I had saved enough money so I could start at the University of Utah.


The University of Utah was much smaller in those days, with a student body of around 4,000 or so. I only went one semester before joining the Navy. One of our good friends, Doyle Olsen, had joined the Navy Air Corps, so on New Year’s Day I went with Gene and another friend, Fred Titel (who lived down on 6th Avenue near F Street), to the Hotel Utah to join the Navy Air Corps. In the end only Gene got in. I couldn’t pass the eye test because it turns out I don’t have any depth percep­tion. Fred couldn’t get in because he found out he was a German alien. Eventually he did get in as a paratrooper.

Later on, Gene ended up getting washed out of the Navy Air Corps. Just as they were finishing up flight school in Nevada, and getting ready to move onto the next phase of their training, someone came down with the measles and they all got quaran­tined. While they were stuck there in Nevada, some of them used to go out and buzz wild horses. One day he and a friend were doing this, and they landed out in the desert. Either there was an accident, or some kind of trouble out there, but in any case, they ended up getting court martialed because there was a rule against flying below a certain elevation. Gene ended up in the Navy as a radioman.

I ended up in the Navy. I wasn’t drafted; I volunteered for the draft. If I’d waited I would have been drafted. I could volunteer to be drafted in the Navy whereas if I were drafted I would probably have been drafted into the Army. (That was probably the motivation—to stay out of the Army!) It turned out to be a pretty good choice. We always had a good bunk, a place to sleep, and food. At least it wasn’t the infantry out in all the mud and the muck. It was pretty good.


I went to Camp Farragut, in Idaho, on Lake Mulberry, for basic training. Spokane, Washington, was fairly close. We got out on the lake a couple of times during boot camp. After boot camp, I signed up for the Quartermaster Service School, which was also held at Camp Farragut. The quartermaster had to be trained in using both signal flags and Morse code by light. We had all these different flags. Each had a name, and you’d run them up on the yard arms in certain combinations to send dif­ferent messages. We ended up learning how to control the helm of the ship, keep the log, wind the clocks, etc. We would also have to wake up the captain or other officers when they needed to be awakened for their watch. Our watch stations were on the bridge.

All this time I’d never seen the ocean. I thought going on board a ship would be kind of fun. After I graduated from quarter­master school, I was assigned to the USS Reno, a light cruiser. I didn’t have any leave after either boot camp or service school but was sent directly to Treasure Island in San Francisco. The Reno was still being built at the Navy shipyard.

Most of the quartermasters were like me: they hadn’t been on a ship before. While we were waiting for the Reno to be completed, our captain arranged for us, one day, to go on a four-stack destroyer at Treasure Island. We were supposed to escort a submarine out so it could do some practice diving. This was to be an opportunity for us to take the helm and steer the destroyer. We got up really early to go on board. This was going to be a great experience—at least that was the theory. I was seasick the whole time we were out there. The others didn’t seem to mind it as much. When I came back I wondered how I could get out of the Navy. It turned out to be a real disaster.

When the Reno got finished, we had to take it out on a shakedown cruise. We had what we called special sea details. When you came in or went out, you had to go to your special sea details. Mine was the quartermaster on watch. I was sup­posed to keep the log, keep the captain informed of what buoys we were passing, and where we were in the channel, except I got seasick again. They have other special sea details and general quarters when you are in battle. They have watertight security systems; every time you went from one compartment to the next one, you had to release the cam-operated levers that tighten the door up against the gaskets. (This made it water­tight.) If you go through, you have to unloosen them all, and after getting on the other side you have to tighten them all up again. I was trying to get down to my bunk, and only made it as far as the infirmary. I just stopped right there; I never did get to my bunk. One of the guys on duty there was a Hawaiian mem­ber of the Church named Charlie Kamoha.

When we finally got out, we’d stay at sea for months at a time. They’d refuel us at sea, bring provisions on, etc., and I eventually got over it. It was just a matter of hanging in there. If I were to go to sea today, I’d probably be seasick again. When we were in California, I’d get invited on deep sea fishing trips, and I’d always get sea sick. I finally decided it was a waste of time. I have to be having that rolling motion con­stantly for a certain length of time before it doesn’t bother me anymore.

After leaving Treasure Island we went to Pearl Harbor, where we joined up with our group. We traveled in formation: four aircraft carriers in the center, a ring of battleships and cruisers in the middle, and then a third ring of destroyers. After we left Pearl Harbor we went out into the Pacific. We were making our way to some Japanese islands. We didn’t see much other than the daily launch of planes from the aircraft carriers. A few times we had enemy planes (we never did see enemy ships) come into the formation.

