Lila was originally given the middle name May and she changed it when she was 18 to Rae.  Her mother liked the name and told her she named her Lila May because Lilacs bloom in May.  Lilacs were one of her mothers favorite flowers and she had huge lilac bushes at her home in Downey.

Life  Story of Lila Hurst Wakley
As told to Dani Wakley Bird
In a series of personal interviews
1998


Lila was born May 18, 1931 at 3:15 am at Downey, Idaho to Agnes and Raymond John Hurst.  The family name was changed from Horst to Hurst, which was an original German name and was probably changed when his father immigrated from Germany in the late 1800's.  The name was changed because it was pronounced more like Hurst instead of Horst.  Agnes’s heritage also came from Germany.   Lila  was the third child and the first one born after the family moved to Downey. Her oldest brother is Raymond, then Barbara followed, a baby named Darrel died in infancy right after birth while they lived in California, just before the move back to Idaho.   Lila was the fourth born, but third living child, then Hal, and Ann was the sixth child born to John and Agnes.  John and Agnes had been to northern California, by McDowel,  and Oregon trying to set up a homestead and failed because of lack or irrigation water, the land was too barren.  Upon arriving in Downey her father had to clear the land and build all the farm buildings, house and everything which was one mile north of Downey.  Agnes’s father helped to finance the small family in their new endeavor.  She was delivered in the home she grew up in.  The doctor lived in Preston which was 30 miles away and her father called the doctor to come over to deliver her.  Her mother had gone into false labor two times before.  The regular doctor was out of town on vacation and so another younger doctor came to deliver Lila.  By the time the younger doctor got there Lila’s mother had stopped her contractions again.  The doctor was a little irritated that he had to come such a long distance again and decided to deliver her anyway.  She was not even in labor any longer.   “He just plain pulled me out.” Lila said. Lila’s grandmother was there and she said she thought he was going to pull the babies body off it’s head, it was so terrible.  Even Agnes (Lila’s mother) said she expected not to see a whole baby.  Being born in the spring of the year was perfect timing for her because she has always loved the spring, she says it is her favorite time.  Agnes chose the name of Lila  May because Lilacs bloom in May.  In high school  she changed the spelling of May to Mae, then changed Mae to Rae after her father, using the Bureau of Vital statistics so the change would be official.   Later, after all the changes had been made she realized that it really didn’t matter all the much any way, because she never uses her middle name, 
at which point she ran across the meaning of the name Lila and decided she liked her name after all.  The meaning of Lila is Sanscrit in the Hindu belief system and means the dance of the Gods.  
At the time of Lilas birth the family did not have a telephone.  John (Lila’s father had to drive to Downey, one mile away, and use the phone there.  


The phones were quite different then than the ones we use today.  The phone was round at the bottom,  on a tall base and the speaker looked like a horn, the ear piece was attached by a long brown fabric covered cord.  A person would hold the ‘ear piece’ part in one hand and the receiver in the other and talk.  Most people did not have phones in their homes.  Lila’s grandparents had a phone in their home.  The phone most common in those days was the ‘candlestick phone’ shown at the bottom center in the photo.
She thinks that she has memories of being a baby and having her diaper changed on her mothers lap  thinking, maybe not in words but in thought, “Come on, hurry and get through, this is uncomfortable”.
When Lila was born the home consisted of a living room, which is where the front door was, and a kitchen.  These two rooms were finished.  Each of those rooms had linoleum on the floors.  The kitchen had cabinets which were hand carved and brought over the plains.  This particular cabinet was called “a cupboard”, there was also a “secretary” in the kitchen.  The secretary was for storing food in.  It was big and had a drawer for the knives and forks, it had a lower door for pans.  Grandma Agnes put a different covering on the base cabinets later on.    These base cabinet were taller by about 6 or 8 inches than what we have now.   Dishes were done with a big, round, tin dish pan.  A smaller round porcelain dish pan was used for rinsing, then they were wiped with a dish towel.  Dishes were not drained then, they were always wiped.  She used to hate doing dishes and in order to get out of doing them she decided she would help her dad with the chores.  She tried milking cows and it took her about ½ hour to get 1/4 cup of milk at which point the cow put her foot in the milk bucket, at that point she decided she was done milking cows.  Her first and last experience milking cows.
