MY EARLY RECOLLECTIONS OF LIFE IN TROPIC, UTAH

MY EARLY RECOLLECTIONS OF LIFE IN TROPIC, UTAH

by Dr. Sheldon B. Johnson

(as told to LaVerna Johnson 1996, St. George, Utah)

I was born April 27, 1926. I was born the youngest son, with my sister Gladys coming along about five years later. There were no hospitals. I was born at home, which was pretty normal for rural Utah in those days.

Some of my early recollections are of going to the sawmill and having a wonderful time playing in the sawdust and trying to dam off Clear Creek, the water source for the sawmill. Clear Creek eventually became the water source for all of Bryce Canyon National Park.

I still love the smell of pine trees. The work ethic of my father was that if it was daylight we had to be working....especially at the sawmill. There was sawdust to be hauled, boards to be stacked, bark to be cleaned up. These projects became my responsibility, though I was a small boy. In spite of the long hours I have only good memories of all this hard work at the sawmill.

After I was about twelve years of age given the responsibility of loading an old Model A Ford truck with sawdust and finding a deserted place to dump it. It gave me great pride to be a real truck driver.

At our house we had everything to eat that you could put up. It was food that we harvested in the summer and stored for winter. The only items bought from the store were sugar and salt, vanilla and root beer extract. (That I remember.) We also bought Rennet to make cheese. With Mother in charge and the whole family helping we bottled all kinds of fruits and vegetables in Kerr or Ball jars with metal lids such as those we use today. We used some glass dome lids with rubber rings also that could be reused. We bottled venison and other meats we butchered. We salted and cured hams for winter use.

We had a cellar that was pitch dark inside where wooden bins were made in which we stored potatoes, carrots, squash, turnips, apples, pears, etc. We had a sawdust pit to store ice. Large chunks of ice about three or feet across were stored in the sawdust. The ice sometimes lasted until the last part of June.

For a refrigerator we had a big box covered with burlap with a big bucket on top that had a leak in it. This caused the wet burlap to evaporate into the warm air. Mother stored butter and cheese in that cool box, along with fruits and some milk. Mostly we had fresh, warm milk for our meals every day.

The first I knew of electricity was when I was nearly fourteen when it was brought to Tropic through the REA (Rural Electric Association). Then we had lights to see by at night and a refrigerator for our food. Up to then we had a radio with a battery that all wore out fast so we could listen for only a few minutes a day. Now we could listen all day long...for as long as we liked.

I still remember some of my favorite radio programs like Amos and Andy, I Love a Mystery, the Lux Theater, the Little Theater off Time Square, Jack Armstrong the All American Boy.

They started using Jack Armstrong on the backs of cereal boxes, but we didn't often buy prepared cereal. We had Cream of Wheat, Quaker Oats, cracked wheat, or rice for cooked breakfast cereal in the morning. By this time in my life the great depression of the thirties was about over.

Dad started selling lumber and we became so prosperous that we were some of the first families in Tropic to have inside plumbing. That meant running water inside of a house. Some thought that rather gross of us to have a bathroom with a toilet inside the house where you live!

Up until the days of inside plumbing in order to take a bath we had to heat the water on the wooden stove, pour it into a #3 round metal tub, and kick everyone out of the kitchen while we bathed by the kitchen stove where it was warm. If you were lucky enough to be the first one in line you had clean water. Otherwise you had to use the water the previous person used, adding a little hot water to warm it up some. When everyone was finished bathing you hauled bucketful's of colorful water outside until the tub was light enough to carry outside and empty near a bush or tree.

The wood range stove was used for many reasons. Thus it was used to keep baby chicks behind to keep them warm, and to keep baby animals warm when they were sick. It was a congregating place for the family to gather around for conversation and comfort.

The wood range was so beloved by mother that when electricity made it possible for a electric stove she didn't use the electric stove because she preferred to do all her cooking on the wood stove because she found it to be a lot more exact in her estimation than making those electric coils burn hot. So she preferred a wood stove all her life. She knew when the oven was just right for baking bread, cakes, and pies.

On the stove top there was always cottage cheese in the making, maybe two or three pans at different stages of being made. When large volumes of milk accumulated she would make a block of cheese the size of a pie...only four or five inches thick. She curdled the warm milk, squeezed the whey out, and pressed it into a round wooden cheese press we boys had made. She squeezed it in the press for several days until it got just right. I remember her trimming the cheese, giving us little delicious slivers to taste. (I still love fresh, squeaky cheese curd when I can get it.)

Then Mother would cover it with cheese cloth and rub it with butter to seal the cheese block. I remember a dozen of these round blocks of cheese sitting on the shelf in our underground cooler room as we approached winter.

Nothing was purchased when I was a boy. It was during the world's greatest depression . So I made my own things often. I remember my first invention: Monday was called wash day in those days. It was a day we set aside for washing clothes. At the crack of dawn mother and children were up. It was my job to haul buckets of water to fill the tubs. There were usually three big tubs, one to wash and two to rinse in.

