Sunday, September 8, 1991, 11:12 AM Written By Wayne Tippets
Today I will write the things I remember about my family starting with my oldest sister, Lucile, and then I will go down the line and do as good a job as I can do. I will tell now that what I write is my opinion and feelings towards these family members and so you have to take some of it with a grain of salt for all folks don’t look at different things in a different eye sometimes but I will try to tell it as close to fact as I can remember them, but take into consideration that I am not very smart and am losing my memory but also remember writing something is better than not writing nothing.
Lucile being the oldest one and I being the next to last or number twelve and she was married before I was even before I was even a twinkle in my folks' eyes. Later I became a mote in their eyes.
The first remembrance I have of Lucile and Ammon is sitting around their big round table in the light of coal oil burning lanterns. These lanterns I will describe to you. They were if I remember right, on the bottom was metal and the top of it was a chimney, a glass one which often got broken for it was thin glass. It would get smoked up easy and it would have to be wiped off very often so light would be able to come through. On top of the metal tank which by the way is filled with coal oil and a wick would be in it and this is what you would light and it would give the light. To light it you would lift off the chimney and light the wick and to adjust the light by how much wick would be showing. It was very difficult to ready by lantern light especially if you was not right under it. To blow it out you would simply have to blow in the top of the chimney and it would go out. To go outside with the lantern if the wind was blowing very hard would be difficult.
I am not talking very much about Lucile yet but will do. Later they had bought a different type of lantern. This was sealed and it worked on pressure air. You would simply pump this little handle then these did not have the same kind of wick but it had two cloth balls, I can’t recall what they were called, maybe will remember later, and these would really give a lot of light, enough to light up the whole room.
Now back to Lucile after that worthless bit of information. I cannot remember the things that we had to eat except after every meal for dessert we would have a bowl of homemade bread and milk and honey with an onion sometimes, best dessert ever made.
All of the kids had their chores to do. Boys as a rule did milking although Lucile would do it sometimes. I don’t think Ammon ever did milk a cow that I can remember, but I am sure he did.
They had to go up the canyon and haul their wood for their stoves for both their kitchen range and heating stove burned wood. Lucile, I can still see standing over that hot stove in the hottest summer cooking meals and putting up fruit.
I think of all my family, Lucile had the hardest life of all living up Dry Creek Canyon. It was two miles from any neighbor except Ammon’s folks who lived maybe a couple of hundred yards east of them. Years later they tore down his folks house and they built them a new log home in its stead. Very nice but in their old house at first it just had a kitchen, a big one, and two bedrooms. Later they added two more rooms on back. They never did have inside plumbing but had an outdoor cranny which was maybe anywhere from ten seconds to two minutes away depending how big a hurry you was in.
Lucile had to carry all of their water from a spring about fifty feet away from their back door. Later after some of their kids left home, they had water piped to the house but until then Lucile had to carry buckets of water in. They would have a bucket sitting on the cupboard with a ladle cup which you would dip in the bucket and get a drink of water this way but boy was it good water.
To heat water the wood stove had what they called a reservoir in the end of it and the heat of the fire would warm the water to some extent and this water is what they would use for bath water. They would dip water out of it into a round galvanized tub and this would be used by, I think, most of the time most of the kids would bath in the same water unless they would like to bathe in cold water. Now I realize why they only bathed Saturday night.
Although things by today’s standards would be classified as tough, I think Lucile just says it was inconvenient. They had a wash bowl on a wash stand. This this is where you would get ready for school, all twelve kids. Wowee! Some fun, huh?
Dishes were done in the same way with water panned out of the reservoir. Can you picture what I am trying to tell you of Lucile’s life?
To do her washing she had an old Maytag gas-operated washing machine and she always did the washing outside for it could not be run inside for it would gas the house. I can still hear that put, put, put of that old Maytag washer going in her front yard. The soap she used was homemade soap. My Mom used it also. It smelled bad but cleaned good.