One day a group of 15 planes came in low on the water, so they weren’t picked up on radar. They flew right into our for­mation. They were trying to get the aircraft carriers. I was on the bridge, and I could see one of the Japanese planes come up right behind the aircraft carrier. I even saw the torpedo leave the airplane and go in the water; it didn’t land properly. Instead of landing, it tumbled, and there wasn’t an explosion, since it didn’t hit anything. Another plane crashed into the Reno’s after-gun turret, glanced off, and went over the other side into the ocean. (This occurred before the Japanese started that kamikaze stuff, so I don’t know if this guy was an early kami­kaze or if he’d just been shot and crashed.) The crash started a little fire, which resulted in a couple of casualties on board ship.

One other time a lone plane flew over really high, and it hit one of our aircraft carriers. It was one of the smaller carriers that had been converted from some other kind of vessel and made into an aircraft carrier. The carrier caught on fire and was finally abandoned. We picked up some of the survivors. The Reno, along with another cruiser and two or three destroyers, stayed back, and the rest of the formation went on.

We’d go alongside with our fire hoses and try and put the fires out. The other cruiser was a bigger cruiser, and it was in charge of everything. While they were there alongside there was an internal explosion, and their captain got injured. Once he was out of commission, out captain was put in charge. We finally decided to sink the thing so it wouldn’t become a navigational hazard. We picked up the rest of the carrier’s crew. Then our captain told the destroyers to torpedo it. Some­how they missed—it’s crazy! It was a stationary target! The Reno happened to have torpedo tubes, so we decided that we’d make a pass at it. We made a run at it and we fired two torpedoes. The first one hit and blew up, and the next one probably went right through, since there was nothing left. We were probably some of the only people who got a chance to sink one of our own aircraft carriers.

Later, while we were in formation, we got hit by a torpedo from a Japanese submarine. Nobody detected the submarine. It was really a bright moonlit night, and the sea was very calm. They figure the submarine must have fired into the formation, really hoping to hit an aircraft carrier. I guess that is why we were out around the aircraft carriers, so they’d hit us before they hit the aircraft carrier.

We got hit just before midnight before the watch was re­lieved. I was asleep on the deck. The torpedo hit in the after en­gine room. The people in the com­partment below me were all killed, as were half of the people in the compartment where I was. The deck tore alongside where I was sleeping. It was thrown up against the overhang, so everyone on that side of the compartment was killed. I just happened to be right on the dividing line. I was asleep when it happened; when I woke up I was somewhat disoriented. I didn’t know which way to go. If I had stepped the wrong way, I would have been out in the ocean and probably would have died. I managed to make it up on the deck.

In the explosion the rudder was damaged, and we ended up just going around in circles. We were listing badly; the next morning we had to abandon ship, leaving only a small crew on board. We put on our life jackets and walked off the fan tail. We didn’t have to jump in, we just walked right off. We had a big long rope. As we walked off we grabbed onto it so we wouldn’t drift apart. Several destroyers stayed back and picked us up.

A seagoing tug went out and got the ship. They were able to put on a temporary patch. After that we went down south of the equator to a place called Manas, where there was a floating dry dock so the ship could be repaired. While I was there I was flown home for 30 days of leave.

After my leave was over, I wasn’t assigned to the Reno any­more. I was sent back to Treasure Island receiving ship. They sent me from there to Pearl Harbor receiving ship. While I was in Pearl Harbor, I was assigned to a little wooden sub chaser which had just been back from the Pacific. It was like a little ski boat with 20mm guns and depth charges. It only had one officer and only one quartermaster. There were eight or ten people total. It immediately went into dry dock next to all these other big ships there. Nobody got out until everything is finished, so all I had to do was hitchhike around Oahu. At a Church function on Oahu, I met Wayne Proctor, who had been in the air force as a B-24 gunner.

The war ended soon after that. I had gone into the service in January of 1943. We were torpedoed in the end of 1944, and then the war ended in 1945. They sent you home on the basis of your points—how long you’d been in the service and other things. I got transferred off the little sub chaser to a couple of other small ships. On one of these other ships I got a trip to Maui and one to Hawaii. I had been to the temple after I’d joined the Navy but before I went overseas, so while I was in Hawaii I was able to go to the Hawaiian Temple. Charlie Kamoha’s parents lived on Maui, and I was able to visit them. I still didn’t have enough points to go home.

We’d get mail, although it wouldn’t come every day, it did come and go. Mother saved all the letters I sent to her. I still have them all boxed up. We were not allowed to tell what we were doing or reveal our whereabouts. The Navy would censor all the mail to make sure we didn’t. As a result I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a lot about what was happening in the letters. Servicemen could write postage free; we just wrote “free” on them. It would have been three cents otherwise.

The night the Reno had been torpedoed, my mother couldn’t get to sleep; she felt very uneasy. Finally she said, “Oh Mother [speaking to my grandma], something happened to Marvin.” She got down on her knees and prayed. When I finally got that letter (it was an extra long time before we got mail), I figured out that her experience coincided more or less with the timing (time zones being what they are) of when the torpedo hit.

