IRENE MERRELL: An autobiography

(A transcription of a 60 minute tape recording made by Irene Merrell Gale on June 16, 1975 in Richland, Washington, in the presence of her grand-daughter, Myrna Gale Hoopes and Myrna’s husband, John. Irene read and made changes to this transcription.)

I was born in Naples (Vernal), Uintah County, Utah, to William Porter and Mary Lybbert Merrell on the 23^rd of April, 1898.

The first (incident) I remember was when we moved from Naples, where I was born, to Jensen, We had a two room house there. I can remember it was when my brother Porter was real young and I dreaded to go from one room to another because there was a step, one room was a little higher than the other, and to go up that step worried me. I can remember the house there real well, it was right on the bank of the Green River.

I had been born in a one room log house in Naples that was across the gulch from my grandmother and grandfather’s place. Daddy had made the furniture himself with Uncle Abe (Albert) Goodrich. They had made the chest that I still have for my baby clothes and a big dresser, we called it a wardrobe, big enough to hold most of our clothes, it must have been about seven feet high. They also made the kitchen cupboard and wash stand and it seems like there was another article or two, but they had painted them real special so it would show off the grain. They have been in existence until the last few years, I don’t know exactly where they are now, and that’s seventy-seven years, but they were made real well out of pine.

Down there we were all alone, but there was five houses a little way from where we lived where my grandmother and her two daughters lived. Uncle Frank (Franklin Remington Merrell) and Fuller (Fuller Remington Merrell) had married sisters and they each had a one room log house, but we were about a mile from there and were all alone, we children and mother.

Porter, he was one that was born in Naples too, I can remember him as not being too patient as a little boy. He was red-headed. As he grew up I remember mother telling me that he needed to learn to be patient, especially like one time when they were bathing him and he said that he didn’t want to be bathed. He kept saying that until he was all bathed and in bed. As he got older he did develop his patience and he became one of the most patient people that ever was.

Then Lucille, she was born in Jensen, the 20^th of November in 1901. They could cross the river on ice, the Green River, and it was already that cold and they crossed the ice to go with their buggy to get great grandmother Remington (Lydia Ripley Badger Remington) to bring her to be with mother when her babies were born because she had gone quite a bit to help mothers. Grandma Merrell (Harriet Amelia Remington) was also there when she was born. So that was quite an experience to have somebody come to our house and stay a few days.

In 1904 (April 14) Bernard was born and he got whooping cough and it weakened his heart and he died when he was nine months old. The night he died I had an experience that has affected my life always since. I can remember mother and grandmother and great-grandmother Remington there because they had sent for great grandmother Remington again because of him not being well. They had him up to the doctor and they knew he had pneumonia and that his heart wasn’t so well and all at once he was worse. This night, as they sat there, I can remember mother with him on a pillow on her lap not saying a word, and the rest being there all at once. Grandmother Merrell said for my father to rebuke Satan because she felt his presence so much. I was a little girl, I was about six years old, and was lying on the bed trying to go to sleep. The awful feeling came over me and then daddy did stand and raise his hand to the square and rebuke Satan. Then Uncle Erwin, who was sleeping in the other room on a cot, came in and he said: “do you know that a great big dark man came in and went out the door in the other room,” and of course, that gave me an awful start. Not realizing why I felt this awful feeling, grandma said: “it was my fault, because I prayed for my husband (that is grandpa, who had died when my father was only fifteen) to come to get Bernard when he died.” But when she felt this awful spirit she said that “I should have been able to overcome this ugly spirit and then I think that I could have seen his spirit as he came to get this other little spirit.” So it made a real impression with me of the spirit leaving the body. Later I heard her explain that she knew that the Prophet Joseph Smith had to overcome Satan because he (Satan) wanted to discourage him. This made a real impression on my life.

William Alton was born on the 28^th of January in 1906. This time we were living in Vernal where my father was helping to build the tabernacle (In 1997 it became the Vernal Temple) that was being built there, and I used to go with him and Uncle Abe to work on it. I liked nailing some of the boards down for the sub-flooring, I just loved to be there with them and do these things and to build play houses there. I started to school that year in Vernal.