The Hursts got their first indoor bathroom sometime while Lila was 9, 10, or 11.  That was pretty normal for more poorer people.  Most of the town kids had bathrooms, there was only a few that did not, but most of the farmers did not have indoor bathrooms.  They had water on the back porch but not in the kitchen.  On the back porch there was a pipe which came up with cold water. It was by a wash stand and they set a porcelain bowl there which was called the wash bowl.  There was a bucket to dump the dirty water in.  There was not hot water, it had to be heated in a big boiler.  This big boiler was a large, oval shaped, copper colored kettle and was attached to the side of the black coal stove.  It probably held five or ten gallons of water.  There was also something called a reservoir on the far right there was a tank with a lid that lifted up and would dip water from with a dipper.  This water was always kept warm, it wasn’t hot, and it was used for washing and doing dishes and cleaning etc.  This water wasn’t hot enough to do dishes so one had to add hot water to the dishes with a tea kettle.  In order to bath they would heat water in this big oval shaped boiler that they sat on the stove, then dump it into a large grey, galvanized wash tub.  They all bathed in the same tub once a week with the oldest ones getting clean first.  The last one probably wasn’t all that clean at the end of his or her bath.They were probably slower than most in getting indoor plumbing.  Lila can even vaguely remember kerosine lamps used for light inside the home instead of electricity.  The Hursts lived one mile north of Downey.  The house was about 50 yards off the main highway.  
Lila remembers her father as “gnarled with rheumatism and kind of a frightening person, kind of bombastic”.  He was in World War I and had been poisoned by Mustard Gas and had to have some of his stomach cut out.  His health had deteriorated badly and after putting all his energy into building a homestead for his family his health went down hill quickly after that.  She never liked him.   “Looking back, though, I can see maybe why he was like he was but it’s interesting to note that my mother says I am more like my dad than any of her other kids” she says giggling.  
When ever she wanted to go to town she walked since they only lived a little over a mile from Downey, the family only had one car and she didn’t even have a bike.  As she remembers her childhood she says  “I was one of five children, the middle sibling, the older ones, a brother and a sister who paired off, and the younger brother and sister paired off, so I always kind of felt like the cheese standing alone.  I spent a lot of time alone.  I never really thought of being lonely because I occupied myself, and I am glad I did because I think that is why I have such an extremely vivid imagination.  As people talk about pictures I visualize things almost like a picture show.  I never realized some people don’t think in pictures, that some think in words.  I had to learn to improvise and imagine and I think that actually was a good thing for me, I think it is a big problem when people live in towns and children are always with other children at such an early age.  They don’t have any alone time, they become socialized to early, they don’t know who they are.  They don’t have time to figure out who they are before the world comes and impinges on them and tells them who they are supposed to be.  I think its good to have a fairly isolated childhood for a while until you know who you are.  I’m glad my childhood was that way....I had no recourse but to develop my imagination.  My own personality had a chance to form before I was exposed to other people when I went to school.  Most people’s behavior is motivated by pleasing other people or other people’s expectations of them, mine is not.  Some people think I’m eccentric, do you think I care, (as she giggles) At one point there was a neighbor family who lived half a mile away that was probably when I was in sixth grade.  We were friendly but she was only there for about a year. Cousins would always come to visit.”
