Autobiography

Kenneth O Kingsford Autobiography

BLESSED: 5 June 1904

CONFIRMED: 7 July 1912

MARRIED: 26 October 1927 - Julia Elizabeth Benson - Logan Temple

The first thing I can remember is Mother saying I was supposed to be a girl and someone there saying they sure did a poor job!

When I was a very small child, my Dad had the responsibility of digging a half mile of irrigation canal. I remember doing my part with my sand bucket and shovel, carrying dirt up and dumping it on the bank.

Another of my first recollections was riding on a horse named Charlie with my Mom. I was in front of Mom and my brother, Ephraim, as behind her as we rode about the ward doing her various duties as a Relief Society President.

When I was about four, I remember riding to the school at Niter on Charlie to take Ephraim and Diantha to school and going to get them in the afternoon as there was no place at the school to leave the horse.

I remember my father would never eat butter because as a child, his mother gave him bread and butter to eat as a lunch while herding cows. This lunch was put into a honey bucket and while sitting in the hot sun, the butter would melt all over and eventually sickened my father on the taste of butter. But I loved the taste of homemade butter and can remember my mother giving me a small dish of homemade butter and a spoon which was a real treat for me.

About age for or five, I started getting ulcers in my left eye which were extremely painful. My parents took me to Dr. Kackley in Soda Springs where he burned the ulcers off with acid.

For the first several years, we didn't have a well for water so we had to haul water from Bear River or from one of the springs in the mountains three miles east of us. When I was about four, we got a well drilled with a hand pump where my brothers and I spent many hours pumping water for the family needs. Four of five years later, we got a windmill to do the pumping but I was surprised at how often the wind did not blow and we still had to use the hand pump.

I started school in January, 1911 at Niter. C. L. Scott was my first teacher. In the fall of 1913, I started school in Grace. It was 4 miles from our home to the school. We walked the 4 miles to the school each day, unless it was extremely bad weather, then Dad would take us in the buggy or sleigh. There was a pond beside the road coming home from school where we loved to stop and catch pollywogs and skip rocks across the water.

Our favorite game at school was called shinny. For this we used a tin can which we smashed end wise to the height of about one inch. Then we would draw two lines about 50 ft apart and opposing teams would try to knock the can across the other team's goal line with sticks. The reason it was called shinny was that many shins were hit with the stick. One of the teachers made us stop playing shinny when one of my classmates got his leg broken.

I graduated from Elementary School in Grace in 1918, the year the flu was so bad. When I got big enough to swing an axe, my father had me chopping sagebrush and piling them up to burn. He always got to do the fun part of setting the piles on fire. All in all I chopped sagebrush off from about 40 acres of land on the old homestead so we could plow it and plant crops.

In 1916 when I was 12 years old, I was made secretary of the Young Mens Mutual, which position I held till 1921 when we transferred to Grace Ward. At 12 I was active in the boy scouts and remember going on to trips to Bear Lake and several two or three night camps. Usually when we went, the Scout Leader was on a saddle horse and the boys walked. The leader would pick up the scouts in the back of the line and carry them up to the front but I seldom got a ride because I liked being in front too well so I stayed there all the time and never got a ride.

On the trips to Bear Lake, we would walk the 9 1/2 miles to Alexander then ride the train to Montpelier and hike from there to Fish Haven Resort on Bear Lake.

When I was in High School, we had a lot of Saturday night dances. The musicians for those dances lived in Soda Springs and most of the time, it was my responsibility to go with a team and sleigh to Alexander and meet them at the train, bring them to the dance and then return them to the train stop after the dance. It took a little over an hour each way with the team to make the trip so for each dance, I spent a little over five hours supplying transportation for the musicians.

In 1921 I joined the Grace Ward Choir and the Bannock Stake Choir at the invitation of Brother Hector C. Evans, the choir leader at that time. The other members of the choir laughed at my singing so I didn't remain in the choir for an extended period of time.

