A Conversation with GROVER HOOPES
(Transcription of a tape recorded conversation between Grover Hoopes and his grandson, John L. Hoopes, on September 2, 1974 at Grover’s home on First Street and College Avenue, Thatcher, Arizona.)
I was born south of St. David (Cochise County, Arizona) about six or eight miles at a place they call Harn Haller in 18 and 92 (April 20, 1892). They was a midwife and as near as I know her name was Summers. Dad was a fellow that did a little trading around different parts of the country and helped his dad on his farm, and my granddad in harvesting their crops.
[How many brothers and sisters did you have?] I was the oldest member of the family, I was the oldest grandchild of granddad, Grandfather Curtis.
From what I understand, although my mother or dad never told me, they were called to come from that part of the stake, it was the headquarters of the stake [What stake?], the St. Joseph Stake, they came over here (Thatcher) to help settle this part of the country. And that would be when I was approximately two years old, that was around in 18 and 94.
Now I don't remember much of anything until we landed over here. Uncle John Hoopes, dad's brother, lived up where Florence (Talley) Holiday lives now (Large red brick home on the North Side of Second Street, East of the intersection of Second Street and Stadium Avenue in Thatcher) and he had a little room that he had lived in, he had gotten that brick building built, and he had moved into that. Dad stayed in the old house until he got a house down here, where Nat moved away from (First house on the North side of First Street, West of the Stadium Avenue intersection) fixed up to where he could move into it.
And the first real honest-to-goodness memories of moving there was when we moved down there. I wanted to go to the toilet, I was up in the front seat, and I couldn't get out and I was a dancin' around wanting to go in a hurry and I wet my britches and dad paddled my butt for it. [That was in a wagon?] Yes, that was in a wagon. And then we lived there from then on, we never moved from there, we added to the house and put rooms around it and there is where we all growed up, all we kids.
Cece (Cecil) was born before we came over here. [He was born in St. David?] Ya, and Melvin and the rest of them were born over here. Melvin and Lynn, Eva, and all the rest of the family was born over here.
Well, my education, schooling, was right here in Thatcher, that is through grade school. I didn't start school until after I was eight years old. Dad was called on a mission when I was just eight years old. [Where was he called?] Indian Territory. And he only spent a year at it because he got sick and couldn't get rid of the chills and fever and they released him at the end of a year. At the end of that time is when I started to school.
I went through all the grades in school and then went to high school at the college (Eastern Arizona College in Thatcher, then called Gila Academy) and then to four years of what they call high school, and graduated from that in 19 and 12.
[Did you have any boyhood friends you wish to talk about?] I was acquainted with Spencer Kimball and knew him as well as I know you, John, or better. He was one of the finest men that I knew in my life, finest young man. He took part in all the athletics and he was especially good in basketball, very active. [One thing that I have read about him since he has become president of the Church is that your father baptized him.] That's right. [Why wasn't he baptized by his own father when he was eight.] He did, but I think they lost the record, and they baptized him in a bath tub. He was later baptized by my father either in the Union Canal or down on the river (Gila River). [Why did your dad baptize him?] Because my dad was in the bishopric at that time and was taking care of the baptisms of the ward.
When Spencer Kimball went to go on his mission, his mother had passed away. President Kimball had married Josephine Cluff and he sent old Spence on his mission in as shabby of clothes as you ever saw, damn near like a regular road bum. He had patches on the ass of his britches and his elbows of his coats. [Couldn't they afford any better?] He could have, but his dad said to him, Spencer, we'll give you all of your clothes when you get out there, you'll have to buy new clothes anyway, you just wait until you get there and that's what he did and I helped him pack.
All the friends that I had anywhere were just the friends that I had made in school and that's where I got acquainted with all the boys was just in school right here at home. I had some real good friends and some that maybe weren't so good.
I more or less went in the way of ambition in the way of being a good carpenter and I studied that as much as I could when I got into the eighth grade. And in high school I took manual training and we had some pretty good classes. I was very interested in them and I took it. I learned to read blueprints and make blueprints and everything, and I got interested in this and that's where my interests was, and my ambitions were to be a pretty fair carpenter. That's how I made my first living was that way.