Her mother used to read Thornton Burgess stories such as, Peter Rabbit, Billy Opossum, and little animal characters and taught her children proper punctuation and grammar, ‘aint’ was not a word used in the home.  They were taught manners, they always said thank you and please and used good grammar.  However, even though Agnes taught the children all the proper etiquette in speech, Ray on the other hand would counter it with a mouth that poured out the curse words.  Lila remembers cringing at the things he would say.  She would just recoil he would use those words, and now she talks just like him and says so herself.  She vividly remembers watching him beat Ray and Barbara.  One incident she vividly remembers is watching her father tromping  Ray in the stomach as he was laying on the ground shrinking and screaming in pain.  He also had a horse whip which he used on the older two, Barbara and Ray.   He never did anything like that to Ann or Hal, but he hit Lila on the rear with a coal shovel one time because she had been out riding around with a bunch of kids when she was 15.  He was cruel.   She can’t recall him beating her so she thinks he must have mellowed out over the years.  The fall before her father died she read a book in high school titled “A Lantern In My Hand”  by Elizabeth May Alcott .  It was the life story of an old woman and took the reader back into the old lady’s youth.  This was the first time it had ever occurred to her that her own father had been young once.   As she examined his life and thought of all the hard things he had to endure; being abandoned by his mother at age 5, raised in a rough environment, sent off to the army, had his health ruined while in service of his country, couldn’t make a good living for his family since his health was gone, she figured out why he was messed up.  As she thought this through she could understand where he came from and in her heart she forgave him.  As a symbol of this she bought a Christmas present for him at the local J.C. Penney’s store in Downey.  It was a navy blue dressing gown, something like Clark Gable would have worn in a movie, not really the type of thing her father would have worn, and had it gift wrapped at the store.  He died on December 18.  She was never able to give it to him.  She can’t remember what ever became of the jacket.   She had a guilt complex for many years over the fact that she had witnessed that beating, until she thought through it and remembered he was the adult, and the one responsible for the beating, not her, that she was the innocent child.  She came to the conclusion that she needed to not carry the guilt any longer, which guilt really wasn’t hers to carry in the first place.   She realized that the guilt complex is in your behavior from the time you are little and your actions still, even though your are consciously aware of it, reflect it, it makes you over responsible taking responsibility for things which are not your responsibility.  She can see this in her own behavior as she is always worrying about someone else’s welfare.  She did resolve this but it took quite a while.  "These family relationships establish behavior pattern that you never really get rid of. The best you can do is become aware of them and try to alter your behavior."
During the depression, probably in 1935 or so, she can’t remember what age she was, but is sure it was before she entered school, a vivid memory that will never leave her was imbedded into her very young soul.  A scripture that goes something like “be careful how you treat a stranger, for you may be entertaining angles” seems to fit the story.  Her mother used to feed hobos or tramps that would walk along the highway which was right next to their home.  If they were young and able bodied she would tell them they could chop wood or mow the lawn or something like that.  She would give them a sandwich and something to drink and they would eat on her enclosed back porch, where the washer was.  If they were old and really decrepit she would just feed them.  One day this old bearded man, maybe in his 70's, came to the house and wanted to know if he could chop wood or do some work for something to eat, he had a walking stick instead of a cane.   He came into the back porch to eat.  Lila was absolutely entranced and fascinated with him and just sat and stared at him as he ate.  He got up to leave, went down the back steps and out the back door, so Lila followed him.  She didn’t want him to leave and had an impulse to do something nice for him.  As he was walking along side of the house from the back to the front, heading towards the front gate, she saw some tulips growing in her mothers flower garden, picked some, gave them to him and he said “God bless you”.  Of course she didn’t ever  know who he was but thinks maybe he might have been the one original apostle of Christ that still walks the earth today. 
At school Lila  had some friends and would walk to see the one Ardy Aldous, who lived about three miles away, so there wasn’t much socializing since they live in the country.  Ardy and her family didn’t have a car, her father was a very mean person, and many looked down upon the family.  Lila befriended Ardy, for one reason because she was always a friend to the underdog, and then they became life long friends. Another friend she had was Mona Bills whose dad raised sheep.  The family lived in a new home which she thought was a big house at the time, but probably wasn’t any bigger than a 3-4 bedroom home.   Mona was a tom-boy, Lila would stay with her and go to mutual, they would slip out the church windows and run the streets.   During high school Mona moved away.  Another friend was June Bloxham who married Reid Morrison later.  Jerry Bybee and June were good friends and they all ran around together about the time many of the kids that age were starting to drive.  Jerry and Lila were good friends also and are friends still.  Lily Flo was also a friend.  Out of all the ones mentioned the best friendships was with Ardy, Mona and Jerry.  Once Lila started working in high school the social life was about nil, except for a two to three week visit to Salt Lake with Ardy to stay with Ardy’s aunt who lived in the Avenues right in downtown Salt Lake. 