The next sister (Elva) that was born in 1908 (March 17). When she was three years old we moved over to Bluebell and father had been over there and had built us a one room house before we moved. During that year we lived in the Tithing Office there in Naples and mother had written out tithing receipts as they brought in their loads of tithing; a load of hay, potatoes, or grain or some eggs or butter, anything in the product way, they’d bring it in and mother would write out the receipt.

The bishop was Bishop Sheaffer (in Naples.) One thing that I remember so well about bother Sheaffer was his kindness and goodness. My father loved him so much. He was the bishop for twenty-two years there. But at the time he was put in as bishop he had been one that had smoked a little bit and had been a little bit rough and when the people in the ward knew that they were going to put him in as bishop, quite a few talked against brother Sheaffer. My father was young and they said that they wouldn’t vote for him. They said they didn’t want a bishop that hadn’t been just right so when they asked for the sustaining vote, no one, just two or three, raised their hands and my father didn’t raise his because he knew that most of them didn’t want him. When they asked for the contrary votes my father was the only one that voted against him, and so, of course, they called him in to see why he didn’t want him and he told why. They said: “well, it’s all right for you to express that but you should be willing to sustain him if the authorities had chosen him, you should sustain them in what they were doing.” And, of course, it made a real impression on my father and that was long before he was married. But anyway, that impressed me all of my life to know that we can sustain anyone that the authorities do, usually, unless there was something really wrong. But it made a real special kinship between he and Bishop Sheaffer.

When Elva was three weeks old we had one my of uncles drive one team and daddy drove the other them and it took us three days to get over to Bluebell from Vernal. It is about 50 miles and would take about an hour to get there now. When we got to Bluebell it was night time and we had to unload and put everything in the house. There was no windows or doors yet because we had them with us. We had to go about three miles to get water and haul it in a barrel. The next day daddy got the windows and doors in and it began to seem like home.

Victor was born in 1910 (Mar 25) but at that time there were no doctors around. The doctors had said that it was dangerous for mother to have any more children, so she went to Naples, he was born there. They came in at least a month before that thinking he would come (early) and they had to come by wagon which took two days for them to get there where mother could have the doctor’s care. It was a month anyway before the baby was born and she had a real hard time in having him.

Then when Florence was born in 1912 (Sep 14), I would have been fourteen. The five children were left there with me in Bluebell with no close neighbors, they weren’t too far away, but they were not too close. I took care of the five children while mother and father went for a month but mother still had to wait a long time. It was about six weeks that I had to take care of the children. We didn’t have any stores to go to, you had to cook every meal. There was some apples, I remember, that had to be put up, the first I had ever made any preserves. We didn’t even have bottles to put fruit in, we had to put it in honey cans or maybe a crock or something of that kind.

Arthur was born in 1914, in September (Sep 21). I had thought that I was going to high school that year, but he was born at home with just a mid-wife, well, the others were born with mid-wives too, I do think they had a doctor with Victor. I was going to start high school, I had a skirt and a blouse and a dress all made so I could go to high school down in Roosevelt, but mother got phlebitis and was not so she could go up for about six weeks or two months, so that made it so that I couldn’t go.

By that time Luther had come to Bluebell and we had decided to get married in April, April 15^th. From then on we decided that mother and I would have our children along together. After we were married LaVoir was born on the 16^th of September in 1916 and three weeks later our son, DeMar, was born.

Sterling Merrell was born in 1919, the 20^th of January, and then Winona was born six years later in 1925, the 28^th of March. And that was all of mother’s children, my brothers and sisters.

[Describe your mother, Mary Sophia Elizabeth Lybbert] I think she was about five foot seven inches and weighed about one hundred thirty pounds. She was pleasant, she didn’t have an especially beautiful face, but a real good one that you could remember as pleasant and nice. She had brown hair, but it started turning gray when she was about forty, it wasn’t long until she was white headed. She had white hair for many, many years. She was always interested in people. She loved everyone and had a real understanding heart and could understand what people meant to do when sometimes it looked like they were trying to do something else until she had everyone she knew as her friend. She was busy in community life. When daddy was bishop she was the one that helped him understand everyone and helped him in his work very much. She was Post Mistress for many years, which made her take care of that and the family as well.