We heated the water over an open fire. When the water was really hot you put slivers of soap into the water, soap which mother had made previously with leftover lard and drippings and lye. After the water was starting to boil a clothes plunger was pushed into the clothes and soapy water to stir and stir and stir those clothes.

Before electricity came to Tropic a new invention of the day was a clothes washer, which was a tub with a plunger that would go up and down when a wheel was turned by hand. We finally got one. My job was to turn the wheel. That got rather boring to pull the wheel thirty minutes for each batch. This led to my first invention when I was about twelve years old. I got the back of an old bike that I found and put a belt where it's back wheel had been. That belt went to the washer so I could sit on the seat and peddle while the plunger went up and down, as the "washing machine" would help clean the clothes.

Mom baked rolls, bread, custards, all kinds of pies, cobblers (using dried or bottled fruit). There was always something good to eat.

At night only kerosene lamps were available to read by, so we went to bed early. In my younger years knowledge and learning was important to both of my parents. Mother got her degree in about 1908 from Brigham Young University. She was a school teacher. One of my fondest memories of early years was a bookcase where Mother hid little tiny books between the books on the shelf. The tiny books could be ours if we could find one. Often I can remember of searching through the big books trying to find the small booklets Mother had hidden for us.

Toys? They were not readily available to be purchased in Tropic. But above all my parents believed that toys were a waste of money. Books were valued, but toys to entertain were a tool of Satan, and the reason for that philosophy was that life was life was serious and you had to work from daylight to the dark of night just to survive and satisfy all the family needs.

Children's work: Mother would say: "If you have all your jobs done then rake the yard." The garden always had to be weeded, the wood had to be chopped and hauled in, the barns and corrals cleaned, the fences needed to be repaired. I fed the chickens, pigs, and other animals. The cows had to be milked night and morning. After milking I took them two miles to pasture them, and walk two miles back to bring them in. But I could always get on my horse Tony to take the cows and go get them.

'Course I always had my little goat, Nan, who I had taught to pull a cart. I would go riding with Nan pulling me.

There was a big black bull in town who bullied everyone, and it was a worry getting past him until the day he came at Nan. She bowed her head and his lowered head with a powerful smack! He staggered away, and never bothered us again. I loved Nan. She was a good friend and companion. She often got in trouble though, and Mother and Dad did not share my good opinion of her. She got in the garden one time too often, and Dad butchered her for meat for the winter. I cried for days, and would not eat a thing.

The only allowed play time was a swing down in the orchard. That was valued by Mother and Dad. It was not considered play when you were swinging. I don't know why.

One thing we did that was looked upon with favor was collecting pine nuts. Dad didn't have time to go looking for pine nuts, but it was the joy of my mother's life to look for the right tree for the best picking. I can remember when I was very small running from tree to tree calling: "I found some good ones! I found some yellow tip ones!" It was a joy beyond measure to kneel down under a tree and fill a coffee can with brown and yellow pine nuts. It was an accomplishment that I can't quite express. There's something about picking pine nuts that pulls you from the troubles of the world and gives you a sense of freedom.

We roasted them in a pan in the oven. The having was not as great as the getting, but I can remember gathering around the Heaterola ...which was a wood stove with a porcelainized cover and an eisenglass window so we could see the fire. We would tell stories and eat pine nuts.

We picked pine nuts on Merrill's Bench....which President Clinton recently made part of the Grand Staircase of Escalante National Monument, so it is probably closed to families to experience such joy forever.

Aaron Jolley and I found an old dead cow up above town. It gave us the inspiration that we could use the meat to set traps for wild animals. We found some coyote traps among our parent's holdings, and carved a hind quarter of this dead cow and headed for Marion Mountain with our bait and traps.

We hoped to find a cougar or a wild cat. We set the bait and waited several days. Nothing happened until one night with an old twenty two and one bullet we headed up to find our wild animal in the trap. The excitement was great when we saw that we had caught a wild animal in one of our traps! But as we got closer we found that it was a skunk with one foot caught.

A skunk skin was better than nothing, so we tried to kill the skunk with our 22, but the firing pin wouldn't work and the bullet wouldn't discharge. Wise as we were, we thought that if we tapped the skunk on the nose with a stick he would turn over and die. (That was what we had been told by good authority.) Well, two hits was better than one, so we both got a stick.

As we swung out sticks something terrible happened. The skunk turned on us and what a terrible smell! We couldn't breathe. We started to run down the hill, through the pine trees toward home, afraid that he would catch up with us at any moment. We thought we could outrun the terrible smell that was catching up with us. So we ran until we were exhausted, then we would stop. Sure enough, that darned smell caught up with us again.

After many times of running and stopping we finally got the drift. The smell wasn't catching up with us, it was ON us! Not knowing what to do we ran first to our Grandma's to see if she would recognize it. We no more than got in the house when she got the broom and chased us out. Laughing and chasing, she said: "You're not coming in here!"