Before she went to school her days were spent playing outside in the dirt.   She used to love to drag behind the leveler.  It was a wooden frame pulled across plowed ground by a team of horses and was real heavy.   It was fun to hold onto the back end of it and drag in the dirt.  This was one of the most fun  things she did.  She would entertain herself and play outside.   She used to spend a lot of time out side as a child, but was not what you call a typical farm girl because she has always liked to read.  As she grew older she didn’t spend her time out side at all, she has never enjoyed sports.  Even though most of her children are sports oriented she says they most certainly didn’t get that from her.   She loved to run bare-foot through the hay stubble and had very tough feet as she never wore shoes except to go to school and probably wore some in the winter.  One of the fun things for her was to make roads in the soft dirt of the canal bank and use rocks for cars.   The canal was a good place for her to play and as she was walking along the bank one day when she was five or six, carrying a large  rock, a toad or a frog, which ever one is brown,  jumped out of the grass of the canal bank and startled her.  It wasn’t that she was repulsed so much as startled.  She threw the rock.   It landed dead center on the toad or frog, which ever, and it insides squashed out all over.  She was horrified at what she had done.  That is why she hates animal cruelty so bad.  Another time when she was about the same age she was climbing over the fence and got caught, flipped around upside down and was hanging by her clothes until her mother found and rescued her.
She was a mischievous little girl and tells about the time she locked the hired hand in the grainary all day.  After her fathers health had gotten bad they hired an older man by the name of Nick Bloxham to cut the hay and put it up, then Nick would get ½ of the crop.  He was kind of a tease, a joker and she liked him, probably because they were two of a kind.  Her father kept most of the tools and a large grinder used to sharpen the hay knives in part of the grainary and stored the grain in the other part.  There wasn’t an electric light in there and so the only source of light was to keep the door open.  Nick was in there sharpening the knives and Lila crept up and shut the door and locked the large hasp lock.  He was in there all day until her father went out to milk the cows that evening.  He was mad, but had a good sense of humor so that is probably what saved her little behind from a good whipping.
She did get a good whipping with the coal shovel once when it wasn’t even her own doing.  Her Uncle Jack, who was a divorced bachelor,  used to come to live with the family from time to time and was a grouchy old man, acted like he was some kind of a king, Agnes couldn’t stand him and neither could the kids.   Since kids are pretty perceptive at picking up on those sorts of things Lila knew exactly how much she could get away with.  She poured water on his chair and he sat down on it one night at dinner.  Uncle Jack and her father would go looking for some gold that her grand father had found at one time some where between Malad and Oxford which he was never able to find it again even though all of the sons had looked for it for years.   Uncle Jack had his tents out by the stack yard where they kept the hay. Her brother Hal went out, took a knife to his tents, slit them all up, and then blamed it onto Lila, so she got the whipping for it.  She doesn’t believe Uncle Jack ever came back after that, so they had unintentionally accomplished their goal.  
She recalls never having seen animals breed, wondering what she was doing to have missed that natural part of farm life.  The first time she ever remembers noticing this happen was when Dani was a baby and she was on her way home from work, turning into the drive way she noticed a stray cat attacking the family cat.  She stopped the car, leaped out and threw rocks at it, they separated, then got back together.  That was the first time she ever realized they were breeding.  She had also never watched the birth of an animal.  She remembers making homemade soap.   Lila used to help fill the milk cans after the cows were milked.  A man by the name of DeLoy Harrison used to come and buy milk from the Hursts.  She didn’t like him very much so she would blow her nose in his milk  cans after they were filled.
As a child she used to ‘tromp wool’.  In May of each year crews would come to the farms and help shear the sheep of their wool in a few hours.  The wool was put into a wool sack that was approximately seven high by three feet wide, they would hang the sacks on hooks, put a little wool in then a child would go into the sack and tromp the wool down tight.  They added more and more wool as the child tromped each batch down until the sack was full.   The wool was greasy, the weather hot, the wool had a unique smell of it’s own, but she loved doing this.  After the sacks were full they would take them to the train station in Downey and ship them out.
As a family they also sold cream.  They had a milk separator which separated the milk.  The skim milk would go into one bowl and the cream would go into another bowl.  They stored the cream in the basement in a small room which was called a pump house.  This room was to the left at the bottom of the stairs and was a very cool room because of the water coming up from the ground.  It was not part of the basement, but an extension cut under ground with a gravel floor, good for the storage of the cream.  They probably only shipped the cream once or twice a week by railroad.
