A Year at 1070 Lincoln Street

About the time I started 6th grade, we sold our house on Wyoming Street and started building a new house in East Mill Creek. While the new house was being built, we moved in with my maternal grandparents at 1070 Lincoln Street. I had spent so much time there while growing up, that I felt at home immediately.

1070 was the home of Nana and Pa (Madge and Elmer Gale). It had been their home since sometime in the 1930's. When I came along as the first grandchild, I named them Nana and Pa since it was too hard to say grandma and grandpa when I was learning to talk. And the names stuck through all of their grandchildren.

This was the family gathering place for all holidays, and the feasts there were wonderful. Nana and Pa had 6 children: Mom (Shirley), Jay, June, Val, John, and Pauline. Pa was in the produce business and had purchased a grocery store in 1938, so there was always an abundance of good food around.

I think Jay was the only one of my aunts and uncles who still lived at home when we were there. He had been severely ill after World War II, and was still recovering when we moved in. He had a brand new Mercury convertible that I thought was the best car ever. Pa had a new Kaiser. It was by far the most stylish car for its time, but the company went out of business a year later because of management problems.

A boy named Clary Cardwell lived across the street. He was about a year older than me. Art Nunn, who was about my age, lived in the house behind, across the alley. They were the only boys I knew when we moved in.

I got to sleep in the front upstairs bedroom during that year. Jay had the bedroom across the hall. There was no heat in the upstairs, so it was really cold in the winter. But there were lots of warm quilts to snuggle under, so it was fine with me. It was just hard getting out of bed in the mornings because the floor was sooo cold.

The closet in that bedroom had a box of old books that I really enjoyed. Some of them had been printed before 1900. I was really into reading that year, and I often would read under the covers at night with a flashlight. I don't remember all of the titles, but The Odyssey was one, Gulliver's Travels was another, and I think Robinson Crusoe was also there. The oldest book I remember reading was called Soldiers of Fortune. The summer of 1955 I missed most of the activities I had signed up for at the local playground, because I had stayed up so late reading and couldn't get up in the mornings.

Pa had built a large garage in the back for his produce truck. There was also an attic storeroom and a fruit room in that garage. It was a fascinating place for a young boy. Nana did lots of canning in the fall, and the fruit room was always full of wonderful things. They also had an old chest freezer out there. They'd had to put locks on the doors, because some homeless men had discovered the great stash of food that was always there. The garage opened onto an alley that went between the backs of the houses on Lincoln Street and the houses on 9th East.

The house was heated with coal. A boiler fed large steam radiators in the main floor rooms. The furnace had an automatic coal feeder that kept the fire going. It was accessed through a large trap door and stairway on the back porch. One of my chores while we lived there was to make sure there was plenty of coal in the feeder. Once a week the furnace had to be opened to remove the clinkers. Clinkers are hard chunks of minerals that are left behind when the coal burns. Another job I had was to fish the clinkers out of the furnace with some long tongs and put them in a large metal bucket. After they had cooled I had to carry the bucket out to the alley for the garbage men to pick up.

I attended Emerson Elementary School for 6th Grade. That was probably my best year in school. Lynn Burningham was the main teacher. We went to Mrs. Meservy for music. Both of them were excellent teachers.

In Mrs. Meservy's class I found my ear for music. I found I could hear the various parts, and I sang alto in some of the songs the class sang. We got into Negro spirituals, such as "Swing Low Sweet Chariot", "Nobody Knows de Trouble I See", "Old Black Joe", and "When The Saints Go Marching In", and I loved them. That led me to a love of folk songs in later years.

One of the most exciting activities we were involved with was a series of field trips to one of the local television studios. The class made six total trips, but not all the class could go each time. Somehow I was chosen to go every time. We participated in a live broadcast of a typical classroom discussion each of the trips. We even got to write part of the script. On one of the trips Linda Booth slipped on the stage and landed on her tail bone. She seemed OK, but a couple of minutes later she fainted. We were just about to go on the air. She came to in time to participate, but it was scary there for a minute.

The boys and girls in that class were awesome. I usually hung around with Bruce Bradshaw, Mike Gannon and David Tame. But Sammy Fernley, Ricky Briggs, Bryant Schroeder, Ronny Hathaway, and Ralph Robbins were also good friends. As was Lane Rogers. Lane was the class bully. I noticed that boys who were willing to fight were not picked on. So one day Mike Gannon and I were messing around, and I challenged him to a fist fight after school. He accepted. He had apparently noticed the same thing. We passed the word around that there would be a fight after school. I got the second black eye of my life in that fight. I don’t know if I got in any good blows, but Mike and I went away from the fight as better friends than ever. And the school bullies left us both alone after that. Lane Rogers especially took a liking to me. I liked him and he knew it. Most of the boys did not like him. He confided in me about many of his troubles. His parents were divorced and he just had a difficult time coping. Basically, his attitude stunk. He did not do well in school, even though he seemed to be fairly smart.

I often went to Bruce Bradshaw’s house after school to study and to play board games. Sammy Fernley and I went to Liberty Park to play tennis on Saturdays. Neither one of us was any good. Older boys often chased us off the courts.

There were so many pretty girls in the class. I seemed to fall ‘in love’ with a new one every week. Patty and Nancy Denhalter were famous. They were very cute identical twins who had been in commercials for Campbell Soup. They had been known as the Campbell Soup Twins. I one time or another had crushes on Linda Booth, Kathleen Morris, Jeanne Thiessen, Vicky Rae Haycock, Virginia Viers, Patty Dobbs, and Marva Poelman. Marva was my favorite though. She is related to Elder Ronald E. Poelman, who is now an emeritus General Authority.

An interesting thing happened years later. I used to see Marva Poelman at the University of Utah. I was too shy to approach her then. She was always with another beautiful girl who often wore the uniform of the Army ROTC auxiliary. When Lyle and Marcia got married, they had their wedding reception in a large home in Connecticut. As I walked into the entry of that home, there above the circular staircase was a family portrait, and the wife was the same girl I used to see with Marva at the U.

We had weekly ballroom dancing lessons during P.E. I really enjoyed those classes because there were so many pretty girls to dance with. The girls were starting to blossom at that age, and I really enjoyed them. Too bad that a year later my teenage hormones started to kick in. After that being in the presence of a pretty girl really made me nervous.

Bryant Schroeder and I both moved after the school year and went to Evergreen Jr. High and Olympus High School together. David Tame and Bruce Bradshaw were in some of my classes at the University of Utah. Bruce and I had a diving class together. He ruptured an eardrum on one bad dive and had to drop out of the class. David was in some of my Institute classes.

All in all, this was probably my best year, both socially and academically through all my K-12 years.