I went to High School in Grace where I completed four years worth of graduation requirements in three years. In 1922, father was called back to Niter to preside over the branch there. Then I went to college at Utah Agricultural College (now Utah State Agricultural College) 1922-1927 and graduated June 4, 1927.

My first year at college, I only had money enough to go the first quarter and enough left over for a ticket to ride the Bamberger train from Logan to Preston. So at Christmas time I rode the train to Preston and then walked the remaining 40 miles home. It was very cold and I thought I could get home faster by taking a five mile shortcut along the bear river through the Narrows. It turned out to be a bad shortcut because the road was untraveled and I was wading in snow three and four feet deep most of the way. I partially froze both feet and was very lucky I didn't freeze the rest of me before I made it home.

I earned enough money to start back to college the next fall. My second year I tried out for the wrestling team but didn't make the team; however I did make the team the next two years.

The people I rented a room from had a little boy who always wanted me to tell him a story so I tried to prepare some kind of a story every day to tell this little guy. Soon his friends and most of the other kids on the whole block were there each day to hear a story. We had kind of a little game we played. When the kids saw me coming they would chase me. If they were able to catch me, then I would have to tell them a story. I always let them catch me. I got kind of nervous telling my stories when several adults turned out to listen too.

It was when I was in Logan in the spring of 1926 when I met Julia Elizabeth Benson. May, the girl I had dated with, had two boys on her hands and Julia filled in. She was May’s best friend. We saw a lot of each other after that.

On October 21, 1927, we were married in the Logan Temple. After our marriage, we started buying a home and a farm three miles south of Grace, which was originally built and owned by my Grandpa Ormond. We started buying the place before the Depression hit and then were unable to continue paying for it once the depression came along and had to sell half the land and house in order to pay for the other 80 acres of land. Our first four children were born here, Ila, Emma, Alvin, and Earl.

Our next house was really a converted garage which consisted of two rooms which we lived in until I could add two bedrooms and a kitchen on the back. We never had running water in the house and had to haul our water from the well at the old Ormond place in ten Gallon milk cans. As soon as the kids were big enough to pull a ten gallon can of water in their wagon, they became the official water haulers.

When the Depression started, I got a job for $1.00 a day working building the pipeline to route water from the Bear River for six miles to the Hydroelectric Plant. This job lasted throughout the Depression. I milked eight to twelve head of cows before daylight each morning, then walked the five miles each way to the pipeline, came home, milked the cows and did my farming at night.

After the Depression (about four years), things got halfway back to normal but as the family grew bigger, the only way I could make a living on the number of acres I had was to raise dairy cows and sugar beets. Both were labor intensive since that was in the days before automatic milking machines and automatic beet cultivators. We worked as a family to try to keep things going.

There was too much work for the time allotted to take time to stop and come to the house for lunch, so we had a lot of picnic lunches in the fields. Mother would bring lunches and the little kids to have a picnic lunch with those of us who were working in the fields.

Our fourth son, Keith, was born in January 1942, in the house on the old homestead where Grandma and Grandpa Kingsford lived.

During World War II, several Japanese families were moved in from the coast and settled near Grace. They along with me worked through the winter each year sorting and loading potatoes from a huge potato cellar on the west side of Grace. Everyone on the crew but me smoked so in order to get away from the smoke, I fed the potatoes into the sorter with a potato fork. The input hopper was about 20 feet from the main part of the sorter so the air I breathed was fairly fresh. On the days when I wasn’t there, it took two other men to keep up so I asked the boss for a raise and was turned down and he threatened to fire me if I didn’t want to keep doing it by myself.

In 1942, my youngest brother, Charles, was drafted into the Army, and left his 1935 Dodge for us to keep for him until he returned. He told us at the time that if he didn’t return from the war, the car was ours. It seemed nice to have transportation other than a team of horses and a wagon or sleigh, depending on the season, to get where we needed to go. Charles was killed on Iwo Jima in 1943.