Her father also raised grain and had to hire a combine to cut the grain when harvest time arrived.   He also raised hay which he cut himself until his health got so bad that he had to hire that done.   They ran milk cows which was the family’s main source of income.  Her mother also raised chickens and took eggs into town on Saturdays and would exchange the eggs for groceries.  About the only groceries they would buy would be things like raisins, brown sugar, flour, sugar, baking soda, in later years she probably bought soap, but in earlier years they made their own soap.  They got the fat to make soap from killing pigs.  They also had mutton which is the meat from sheep.   She has never been a big meat eater but says that mutton tastes nasty.   They used the mutton tallow for bread.  This mutton tallow, which is the white fat on the sheep, has a nutty taste when used in baking and was a well know ingredient those days, but is a little know secret in today’s world of the year 2000.  One would do what is called ‘render’ the mutton tallow which is the process of melting the fat in the oven and then straining it.  In her later years she was well known for her prize winning breads that she entered in the local county fairs and attributes the winning to the secret of mutton tallow which she would blend with the shortening.  She learned of this secret when she was visiting one of her school friends whose mother made the best bread she had ever tasted.  She asked her mother why her bread tasted so good and the mother told her about mutton tallow or fat.  The mutton fat or tallow gives the breads a different taste and the best description of the taste is almost a nutty flavor. 
She used to watch her father butcher animals and thinks that is one of the biggest reasons she can’t eat meat.  Watching him cut the throats of those helpless animals, and seeing  chickens get beheaded  made an awful impression on her.  She is extremely repulsed at the thought of eating flesh.  She did, however eat some hamburgers when she worked at the cafes in her teens.  She may have eaten meat as a small child until she witnessed the butchering of the animals, but after seeing that she never ate meat again.  In her opinion she thinks maybe that is one of the reasons human-kind is so aggressive, because they eat flesh.
Raymond always had friends over and played in a club house which he built.  He used to go with their father up into Yagal Canyon with the team of horses and the hay rack wagon to cut wood for the heat for winter.  One year Raymond stayed home, but their dad had left, Agnes was home with the children and Lila let a ‘dope fiend’ in, which is what her mother called him.   A knock came on the door that night and Lila bounded to the door, flung it open and invited this rather odd looking, strange acting, bloodshot and droopy eyed man in.  Agnes got rid of him and sent Raymond outside to check and see if he had left, when Raymond returned he said he couldn’t find him, but Agnes expected he had gone out into the barn and hid. 
 When the family got their first radio she was furious and pouted around, most children would have been thrilled, but she was very upset.  Some how she must have gotten over the hatred for the radio because she remembers listening to  “Helen Trent” and “Our Girl Sunday” , and some of those original soap operas that her mother used to listen to.  She would pretend to have the name of Helen and go on cruises.   Her cruise liner was a long row of wooden logs which made up the fence.  She loved ants and played in ant piles a lot, she never ever did get bit, in fact it wasn’t until she was a mother of small children that she found out they stung.
Lila’s older sister Barbra, who was seven years older than her, was her idol and she always looked up to her.    She made beads cut out of  magazine and catalogue papers that she would roll up, cut into strips,  and string them.  She had a box that a radio had came in which had all of her treasures in.  Lila loved to look in this box and see what treasures Barbara had saved.   When she left to get married, at a very young age, Lila got the treasure box all to herself.
Christmases and birthdays were a big deal in her family.  Her mother always made an occasion out of birthdays and Christmases, which has filtered down through the family line, as Lila always made a big deal out of both holidays as well as Lila’s children which have nice celebrations in their families as well.  She had never heard of trick-or-treating until she had a family of her own.  As a child they would take an old wooden spool which thread was wound on and cut nicks in the flanges on each end, put it on a string and go to the neighbors, Mrs. Underwood, and run it along her glass windows and doors.  On Thanksgiving they would usually drive to Preston to her grandma and grandpa’s, Agnes’s parents.  Her uncle Aust liked to cook so he would make the family meal.  They would make the drive once or twice in the summer.   For Christmases she would hang up one of those ugly, long, brown socks which would be filled with apples, oranges, peanuts, and a little candy, they always got a toy of some sort or a doll.  She does not remember giving presents to each of her siblings, they had a decorated tree.  The fourth of July they would go to town and watch a parade , go the park, and the town would be full of people. 
            One time she remembers a bus came to town with a bunch of black people in, and she had the most fun playing with the kids, the next fall when school started all her school mates made fun of her for playing with them.  She said they were much more fun than any of her friends. 