The service at that time was a pretty good thing. Service­men got treated very well wherever they went. You could hitch­hike anyplace, and people would pick you up. When I was at Treasure Island I’d hitchhike to San Francisco or Oakland or wherever. I could always get a ride. There was a nice family in Oakland that would invite the servicemen home and feed us and put us up over the weekend.


When the war was over, servicemen were treated well. They had the GI bill, really a nice thing. It enabled us to get an edu­cation.

When I came home I elected not to be in the reserves. Some people did stay in the reserves. When the Korean War came along a lot of those people got to go again. In fact, Si’s sister, who was married to Grant Madsen, Truman Madsen’s brother, was in the air force and elected to stay in the reserves. Grant got called back and ended up being a casualty in Korea. I didn’t want anything more to do with the military.

I got out of the Navy in January or February of 1946. I may have gone to spring quarter at the U [the University of Utah], I don’t remember for sure. I distinctly remember taking sum­mer quarter. I took solid physics and got rid of it all in that one summer. I was going to go into electrical engineering. After that summer quarter I didn’t go back to school because I was planning on a mission. That’s when I met Barbara, in the fall of 1946.

My sister Ruth had arranged a blind date. Barbara and Ruth were sorority sisters. We went with Wayne, who took my sister Helen as his date. We went to the Old Mill, kind of a fun place for dancing. That got us acquainted. Barbara worked at Auerbachs, which was kind of like ZCMI, except it was on the other end of town, down by 3rd and State Street. I’d go down there and meet her when she got off work. I’d either ride home later on the bus or, if it was too late, walk home from her house. She lived close to 17th South and 15th East on Logan Avenue. We were living on D Street below 6th Avenue at the time, so that made for a pretty good walk.

On Christmas Eve I surprised her with a ring and we got engaged. I don’t remember exactly how I proposed, but I don’t think I did it on my knees. We had to go and talk to her parents. Both her father and her mother were still alive at that point.

In February I left on my mission. I had been called to the Western Canadian Mission. At that time our mission included the three western provinces of Canada—British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. We reported to the mission head­quarters in Edmonton, Alberta. We traveled by train. A lot of people came down to see us off. Altogether there were six or eight elders and one lady missionary.

I can remember when we crossed the border and got on a Canadian train. When we had stopped to get something to eat, I had my first experience with the metric system. Canada had quarts and pints that were different sizes than ours. One of the other elders ordered a pint of milk and just took it and dumped it into his glass. In the States it would always just barely fill it, but this time it overflowed. Apparently there is more in a Canadian pint than in an American pint.

After we reported to mission headquarters in Edmonton, I was sent back to a little town in southern Alberta. We lived in a small one-room house that had no indoor plumbing. We’d have to go out and pump water, heat it on the stove, and put it in the big old tin to take a bath. We used the outhouse when we had to go to the bathroom. When spring came, the streets weren’t paved, and so they became really muddy.

We really didn’t have the lessons like they have today to teach. I can’t remember now what we taught. We had some tracts we would leave with people. The Anderson plan had come from the Northwestern States Mission and was starting to get used quite a bit.

From there I went over to Redcliffe, Alberta, which is now New Medicine Hat. There was a little more civilization there. The house we lived in had water inside, but it didn’t have a boiler. We still had to heat the water on the stove and put it in the tub. It did have electricity though. An Anglican minister lived fairly close to where we were staying, and we became fairly good acquaintances with him. He had a car and would give us rides. Every Saturday we’d go over to his house and take a bath (he had hot water). He told us that in his opinion the Church of England, the Roman Catholic, and Greek Orthodox churches really all had the same priesthood. He looked for the day when they would all come back together in one big church. It hasn’t happened yet.

From there I went to Vancouver, British Columbia. That was really quite a shock. Vancouver is a big city—bigger than Salt Lake. I had gotten used to the small towns out on the prairie. We didn’t make a lot of friends. People weren’t very interested in our message. We’d knock on a lot of doors—we didn’t have a good system of referrals from members in those days. We had a couple of families to teach. One lady, Sister Miles, used to exchange Christmas cards for many years. Their family turned out to be a really active family. I think the kids went to BYU and were all active in the Church. I’ve lost track of them now.

One day we knocked on the door of Brother Douglas, a former Catholic priest. He had come from Scotland but had walked away from the Catholic Church because he was having difficulty with some of its theology. When we knocked on his door he invited us in. We got into a discussion (he’d been look­ing at various faiths, including some eastern religions) and left him a copy of the Book of Mormon. He invited us back.