Next we went to the Louelle's, the town store. It was cold, and we thought we would get warm around the big pot-bellied stove where everybody gathered to talk. The talk from everyone continued for about a minute, then someone said: "Louelle, you've got a SKUNK in this store!" Louelle started to sniffing and roaming, and when she came to us she laughed and chased us out just like Grandma did. The store emptied in a hurry as our fragrance lingered.

When I got home Mother said: "You've got to sleep in the barn!" But after a lot of scrubbing with the hose outside, and a change of clothes it was agreed I could continue to live there.

The skunk was recaptured later when it had died of it's own will. We brought it to town. With the help of Macuen Ott, an older classmate, the skunk was skinned in a 50 gallon drum, under water. After a great deal of soaking and care the hide was sent to a tannery where we got a dollar and twenty cents for the hide.

We split the money with Macuen, and thought we were rich. There was lots of excitement, and all the boys wanted to do it like we did, only they wanted a coyote or a cougar!

Raising Pheasants and Other Ambitious Projects in Tropic

When I was about nine or ten Will LeFevre was in charge (photo). Mr. Muir,the County Agent from Panguitch, had a Lincoln Zypher. He gave me a ride on the front seat, and I could watch him shift. It was the first car to have shifting gears on the steering wheel, kind of on the dash. They'd always been on the floor before. What a thrill!

Dad and my brothers helped me build a pen for pheasants. Aaron decided to raise pheasants too, but he did not have a good pen like mine. We raised lots of pheasants from chicks, twenty five cents when they turned them loose. It took all summer to raise them. I had to provide the food for the chicks. We raised corn and wheat. When we got through we had $3 or $4. They were hard to raise. Many died.

I was trying to make a go-cart before go-carts were made. The wheels were heavy big cast iron wheels from a push-pull washing machine. It moved the puncher. I never could get that engine to go...an old lathe mill engine from Dad's lumber mill. Couldn't get it to go...well, it would run going down hill, but not up hill or on the level. I worked and worked on it, trying to invent something.

So I hooked my goat Nan up to it. she pulled me just fine. I loved her and my parents hated her becaise she kept getting in the garden and ate everything. Weeding the garden was my job, and it occurred to me that she just saved a lot of weeding in that dumb old garden.

Dad didn't like the way she'd jump in the manger and run back and forth bossing the cows, wouldn't let them eat. She could climb, go over, under, or through anything!

Dad said one night, "Well, we're having goat meat." I just about divorced my family. I NEVER ate goat meat. I cried for days. He killed my best friend. I think he felt like he made a big mistake.

He didn't know what a help she was. He didn't have to herd the cows through town to take them to pasture like I did. Old Nan made it easy. The old bull at the end of the lane wouldn't let the cows through. He'd charge anybody around him, but he challenged Nan.

She led the cows. The bull stopped, bellowed, lowered his head, and Nan hit him in the forehead. That made him mad. He lowered his head and charged her. She reared up and lowered her head and crashed his head. He shook his head, moaned, and walked away... never to bother us again.

We, all the boys in town had a hole in a wooden fence to dive through and roll to get away from that bull. I never had to do that when Nan was there. What were corn and peas compared to that?

I got Nan as a little teeny kid. Aaron's brother brought two small goat from his Ag class. Aaron raised a billy. I raised Nan, and now she was gone. Laurel Barton had a speckled goat. I had the only cart, invented for Nan.

I always had projects. When I was twelve or thirteen I had the best club house that was a thousand per cent better. I spoke for our old chicken coop when Dad built a new one. My inherited chicken coop was about fifteen feet long with a slanted roof. I cut the house in two, sawed it in half. I sawed for weeks, and put it together again. I turned it around and matched the pitch of the roofs to make it a pitch roof, high in the middle.

I put it down by the Bryce Canyon wash that went right along our property. It was very private. My mother loved to wall paper. I took all her scraps and wall papered the walls and ceiling... all colors.

My folks had an old spring cot that folded in the middle to make a bed or a couch. I acquired this, and some old quilts. It was the finest! I had a lock with a skeleton key. Everyone had a key that would work, but we felt very private. My friends had to come to me to get in. A clubhouse is no good unless you have friends.

About this time my brother Mark hauled potatoes from down to Phoenix and brought oranges back. He's peddle the oranges and grapefruit in Panguitch and Tropic. I helped him a lot. He gave me wood orange crates with a few oranges in, and I kept them in a secret place under the cot.

That clubhouse looked so clean, all the chicken dung covered with wallpaper. We re-wallpapered several times when the smell would come through. I remember trying to shingle it with scraps from Dad's saw mill. I had to use old stuff, cast-aways. I finally got it done. Sheldon's Clubhouse was known to the whole town.

We moved to St. George when I was fourteen. I hated to leave my clubhouse. It was a land mark. Someone set fire to the barn when we were gone, and my clubhouse too.