My father (William Porter Merrell) was a small man, he was about five foot nine inches and weighed one hundred twenty to thirty pounds. He was always interested in the community. When we moved to Bluebell he was the one that helped get irrigation and the community organized and helped get the church house built, and got the books for the first school we had there and all of those things. He loved to play baseball and run races and have fun with people. At the dances, he called the dances, he loved to go and mingle with people.

My education started in Vernal and then we moved to Naples and then back to Bluebell. I lived one winter with Aunt Esther (Esther Lybbert Olsen) and grandpa (Christian Frederick Bernard Lybbert) in Naples after they (the family) had moved to Bluebell. She (Aunt Esther) was my school teacher that year. We went home for Christmas and it took us two days to get there because it was so snowy and bad. Daddy freighted and got enough money to buy a few gifts for Christmas that year. He had been freighting out to Price (Utah). It was a real nice year for me because I was there with the school teachers. There were three school teachers that were friends of hers and they were real close and they always took me in like I was one of them and they made me feel good. The rest of the time I was in Bluebell in this new school where there was one teacher for all the classes. I think the last year or so we had two teachers with a partition, a duct partition, between the two different teachers. I graduated from the eighth grade there.

The first love letter that Luther wrote to me was at that time. He went out to Nine Mile and while he was there he sent a letter back by his brother. He brought it and gave it to me there the day we were graduating. The girls thought it was so much fun, they took the letter from me and took me back behind the church house and sat me on the steps there and they read the letter to me before I even got a chance to read it, which was a great anxiety, I didn’t even know if he said, “I love you” or not, but he did.

I didn’t even get to go to high school because Luther came before my mother was well enough, so I didn’t get to high school. The first I ever went to high school is when I went with my children, they all went to high school. The first I actually went is when I taught in Blackfoot (Idaho) when we moved up there. I taught home economics for most of the year.

The first thing that happened when Luther and I started going together is that he had a nephew who was going to school and each day he would send a message over to me. I was in the eighth grade there. He wanted to know about the bishop’s daughter and other smartelec things and I always had some smartelec thing to reply back. I had never seen him and so the first time we met it was kinda embarrassing for me because of the smartelec remarks that I had been sending to this man that was ten years older than I was.

One of the first dates we went up to Altona, which I guess is about six or eight miles from Bluebell. We had a buggy, most of us rode in that, but Luther had his horse and he rode along the side and he had his baseball suit on because he had played baseball. He was the only one that had a baseball suit that played these games. They called him “Denver” because he was such a good batter and such a good pitcher and such a good catcher. They thought he was fine. So it looked like it was quite a bit of fun to go to a ball game with a horse so he invited me to go with him over to Mount Emanson. He came and brought the horses down and gave me the spry one and he took the slow one. As we were leaving my place he gave it a sharp whack on the rump with his reins and away he started and he went racing up past the few houses there was, and the church house and the store and the few houses. He didn’t catch me until we were out of town. And we didn’t have any more than gone to the ball game until he announced to everybody that I wouldn’t even ride through town with him, that I rode off and left him until we had got out of the community and then he caught up with me and rode the rest of the way over. So it was quite a joke for a while, while we were going together.

The very first time that I went with him we had been having readings from a book for the community for our entertainment. The school teacher had us make a book report, that is, we read the book and we’d all come over to our place on Wednesday night and sing a few songs and then we’d have the book report, we invited Luther to come. But instead of having the book report that night they had a farmer’s meeting at the school house and the church house combined. So Luther came down thinking they were going to have the reading of the book, but we were going up there to the meeting. We just all walked together, mother, Luther and I and daddy. When it was time to go home I didn’t think about Luther being responsible to see that I came home and still he was around there and I don’t know just what to do and whether to wait for him or what to do. But he did come and ask me, but it was a real worry to me just which I should do, but he did walk me home and he rode the horse back.

We were married in the Salt Lake Temple. It was kinda amusing how smartelec Luther was about that too. He said that he was going to ask daddy if he could marry me, which, of course, everybody did in those times. He said that he said to the bishop, “I’ve been wanting to ask you,” and he was going to ask him something else and daddy said, “oh, that’s all right my son, you can have her.” And he said he didn’t even mean to ask for me, but he hated to disappoint all of the people in Bluebell and the bishop and his wife and daughters, and so he went ahead and married me. He did ask mother as we got in the wagon and started off for Salt Lake this cold March morning. He told mother that he wasn’t going to ask for me, but he finally did ask mother as we drove off if it was all right if he married me.