I went through all of the orders of the Priesthood; deacon, teacher, priest, elder and seventy and high priest. [Did you go on a mission?] Yes, sir, I went on a mission in 19 and 16 to the Northwestern States. I spent most of my time in Washington and in and around Seattle. I spent three years in that mission, right a war time. They encouraged us to stay as long as we could. President (Melvin J.) Ballard was my mission president and I worked with his son as a companion for about six months, then I worked with a fellow named Allred. For nearly all the time then I had two or three others then I finally wound up as what President Ballard called me a "trouble shooter". They had troubles in the mission field and the stories got around about this man and that man and the other man and he sent me out as a trouble shooter to find out the truth. So I worked quite a bit with that. Also, I repaired one full church in Tacoma, Washington, and then had to do a lot of repair inside. And then I went to Everett, Washington, and repaired a little church and fixed it so we could use it. Then I was sent to Montana to build one. I got it all up and ready except we didn't have any of the inside plastering done and it didn't have a flue laid for heat. I did have the trusses up and the sheeting on.
[Who supported you while you were on your mission?] My family sent me the money. My brother, Melvin, sent me most of what money I had. He was working quite steady and he sent me a good part of my money. He and dad sent me the money, I didn't get any outside help.
After I came back from my mission I got married to Nora (Nora Estelle Lamoreaux). [How did you meet her?] Right here in town, I wrote to her quite a bit while I was on my mission, just the other day I was going through some old papers and I found a lot of letters that we corresponded during the times I was on my mission. When I came back home I got looking a bit, and she went up north and went to school. And she got to be a Home Ec teacher. Then she came home to visit and I met her. President (Harry L.) Payne (President Payne was the Stake President during the 1940s.) tried to beat my time but I didn't let her go, he was just going to kick me right out by the britches, but he didn't get the job done. I beat him and we were married and we lived right here.
And we lived right up here (pointing south) by the Curtis place, by the Standard Station (South corner of Main and College Avenue in Thatcher.) Do you know where June McBride lives? Well, the little house this side of her place is where we first lived.
[Did you build the house or did you buy it?] No, it was my grandmother Hoopes', my dad's mother's place and we lived in it until Lamro was about a year old. Then I moved here on this place. Her dad (Nora's) and parents, they lived here. Not in this house but in the one that I tore down. (The original Lamoreaux home was built of 1" x 12" lumber standing on end, joined with furring strips. Grover built an adobe brick house in front, to the south, of that house, using the lumber from the old house in the new house.)
We were speaking about Spencer Kimball, he and his wife, their oldest child was about the same age as Lamro. Nora, your grandmother, shared what milk she gave with Spence's oldest boy, she did it two and four times a day because his mother couldn't give any milk.
You might say I went through all of the organizations of the Church. I served as the superintendent of the Sunday School after I came home from my mission. And then I was in the Mutual Improvement, and, in fact, I worked in nearly every organization of the Church with the exception of a bishopric. I was supposed to have been put in a bishopric deal when I was to get a job and I didn't come back. This is when Maurice Mickelson was in the bishopric. I was ordained a High Priest at that time, then I came back. [Where did you go?] I got a job at Ft. Grant (State Boys Industrial School, reform school, south of Mt. Graham in Cochise County) I worked, I guess for about eight to ten years as the High Priest's secretary of the ward with Oscar Layton and old man Fredrickson when they were the presidents of the High Priests quorum. Since then I haven't been very active, your grandmother died in 1948 and I haven't taken too much of an active part.
I married Olive (Olive Palmer Robinson) about a year after your grandmother did. I have five boys and one daughter in the way of children.
[You didn't always live in Thatcher, did you? Didn't you say you lived in Ft. Grant for a while?] Well, me, I did, yes. I went over there for two years under the Phillips Administration. This is the only time that I have spent away from home since I was married. [What did you do over there?] I was a guard, well, not just a guard, I was a manual training teacher over there. I kept the buildings in repair and tried to keep some of the trouble down. We had some of the damnnest trouble makers over there you ever saw.
