THINGS I DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT MY 88-YEAR OLD UNCLE EVAN UNTIL I ATTENDED HIS FUNERAL THIS WEEK:--He loved music and played the harmonica.
--He was raised in Hinckley UT in Millard County on a family farm, which was irrigated by the Sevier River.
--They never had running water in the house, but got it from a pump outside.
--The family bathed in a #3 iron tub. Adults bathed first and then children. Legs hung out over the rim of the tub. Water was heated on the stove.
--Do I need to say it? Outhouse.
--In winter the house was so badly insulated that it froze except for the area right around the stove.
--The ceiling was covered with a muslin blanket to keep parts of the roof from falling into the house.
--The boys slept on the floor with a quilt and a sheet. No mattress.
--Oil lamps
--He got up every morning at 4:30 to milk two cows.
--He played marbles with his brothers and friends, but they couldn’t afford to buy marbles so they made them from clay and baked them in the oven. The game became who could break each other’s marbles?
--He was a thoughtful boy. When asked if the earth was flat, he contemplated, looked around and said, “Not all of it.”
--He finished college and taught high school in Myton UT for one year (I knew this. I was ten and wrote them letters, asking if they would send me their piano for the summer).
--Repaired elevators for the church for many years and then went into business for himself as a master electrician.
--He loved and collected tools (laughter from his family here). He bought new tools for a new job, but kept the old tools. I can hear my father rolling over in his grave.
--Instead of having a tool belt, he carried his tools in a five-gallon bucket. His brother, who was a professor at Utah State, carried his books and papers in a five-gallon bucket and referred to it as his briefcase.
--He married my mother’s sister, Marie and called her Ave Maria. She called him Heaven Lee.
--He and his brother worked together and cut each other’s hair.
--His middle name was Winslow
Reading this list was like looking through a window of a long lost landscape. So wonderful. People of that generation make me feel morally and physically flabby. Which I am.
ReplyDeleteI meant AT a long lost landscape. Will I never learn to proff read before hitting the POST button?
ReplyDeleteThat answer is "no." Obviously.
ReplyDeleteYou know what was so remarkable about the little known facts you cited here? I too lived in a home with oil lamps, a wood cookstove, my mother ironed with sad irons, we brought water with the stone boat up to the house. But I am not 88! This was in the late 50's.
ReplyDeleteWhen you heard him call your aunt Ava Maria what ideas about romance and commitment and tenderness came to your mind?
And what was it about teaching that he stayed only one year?
I love this post. It makes me want to ask my aunt, who is around 80 now, to tell me about her childhood. Also, it seems strange that I, age 23, have an aunt (my father's sister) only a bit younger than your uncle, while we are decades apart.
ReplyDeleteI have bathed in iron tubs and lived in a house with an outhouse, but never with oil lamps. 1948 when I was six.
ReplyDelete