It took us three days to get to Price. The roads were so bad that we had to hire a team to help pull us over the mountain, they were so bad. The first night out we slept in a shack, oh, I imagine it would be about 9 by 10 feet big that had been built of boards that were green and there was about an inch crack between all of the boards. The wind just whistled through. We put a quilt at our heads so the wind couldn’t blow through as bad. There was Luther and my father and I sleeping there.

We had a horse who was a regular out-law and when we would have a rodeo or anything “Old Snap” was just a regular bronc. The first time when we started out they couldn’t hold him in and they also had one of daddy’s horses, which was kind of a slow horse. That is the team we had to go with. At the time we got the first day out Old Snap was so he didn’t want to be so rambunctious as he had when we first started in the morning. When we got to Price we went to a friend’s who had come up there quite often, they were the Powells.

We stayed with them (the Powells) and we left our team and wagon and went up on the train. On the morning when we were going we knew that I wasn’t old enough to get a license without daddy’s signature, so daddy and Luther just decided, well, while she is fixing up we will go down to the court house and get it all fixed up and she won’t even have to be there. It was kinda disappointing to me to realize that I wasn’t even old enough to go and sign my own license. It made me feel kinda left out or something, but it was only a few minutes until they were back and found out that I really had to be there to prove that I was somebody. So we got our license there in Price and we went up on the train.

I had never seen a train before, that is the first train that I had ever seen. As we came over the mountain and looked down into Price we saw the train. Daddy and Luther jumped on the seat and yelled and throwed their hats in the air and were so excited to see a train, although they had seen one before. I thought, oh what kids to be so glad to see a train. I’d seen them in pictures and they didn’t look any different, but anyway we rode on the train.

When we got to Salt Lake then we had to take a street car out to Murray and stayed with Doctor Olsen, my mother’s uncle. Grandmother Lybbert was to meet us there and go through the temple with us, she was working in the temple in Logan, but she didn’t get there in time this morning. We had to be married then, that day, because it was conference time and the temple was going to be closed. Some people don’t believe that when we got dressed in the temple I got behind one of the oxen where the font is. People can’t imagine that they didn’t have dressing rooms there in the temple like there is now.

Anyway, when we came back we stayed for conference and Luther and I stayed in a hotel. It was on Third West, I believe it is, and it was later one of the worst hotels in the city. I don’t suppose it was then when we were there, it didn’t seem to be like that, it seemed quite special to me. We stayed there for three nights while conference was on and then we went out and stayed with grandmother and her brother. When we got out there Aunt Nicollini Olsen, that was his wife, by the way they had fourteen children then, she said that I was too young to be married so Luther had to sleep with daddy and I slept with grandma because she didn’t think it was right that we should be married.

The first house that we lived in after we got married was the same thing, it was a one room log house, but the logs were sawed. I want you to remember that, because all logs weren’t sawed in that time, but these were sawed logs. It was quite a good sized room but they didn’t get enough dirt on it and we white washed the walls with gypsum.

DeMar, our first, was born in 1916, the 9^th of October. I had just been married for one year and a half. He was a nice big boy, ten and one-half pounds, red haired, very independent. He never wanted his face covered or anything, he wanted to be a boy and out and doing from the time he was born. He and LaVoir, there was only three weeks between them, LaVoir was more of a dainty person, he didn’t want to play rough but DeMar was always the one that would play real rough.

We moved down to Monticello and were gone during the summertime down there and moved back in the fall. I had written and told them how he (DeMar) could walk and he got sick and he had been so he couldn’t walk, but when we got back home LaVoir came out to meet us. When we got to mother’s and daddy’s, DeMar never even walked again until he was sixteen months old because he was so frightened because I tried to get him to walk after he had been sick and felt so shaky, I guess. He would wait and stand by a chair and when LaVoir would start to pass him, he was walking, he would grab onto LaVoir and hold him and they’d go down together.