When Nel was born, oh, she had an awful rash and we couldn't get it to go away. The doctor suggested that we take her up to the mountains and find a place up there and he thought that that would clear it up. And I went and rented a place for a week and thought that I could rent another one, but while I was up there I found that little place that was for sale. It was one little room, ten by fourteen feet, and I came down here to see about it and while I was here I bought it. I give the man cash, a check, for it and we went back up. We couldn't get it until Saturday or Sunday evening, the old man that I bought it from had already made arrangements to have some of his friends from Tucson come and visit and they wouldn't vacate until Sunday, so I moved the folks on Sunday evening. Then I came down here and rustled up a little lumber and what not and made enough beds for the kids. But they ate, slept, and everything else in that one room, it is the room where the kitchen is now.
He said he would sell it to me for one hundred dollars on time and I could pay for it whenever I could. I said: "if I give you a check for the whole damn thing, what will you give me?" He said that he'd take ninety dollars for it and so that's what it cost. Well, I added a ten by twelve foot room on the east side of it and that little bathroom and a front porch. [Did you ever stay up there all summer?] Ya, we stayed up there pretty much regular with Nel. I would go up twice a week, ride up and back. [How long would it take?] Oh, about an hour and a half. When we first went up there it was a one way road. We went up at a certain time. It wasn't easy and as fast as it is to go now, now you can get up there in three quarters of an hour. Well, you know how it is, it used to take an hour and a half to two hours and cars didn't make it easy. [What kind of a car did you have?] A Ford.
[You were living in Thatcher during the depression, what did you do during the depression of the 30's?] Well, I did carpenter work and I did anything that I could get work at or get a dollar or get, say a gallon of honey or a can of molasses or a sack of potatoes. I worked for it.
[You farmed quite a bit, didn't you?] Well, I did. I farmed all of the time in between my carpenter work. [What kinds of things did you raise?] Oh, hay, mostly hay. We had a cow for milk and butter and we had our chickens and we had our own pork. [You didn't have electricity, did you?] Oh no, that came a little later. [How did you keep the milk and meat cold enough so that it wouldn't spoil?] Well, we just simply had to put it in bottles or we had to watch our seasons. Now the pork we could keep, we made bacon that we could keep also, we had to watch the hams pretty dog gone hard. [Where did you put them, in a well or somewhere else?] No, we kept them hung up and watched them. Now, the only cooler that we ever did have would be a double compartment made from gunny sacks. We put a sack in some water and it worked like a lamp wick. We got electricity when you dad (Lamro) was very small and we put the milk and cream down in the well, and we would churn the butter.
When you wrote and asked me to do this I thought that there is one story that I want to tell John. Cece and I wanted to go over to St. David and I asked dad it if it was alright if Cece and I could go over to St. David. He let us have a team and wagon, a buggy and a horse, but he wouldn't let us have a gun with us, so we made bean shooters, flippers. We killed rabbits and quail on the way over. We ate rabbits and quail, we ate all we wanted on the way over and back. It took about two days and one half. We were out two nights. Then we'd go and stay ten days to two weeks and come back. But he'd never let us take a gun with us. I guess he was afraid that one of us would get shot or hurt. [How old were you?] Well, I was 14 years old and Cece was about twelve.
[Did you ever go into some of the mining towns like Tombstone or Bisbee?] I have been to Tombstone when Tombstone was a pretty lively town, but I never had any exciting experiences there. I'd just go in to there with either grandma or Joe to sell a load of produce or chickens or eggs or garden stuff and dang we'd sell out.
[Tombstone and St. David were settled about the same time, but from what I have heard it seems that all of the Mormons lived in St. David and they stayed home and didn't spend much time in Tombstone.] Well, that's right. We were about eight to ten miles from Tombstone from the ranch and never went there.
Granddad (Curtis) used to have bees, lots of bees. He must of had two thousand stands of bees or better and when they shipped honey he shipped it by the carload and his honey all went back east to New York. The bees got a disease among them. I guess Milt's (Milton Curtis) got eight to ten stands of bees now. They made honey from mesquite and mescratch and moose. They didn't have enough alfalfa there to make much honey on that, but most of their honey, their better honey, was all mesquite and mescratch. Well, of course, after the mesquite and mescratch the bees made it from the sunflowers and weeds, but the better honey was mesquite and mescratch. [What do you think is the best honey?] Personally, I like mescratch better, it is almost like white sugar when it goes to sugar. It is plumb white, it is a white as honey can be.