In August 1945, our fifth son, Grant, was born in the Soda Springs Hospital. He was the first of our children to be born in a hospital.

When my Dad decided to retire from farming in 1947, we bought the old homestead and moved one mile south. It took all the money we could scrape together for several years just to make payments on the place, so we had some lean times. Our stable source of income throughout each year came from our milk cows which we milked by hand until 1950 when we finally got our first electric milking machine.

The milk check each two weeks averaged about $150 which was used to buy the few staples which we couldn’t grow in our garden and to pay the monthly bills. About 90 percent of our food came out of the cellar which we had canned when our garden was producing. We would also go to Brigham City each fall and buy 10 or 12 bushels of both peaches and tomatoes to can because we couldn’t grow them in the area where we lived.

Through the years I served in the following church callings: Young Men’s Secretary, Home Teacher, General Secretary of the Adult Aaronic Priesthood, Sunday School Teacher, Scoutmaster, Assistant Chairman of the Genealogy Committee, Ward Teaching Supervisor, Stake Missionary (three missions).

Our sixth son, Lowell, was born on the 12th of March, 1950, in the Soda Springs hospital. Martha was born 20th of January, 1952.

In 1952 we bought our first new car, a Chevy. We’d had two used cars before this. We sure enjoyed having a new car.

We always looked forward to the huckleberry season each year and farm work permitting, we normally spent two or three days up in the mountains picking huckleberries. If we were too busy with farmwork, mother and some of the kids sometimes went and camped for a few days and picked huckleberries.

In the fall of 1967, we celebrated our 50th Wedding Anniversary and had all nine of our children home for the celebration, as well as their spouses and children. We rented the Stake Camp in Childs Canyon and made it a three day celebration. Many friends and relatives came as well as the family to celebrate with us.

In 1968, the year Lowell graduated from High School, he thought it would be a fine idea to rent a camper for our old pickup and take his parents to Alaska, a place we had always wanted to see. He overhauled the engine on the pickup before we started our trip and except for minor details, all went well on our trip. We sure enjoyed Alaska and the many points between Idaho and Fairbanks.

In 1970, Alvin and Joan took us on a wonderful vacation to Hawaii. We visited the Hawaiian Temple and the Polynesian Center and many other points of interest and had a wonderful time in Hawaii.

In the fall of 1972, we decided it was time to stop farming and go on a mission. Since Emma and Wayne had been wanting to buy the farm for some time, we decided to let them move in and take over. We left for the mission home in October, 1972 where we spent a week and then went on to Sheep Springs Trading Post, New Mexico. Our mission was teaching the Navajo Indians on the Reservation. We did a variety of things besides teaching the gospel to the Navajos. Among them were digging, hauling water for the neighborhood since we had the only car. One time a lady asked us to go with her to get her husband out of jail. We did and it was rather interesting because an hour later she came to us to get our help to get him put back in jail because he had promptly beaten her up.

After proselyting for about eight months, we were called to live at the mission home where I took care of the mission grounds and drove new missionaries out to their first fields of labor all over the states of New Mexico and Arizona. Mother was called to be the cook for the mission home and cooked for 15 to 40 people all the time.

Our mission president, President Felt, asked us to stay on for an extra six months past when we were scheduled to be released so that Mother could keep on cooking for the mission until President and Sister Felt had completed their mission.

Earl and Janice were in Germany at that time and had sent us tickets to come visit them and see some of the sights in Europe. We told President Felt we would be glad to stay if we could have 30 days off to go to Europe. He agreed to that and we traveled to Los Angeles and caught an airplane to Frankfurt, Germany.