Then Donald was born, the first day of June in 1918. At that time I was twenty years old, DeMar was twenty months old, and Donald was twenty hours old, so we were all twenty at the same time. He was more of a delicate baby when he was born and I don’t know how much he weighed because we didn’t have any scales. At the time he was born Luther’s mother took care of me. She was the mid-wife for both DeMar and Donald, but I had hemorrhage when Donald was born and I was really bad and I know from how the doctors had been when I had had hemorrhages since, that I was real near death. I didn’t even know that I was the one that asked, but I asked to be administered to and they administered to me and then I just felt like a light coming from my feet up over my body and I knew that I would have been gone before very long if they wouldn’t have administered to me. Grandma was making some tea for me out of herbs, pepper, ginger, and all those spices to help me, but I know from experience that it never could have saved my life.

Eldon was born in Monticello when we were living there on the 8^th day of June in 1920. Donald was just two years and eight days older than Eldon. We had no friends around. The doctor, we did have a doctor, didn’t have a license, he had studied some but was not one that was licensed even to deliver children. I had quite a bad time then, in fact, I had some blood poison before it was all done. Luther’s sister came a day or two and helped in bathing the baby and then a neighbor came and bathed him a time or two when I was real sick. He weighed thirteen and one-half pounds, a nice big baby. One thing impressed me so much when I went to a meeting and one of the apostles, Brother Richards, saw him and said what a lovely baby and put his hand on his head and said: “God bless him always,” and it impressed me so much to have an apostle say that.

The doctor said at that time that he would not even help me with any other baby because I had such a time, so before Mildred was born he said he wouldn’t take care of me unless I had a trained nurse. I guess he thought the nurse knew more about it than he did, so I did have a trained nurse.

Maybe I should mention about when our daughter Mildred died. We had the three boys before we had any girls and she was born down in Monticello during a great blizzard. She was real special to us, to have a little girl after we had the three boys. We went into Vernal to have Arvene and when he was about two or three weeks old I had to go to the doctor and when I got back Mildred was sick. She had been vomiting during the night and she jumped up and was all excited and started to tell me things and was doing things and I felt that she didn’t look just right. There was something different about her. I got her to lie down and I ironed for a while, which was real hard for me to do because I wasn’t real well. All at once I felt that something must be done, that she must be administered to. She wasn’t acting any worse or anything, but I felt the need that she should be administered to so I mentioned it to daddy and he got our neighbor, Bill, to come over and they administered to her. As soon as they administered to her she went into a convulsion and then I was really concerned and felt that it was really something serious. We had to melt some snow to have water and so during the afternoon I felt the anxiety of having more water on hand and so we had this stove with a number three galvanized tub with some snow on it melting, and during this time the snow had melted and was quite warm. When we phoned the doctor he said to put her in a warm bath and then a cold bath and it would take her out of the convulsions. If we hadn’t of had the water already there we wouldn’t have been able to do the thing that needed to be done.

Then the doctor, doctors, there were two of them, came down and

they tapped her spine and found that it was spinal meningitis, one doctor did, he phoned the drug store. He said (to the druggist) that we have to have a certain kind of medicine because we have a case of spinal meningitis. They said, can you get it from Salt Lake and he (the druggist) said I already got it this afternoon, it came in this afternoon. They got it and they gave her a shot as they were supposed to but they never did find out what germ caused it, they never found the germ, but they did know that there was infection in the spine.

Then she only lived three days and, of course, we were under quarantine, mother’s family and all of our children there together. It was a real touchy time to keep someone else from getting it, in fact, I couldn’t even be with her when she was sick, the others were.

At the time they called me in I said: “oh daddy, she is so bad, can you administer to her?” Instead of administering and saying anything about her getting well he dedicated her to the Lord and that she would not need to suffer any more and I thought that I couldn’t stand that. I thought that I just couldn’t stand for the Lord to take her, he didn’t say “take her,” but he dedicated her to the Lord and then I sat down and it was a few minutes before I could conscientiously say that I was willing for Heavenly Father’s will to be done. And then she passed away, which was a great testimony to me that we have the power that we can hold someone. The doctor said that if she would have lived that maybe she could have never talked because this settled mostly in her vocal chords and in her throat.

Bruce Kent was born at Naples, that is when we moved from Bluebell over to Naples and he was born there. Luther had been home only a few days as he had been away to work and came home. He (Bruce Kent) was born the 10^th of November, 1925. I was all alone all the time for months before and moved three times that year. Luther was never there, so I can’t describe each house because I wasn’t in each for very long. Victor, my brother that was fifteen, helped me with this work.