I can well remember grandmother (Sarah Diantha Gardner Curtis), she was a cobbler, she made all of the shoes for the girls and boys and everybody. She made the shoes right there at the ranch. I used to like to watch her in the early days at the ranch. I'd go there and they would have their pork barrel and their corn beef barrel and they kept it in the shade and the cellar. By golly, you'd find fifty or sixty gallon barrels of corn beef or pork and they'd keep it all in salt brine, they used to can tomatoes in five gallon cans, they really had lots of that kind of stuff.
[When she made shoes, did she have a sewing machine, or did she have to sew them by hand?] Well, she made some of them by hand, but she had a regular sewing machine to sew part of it. [Did she have any specific talents other than that?] No.
[I imagine that she was a good cook?] Oh, she was a great cook, they was all good cooks, them girls all learned to be good cooks and the cooking business and grandma was excellent at it.
[Did she sing or anything like that?] No, now my aunt Clara (Clara Curtis Kimball) she is the one that played that danged harmonica (at the annual Curtis Reunion, which we had attended that morning) when it comes to playing the piano, they was just not anybody that could beat it. She is my mother's sister. They are all gone now but Clara. She married Gordon Kimball, brother to Spencer Kimball.
[What was my grandmother, Nora, like?] Your grandmother was a good church woman. She could preach a sermon as good as anybody ever listened to. [Didn't she go on a mission too?] She went on a mission. She could sing, she could play the piano, and that is about the size of her musical talents. She was a good speaker.
[How old were you when you married?] Oh, lets see, I was about twenty six, she was two years behind me, twenty four. We were married in the Salt Lake Temple. We didn't get married here first, we went up there to get married. [Didn't a lot of people get married before making the trip to Salt Lake?] Some did, but we didn't. [Did you go up there by yourself or were there some other people who made the trip with you?] They used to be a train load, you might say, of people go from here. I went with Mark Mortensen (pronounced Martensen) and his wife and Earl Stowell and his wife. Well, we went up there together on the same train. In the same party. And we got us a room in the same hotel.
[Did her parents live in Thatcher?] Yes. [What were they like?] Well, Grandpa Lamoreaux was a, he was a cripple, his feet broke off him when he was a comparatively young man and he was pretty much of a cripple and did pretty much of his work on his knees. When they took his feet off they just took a saw and sawed them off right here, (pointing to his ankle), they didn't trim them off or nothing. They just sawed them off, it threw him off balance. (What did he do for a living?) Farm. He also did a quite a bit of horse riding. Cattle chasing he was good at, he could ride a horse pretty good. He didn't use stirrups, he just sat there like riding a horse bare back, he could do it good and he could catch a calf and dally down and help round out a bunch of 'em as quick as anybody. And when he was irrigating he always had a horse, he could get on and ride to where his water needed to be turned and he would get off and take care of it on his knees. He milked cows and grandma carried the milk in all the time, but he would come in and separate the milk and always had quite a bunch of chickens. [Where did they live?] Well, to start with he lived down at, oh shoot, just below Matthewsville, just this side of Matthewsville wash. He lived there then he moved up here to Thatcher. Then he moved across the river to Bryce over here and then he came back to Thatcher and got his place right here where we are. (The home was located on the North side of First Street, a little west of the intersection of First Street and College Avenue. It was sold in 1996 and torn down, a new home now stands on the site.)
I bought this place from him and then from here he went to Mesa. [Who planted that pecan tree out there, did he, or did you?] No, I did. I planted that pecan tree out there and, ah, this place, he had this place cut up in little bisty ole' pieces of ground that was awful hard to water. I took all those ditches out and leveled it all so that I could manage the water easier. He didn't have a pump, he got his water from the canal, I put in the pump.
(The phone rang and interrupted our conversation at this point, we never resumed recording it.)