I don’t know how she dried the clothes in winter which was sometime ten months out of the year in Star Valley, but she did have clothes lines in back of their house, quite a ways from the washer. They did not have Pampers then and I am sure Lucile had more than 2 kids in dideys all the time.
I still can’t think of how Lucile got enough hot water to do washing, bathing, cooking and everything else. She would have had to have a hot fire going year round inside the house to do it, it think. How else would she get hot water. I don’t know, maybe you do if you do I will leave next line for you to write in what she did. Don’t be afraid to do it either. I can see a tea kettle on the stove and flat irons but that is all.
Continued on September 15, 1991.
Today would have been my Mom’s 102 birthday.
Lucile had two garden spaces, one east of their house and one west of their house. They raised a lot of things like spuds but not corn that I can remember or tomatoes although she may have done. They had some acreage where they raised grain in part and hay in the other. None of their crops looked very hearty for the season was too short. They had long winters, short spring and fall and even shorter summer.
Years ago Ammon raised foxes and mink and they would sell them for pelts. I don’t know how they did on them, never did hear. Of course they always had chicks, pigs, horses and cows, one they called Three Tits for that is all it had.
All the kids were excellent shots with a twenty two but so is Barbara.
There are only two of their kids that have stayed there after they have grown up.
Lucile always seemed to have time to go picnicking with us or fishing regardless how busy she was. She enjoyed company and made you feel at home very much and was always willing to share what little food she had with others. It seems like each generation gets to be less and less sociable. For instance, I just can’t see any of Lucile’s kids meeting anyone out to the car and inviting them in and insisting they stay for lunch but on the other hand, I am less that way than were my folks and my kids are worse than me. I don’t know what the reason is other than each of us are in our little worlds anymore.
September 29, 1991 10:44 AM
To continue about my sister Lucile. We used to go to Lucile’s when we were in our early teens and stay with them for a couple of weeks in the summer. We would help them in logging and boy that was hard work for some one that was not used to sawing wood with a two-man saw for they had not invented chain saws as of yet then. Sawing through them trees that were a couple of feet in diameter was tough.
We would have to make a decision on which way we would want to have the tree fall then we would make a small cut on that side opposite of which way we wanted it to fall and then finish cutting on the opposite side then start sawing. To watch them giants fall was neat for they would knock down all the other trees in their way and then we would have to trim all smaller limbs off and then horses would be hooked to them and they would snake them down the trail and this was a trick also for the drag trail was most of times very steep and logs sometimes would catch up to the horse and have the chance of crippling them then they would be loaded on a log truck which was another problem.
You can see how Lucile would have a hard time keeping enough food for family after they had spent a day up on the mountain doing this hard work. For she had more things to do than to cook also like weeding the garden, washing and all things else that had to be done.
In February of 1990, Lucile went to Hawaii with us, that is LaRue, Thad, John, Colleen, Barbara and myself, Screwy Louie and his daughter, Cherry, John’s daughter, Lisa, and Thad’s daughter. Lucille never missed a beat. She would go every place all the rest did and she was 80 years old then. She did not want to miss anything and I tell you she enjoyed it as much as the rest of us did. But it was an exceptionally nice trip. Never could we again have such a perfect trip as we had then.
I think as a kid Lucile put up with us younger kids more than any of the rest of my brothers or sisters although they were all good and I used to be a pain too.
Winters up there were very, very tough. Snow four or five feet deep. Temperatures minus zero some of the time and they would have to take the kids down the canyon to school. I think Lucile did drive what they called the school bus one or two years. Same things on going to Church in winter.
I have been up there when we had to shovel snow from their house clear up to their grandmother’s house which was about a block. I am sure sometimes they would be snowbound for days at a time. Maybe this is why they had so many kids. They would be trapped in the house for all that time. Woops! I did not say that did I? Mark that paragraph out. They probably did other things like play Monopoly.