She went to work in the cafe when she was twelve years old, before this she worked picking potatoes and baby-sitting.  The Morrisons were one family she baby-sat for quite a bit and had a bunch of boys, maybe 5 or 6, so when Jennie, the mother went to the hospital to have another baby Lila was the one they asked to take care of all the little boys, she could not have been more than 11 or so.  She even tried to make bread for the family and could never get it quite right, so, finally, after she had ruined 2 or 3 batches Mr. Morrison went to town and bought some store bread, which was an uncommon luxury in those days. 
          One day as she went in to Jack’s cafe to get some ice cream cones for her family as they waited in the car, the owner, by the name of Eunice, asked her if she wanted a job.  She started washing dishes, then went to waitress there, then she got a job at the Highway Cafe.  She didn’t participate in any school activities because she worked every night after school and on the week-ends.  The Highway Cafe was the local stop for the Greyhound Bus Lines so after work each night she would get a ride home on the bus which would drop her off in front of her home, just a stones throw from the main highway.  Even working every day she was able to get A’s in most of her classes and was always at the top of her school class.  Her and one other gal were always in competition for the top grades. She says she can remember all of her teachers and especially remembers one who taught her second grade named Leslie who married Nuet Bloxham.   She was sharp ornery, grouchy, and had her own pets which Lila was not one of.  She was her least favorite out of all her teachers.  During lunch time they would walk the 3 blocks from school to town.  On the way back one day Lila saw some tulips, and, probably trying to win her graces, she picked the flowers for her teacher.  In the meantime someone had gone before Lila and told the teacher that she had stolen the flowers.  As Lila presented the flowers to her teacher,  Leslie, she scolded her.  The idea of stealing the flowers had never even occurred to Lila, she just wanted to be nice to the teacher.  She remembers being very crushed, falsely accused, and maligned, and has never forgotten that incident, if fact she remembers it very vividly.  She used to take melted cheese sandwiches to school for lunch every day.  One day in fourth grade she was eating her sandwich, her jaws started stinging, she was coming down with mumps, so after that she hated melted cheese sandwiches for years, but as a retired person, and for quite a few years before, that is what she lives on.  Some of the other teachers were Thelma Fraser, her first grade teacher who was very nice, Miss Penrose was also nice and was  3rd grade teacher, Miss Salveson was 4th, and by the way taught Lila’s children in 4th grade as well, she was stern, but a good teacher also.  Miss Price a teacher of sixth grade and Mary Christensen were other teachers she liked.  Some of the kids were the teachers pets and they were the towns kids, the social elite.  The bus kids were a lower class, never the pets and Lila was one of the bus kids.   There were six girls who lived in town and one of the teachers had started a sextet singing group, which was a group of six girls.  Lila has always been good with words, even as a small girl and she nick-named this group six-peck-sex-tet.  In 4th grade Miss Salveson stood before the class and named off a group of kids who had accomplished the most in the class.  Lila says this was real unfair because the ones who are not named are sitting in their chairs being reassured that they are stupid, she thinks this is not necessary.  She started naming off the ones who had accomplished a lot and went right through the ones who were in the singing group, as Lila turned to her neighbor and made the comment about the six-peck-sex-tet Miss Salveson named her along with the rest of the kids.  She was absolutely flabbergasted, she thought “I’m smart!”   Until that time she had never thought anything about being smart, no one had ever told her she was smart.  She figured the teacher did that just to shut her up.  After that she had to fulfil the role and then decided she was smart.  
            Junior high school consisted of seventh and eighth grades and high school was freshmen and up.  Her very favorite teacher was Steve Alley, a high school teacher, and was one who instilled in her the love for philosophical thinking, probably as a freshman at age 14.  He had a big influence on her life.  
 She used to walk to town a lot because their home was only a little over a mile from Downey.  
In high school she started putting a henna, a natural hair dye with a  dark auburn tone, on her hair and wanted everyone to call her Rusty, not many used that as her nick name tho.  The hennas are very healthy for hair and her oldest daughter Dani remembers doing the henna treatment when she got old enough to do those for her mother, so she kept up the henna treatments for many years.  A nick name that did stick was ‘hearse’ because Hurst sounded like hearse so as the kids on the bus tried to come up with something, this nick-name was attached  to her.   She never accepted this derogatory nick-name though.  