I guess basically I get my testimony from Brother Douglas. He would always ask us questions that were really hard to answer. I remember one day when we left his house, I felt that we really hadn’t done a very good job. I had a strong impres­sion that regardless of our ineptitude our message was true. That was kind of a confirmation of my testimony. Eventually Brother Douglas joined the Church—not while I was there but before I finished my mission. After I’d been sent to Saskatchewan (that’s where I finished my mission), I received a letter from him. I saved it for a long time—I probably still have it in a drawer somewhere.

I came back in February of 1949. We were known as the Valentine of ’49 group. I started immediately back at school. Barbara graduated June 14, 1949. We were married the next day. She used to say she got her BS on the 14th and her MRS on the 15th.

We were living in an apartment fairly close to the Salt Lake Temple on about 2nd North and 2nd West, across the street from West High School. We went on our honeymoon to Yellowstone Park. I didn’t have a car, but Charlie Kamoha (who was down at BYU) had one, and he loaned me his. (Later on Charlie was killed in a motorcycle accident. He was riding a motorcycle, and someone made a left turn into him. That was after he’d graduated and moved to southern California to teach high school. He had four children when this happened.)

We set up shop in our little apartment until housing opened up at the veterans’ housing at the University of Utah (Stadium Village). We’d been on a waiting list. The apartments turned out to be pretty nice, and we met some nice people up there.

When you had a family you got to move into a larger unit. So once Claudia was born we got to move across the street. Between my junior and senior year we went up to Washington. I had signed up for a job at the Peugeot Sound Naval Shipyard as a civilian. I did drafting. We lived in a pretty nice place. A school teacher had gone on a trip for the summer, so her house was empty, and were able to stay there. The Peugeot Sound area was a very beautiful site. We had to take a ferry or the Tacoma Bridge to get out to the shipyard. (That was the bridge that fell down.)

We came back and I finished my senior year. After I graduated we moved to California. We had packed up the few things we had and had a van line move them. I already had a job lined up with the Southern California Gas Company before I graduated. The gas company paid our moving expenses. We got down and had to find a place to live. I didn’t know any­body. Barbara knew some who lived in South Pasadena, so we ended up in that direction. We looked at a lot of places.

We had found a little house and had decided to take and put some money down on it. Afterwards neither one of us could remem­ber seeing a closet. We went back, and there wasn’t a closet! So we asked for our money back and went someplace else. We found a little place in Alhambra. There were four little apart­ments, each right behind the other. It had one bedroom, a little kitchen, and a living room. We were close to a nice little park.

We became members of the South Pasadena Ward, which was Elder [Howard W.] Hunter’s ward. He was the first bishop. (It was called the El Sereno Ward then. They didn’t meet in the same building they do now. It later became the South Pasadena Ward.)

Bishop Hunter called me to be in the Young Men’s Mutual presidency. Then I was put in the elders quorum presidency. Then I was made the elders quorum president. Then I was put in the bishopric (I ended up serving in two bishoprics). Then the ward was divided, and I was made the bishop. The ward was divided again when I was released. I was put on the high council. Then the stake was divided, and the Arcadia Stake was created. We stayed in the Pasadena Stake. I was called to be the stake clerk. Later on I was called to be the stake executive secretary to President Hunter, who was our stake president until he was called to be a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

When David was about to be born, we figured there wasn’t enough room in the apartment, so Barbara’s mother helped us with the down payment on a house. She gave us $3,000. We looked around and ended up buying a two-bedroom house that had a little room on the back that the family had added. The house was in San Gabriel at 356 Bridge Street. We paid less than $17,000 for the house.

Our house in San Gabriel was where the garden was. When President [Spencer W.] Kimball was President of the Church, he said we should all have gardens. I decided to take out most of the back lawn, and I started to make compost. I dug a hole that was four feet square on each side and two feet deep. We had some trees on the property that dumped a lot of leaves. I picked them up, shredded them, and mixed them in with a lot of grass clippings and horse manure (I’d go to a stable to get horse manure). Then I’d put in a layer of dirt, then another layer of organic matter, then another layer of dirt. When it got up to ground level, I’d build a little box that was four feet square and two feet high. I’d take the dirt I’d dug up and I’d throw it back on, so I had in essence a four-foot cube of won­derful material. When I got that done, I’d build a hole by its side. I kept moving across the back of the lawn. When I got all the way across, I’d start doing another row.

I ordered a Troybilt tiller by mail order. One day it came. Oh, that was an exciting day! I had to put it together and put the oil in it, and the gas in it, and start it up. Then it worked just like a big Mix Master, and I got out there and churned all this dirt up with this tiller.

I’d read about the French intensive method of planting, so I planted everything so that all the plants were equal distance from each other. Tomato plants would be further apart than radishes, of course, so it depended on what kind of plant I was planting. The tomatoes really started to take off. I got some welded wire and made cages for them to grow up in. The cages were about seven feet tall and three feet in diameter. These tomatoes would grow right up to the top and down the sides. So they did really well.