Earl and Janice picked us up at the Frankfurt Airport and took us to their apartment in Wiesbaden. We spent most of the 25 days seeing some of the interesting sights in Europe. Among the things we saw were: The Swiss Temple, the famous Bear Pits in Bern Switzerland. We visited King Ludwig’s Chiemsee Palace and the sights in Salzburg, Austria. We went on a Rhine River cruise, went to Holland and saw the Keukenhof Tulip Gardens, the Rotterdam Harbor and ship repair dry docks, the miniature city of Madurodam, a small cheese factory in Holland, and saw some windmills. We saw some of the large dairy farms where instead of fences they have canals with a steep concrete edge on the outer side that serves as a fence. We also went to Paris where we saw the Eiffel Tower, Arch of Triumph and Notre Dame Cathedral. We saw some art museums and diamond cutting facilities. So in 25 days, we visited parts of Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Saarland, Belgium, Luxemburg, France, and Holland.

After our European trip, we completed the remainder of our mission and returned back to Idaho where we lived in a mobile home about a half a mile from the house where we lived for many years. Since all of our kids were on their own, there was plenty of room for us in the trailer.

In 1975, there was a famous automobile commercial asking people to see the USA in their Chevrolet. We decided to save the fuss and take the bus. We bought a 30 day Greyhound Bus Pass which allowed us to ride the Greyhound bus to any destination. We had always wanted to see the Florida Everglades and the Keys so we started out heading Southeast. We stopped and spent three days with Earl and Janice in Montgomery, Alabama where they had moved after returning from Europe. Janelle at the age of three succeeded in getting herself and her grandpa totally lost when we went for a walk. A kind lady whom we asked for directions loaded us in her car and hauled us back to Earl and Janice’s. From Alabama we traveled on to Key West, Florida. We cut our vacation short because I was having some medical problems so we headed back to Idaho.

In the fall of 1975, we decided to spend the winter in St. George and work in the Temple. We were able to get into one of the temple apartments where the rent on the apartment was about the same amount we would have had to pay for heat if we had stayed in Idaho for the winter. We enjoyed the warm, sunny weather in St. George and were able to accomplish a lot of temple work. After that, we returned to St. George each fall and came back to Idaho each spring. We were able to stay in the temple apartments in St. George every year until 1990. That year it was full so we had to rent an expensive apartment for the winter. When spring came, a townhouse near the temple became available to buy. We decided if we were going to spend as much time in St. George as we had been doing, we might as just as well buy a townhouse.

From that point on, we stayed in St. George year around, enjoying their winters and roasting in the summers. Shortly after buying the townhouse, I bought a three-wheeled battery-powered cart which worked very nicely to get me to and from the temple and to the grocery store to do our shopping. Earl was worried about my cart not being seen while I was riding it, so he made me a hot pink flag that hung from a 6 ft pole on the back. This could be seen for about a mile.

In December of 1992, I got overbalanced while leaning over to pick up the newspaper, fell on the pavement, and broke my right hip. The break was a bad one since I already had an artificial hip. It split the bone lengthwise nearly to the knee. The doctor installed a new hip with several wraps of wire around the bone to hold it while it healed. Everything seemed to be going well and I was getting around real good by the following April. While I was laid up, I mentioned to Earl that I would really like to see Nauvoo and some of the other church history points of interest while I still could travel.

Earl retired from his job at Hill AFB in March of 1993, and said if Mother and I felt like we could go, he had plenty of time to take us on the trip. Janice had just had back surgery so she wasn’t able to travel, so the three of us headed east. We saw Liberty Jail, the temple site at Independence, Missouri, Adam-ondi-Ahman, the temple site at Farr West, the Carthage Jail, and spent two days seeing everything of interest in Nauvoo. The total trip took us about 10 days and we thoroughly enjoyed it.

About a couple of months after returning from our trip, I started running a fever and when I went to the doctor to see what was wrong, he extracted about a pint of puss out of my hip and said I had a severe staph infection. He put me in the hospital for the next three weeks. After the hospital, I spent another two weeks in a rest home before I was able to come back home.

During my time in the hospital, several of our children took turns coming and staying with us. We realized we needed full time help and with all the travel involved, this created considerable hardship for the family, so when Earl and Janice offered to have us come up to Roy and live with them, we decided that would be a good idea. We moved to Roy in August, 1993.