Luther went out to the mine and we moved out there when our next baby, Arvene, was born. He was born in Naples but we had to come in from where we were out at the mines, he was born at mother’s on the 22^nd of December, 1927.

I again came in to mother’s and Venna was born. Daddy was there dying of cancer and was in bed. I thought that she was going to be born a month before she was and so I was at mother’s. Everyone came in for Christmas and I was in bed in the front room because there was no other place to put a bed and every room was full. I had a real bad time, of course they stayed in bed then for two weeks. Daddy died when she was two weeks old and all the family came home then for the funeral. I was not able to go to the funeral because I was not well enough.

Lynn LaDell was born while we were living there in Naples on the Hawes Place, we called it. He then lived until he was six years old and he died. By the way, Mildred had died of spinal meningitis when Arvene was just two months old.

Evaune was born on the 27^th day of May, 1936. She was born on a farm that we had bought and thought we would stay there for a while. She was born the day that DeMar left to be married. She was born that afternoon. They were having a family get-together at the Noels and she was born along about four in the afternoon. DeMar had to hurry to get ready to go because they were going up to the temple and then to Klamath Falls (Oregon). Mother was there to be with me and everyone of the older children left. Some of them bathed in the tub in the other room and mother fell over the tub and frightened me almost to pieces for fear that she was hurt. She did get hurt a little and was black-and-blue some.

Sterling was born in Vernal the 13^th of July, 1938, but he was born there on the farm too. Eveart was born in the same place on the 22^nd of July, 1939, then we moved out to Lehi and Sharon was born in Lehi on the 28^th of February, 1941.

Most any part of my life would make an interesting movie. Some of the southerners, when you see their houses and all, I think that we were as good.

We had a flood down in Jensen and digging out from the flood and mother coming running through the field waving her bonnet to get attention of the men as they were trying to build a dam to keep the water from flooding in from the river and the flood from a rain came down the other way and flooded part of the other way, that would have made kind of an interesting movie.

I think of when we were moving up to the Northwest and had to get out of the snow drifts that had drifted in and being without food and without fuel for two weeks. We had to cut up our tires and burn some of the fence and these things to keep us warm during that time. Then to get out and tip over in the river and get rescued from that. We didn’t have a place to go for two weeks and then had to build our house and get it fixed. These things would make quite an interesting movie.

Maybe I should mention something about how it was when we went down into the river there where we turned our car over. We had been driving all day and it was not very good weather. I had been real sick the day before as we were loading our furniture.

As we were going along, it was toward evening time, we had talked about that when we got up to Moses Lake that we would be in the mission field and that we should be missionaries and that everyone should strive the very best they could to show the truthfulness of the Gospel by our actions, and we had dwelled on that quite a bit of time.

It was about nine or ten o’clock and we were all settled down and thought that we’d wait until we got to Baker (Oregon) before we stopped for the night. There were six of us in the car, the one window was out of the car on my side and we just had some cardboard there. There was not any glass in the window. Sterling was in the front seat with us and the four others were in the back. Luther drove along this curving road out of Huntington, it was winding back and forth along what I thought was the river. I thought it was the Snake River. The lights went out on the car and Luther just kept the car going straight and it hit the curve in the road. I said, “oh, thank goodness” just as it stopped, and as it stopped it started rolling over down the bank of the river and, of course, as soon as the side of the car hit there (the water) it started coming in the car. Sterling said that I helped him out of the car, I don’t know how I did, but Evaune rolled the back window down and they got their heads out of the back window. Luther broke the other front window and he came out of there. Sterling said that he bounced across the water because it was too deep. Luther helped Sharon out and I don’t even know how I got Eveart out. I know that I must have helped him out from the back, he must have bounced across too. I had my coat on and some heavy underwear of Luther’s and in the cold and wet I could no more chin myself and get out of the car than anything, but Evaune helped me get out. And then no one stopped along the way until finally someone saw Sterling, he was in a big truck and they saw him and he stopped. Then the ones that were coming from the plant, where they were making brick, stopped and picked us up and took us back to Huntington. This is when were moving up to Moses Lake in 1949.