She would date a little when some of her friends would bring some boys around, and one time had a bad experience with a boy.  Ardy and her went to Malad with some boys they didn’t like because they wanted to get over there to go to the dance.  She can’t even remember who they were, but they dumped them after they got over there.  The hooked up with these ‘popular, jock looking, high school guys’ who said they would take them home.  They knew they were with some hot shots.  On the way home as they were heading north from Malad and Downey Lila’s home is first so she said this is where she lived and they kept going.  She thought, oh, oh, if they take Ardy home first that means I have to be with them alone and she was worried.  About 1 ½ miles farther north is the turn to the country road that leads to Ardy’s home.  They kept going and didn't turn off the highway to Ardy’s place, by this time she was considering jumping out of the car because she knew what was going to happen.  This was in January and the first time she had been on a date since her father had died on December 18, just a month ago, so it was a cold, clear, sub zero, January night, probably about 1 or 1:30 A. M. in the middle of winter.  They drove up into the mountains and as Lila  looked down she could see the city lights of Arimo which is about 10 miles north from her home.   The boy she was with tried to take advantage of her and she fought with all her might, she pulled hands full of hair out of his head, scratched and clawed his face, and at last fought her way free.  She and Ardy were able to get out and started walking home, but they had on high heels, nylons and dresses and therefore would be very cold.  These guys promised they would not bother them and said they would take them home.  Thinking they would probably freeze to death they agreed and climbed back in the car.  After they got back into Arimo the boys stopped the car, all got out, and went to the back of the car.   Lila knew they were plotting what to do so she said to Ardy, this is our last chance, we have to run for it, you go to one house and I’ll go the to other.  As Lila began running she came to a barbed wire, chest high fence.  She doesn’t know how she did it in her heels and tight skirt, but she somehow managed to clear the fence, at the same time noticing that the boys had realized they were running, had hoped into the car and were following them and the car was at her heels.  She landed in some raspberry bushes, hopped up and ran as fast as she could to the house.  She could see the car was very close again.  She reached the front door and pounded and pounded tying to wake up the family, no answer, she pounded and pounded some more, still no answer.  Ardy had gone to the other house which was next door.  Still no lights came on either house.  She yelled and yelled, the boys started closing in on them because they figured no one was home or if they were, no one would answer the door in the middle of the night.  Just before the boys reach the house the lights went on.   Lila was lucky enough to have knocked on the door of a relative of her father, Merl Tibbots who was her fathers cousins daughter.  Lila didn’t know her before then, but her and her husband got up, let both of the girls in, let them get warm, and use the telephone.  By now Lila’s family had a phone.  She called her mother and she was on her way to get them.   The boys came back to the door and said they wanted to apologize, Lila didn’t want anything to do with them and waited for her mother to come.  
College was a very important thing to Lila and her mother.  After she got out of high school her mother tried to sell the farm so that she could pay for Lila's  college, thinking that they could afford to live in Pocatello and pay for her tuition, but could not afford to pay for the commuting expenses.  The three to five dollars a day working at the Highway Cafe that Lila would make wasn’t enough to defray those costs.  Of course her brother Hal, being a man, could work and make more money than her and save enough in a summer to pay for all his expenses.  A woman just didn’t make the kind of salary that a man made.  Agnes wasn’t able to sell the farm, and Lila got discouraged and thought she was going to be an old maid at age 18.  She wasn’t able to go to college and as she looks back on it now says that if she had gone to college at that age, as a young, wet behind the ears, teenager of 18, just out of high school, anything the professors would have told her she would have believed as the gospel truth.  She thought college professors were the top of the ladder, they were almost Gods, she would have followed anything they would have told her.  She finally did get her chance to go to college, but not until she was 39 years old, graduating 7 or 8 years later while trying to raise her family as a single, divorced mother.  By this time she was wiser, having lived and learned a few things of the way the world works and didn’t believe everything, being able to be discriminative, about the so called knowledge the professors passed out.  
About that time is when Arley Wakley came along.  They met when she was a waitress in the cafe.  They got married in 1949 and live a hard, poor life trying to always get ahead, but would have one discouragement after another.  She continued to work, keeping her job at the Highway cafe, then later working for the local grocery store as a clerk at the check out till, and later as a bookkeeper for the local Sego Milk plant.  She really liked working for Jay Larsen at the grocery store, he was a good man to work for.  
When they got married Arley had a new Mercury and Lila wrecked it.
Dani, her oldest daughter was stuck with the responsibilities of home, as a young girl, babysitting her younger siblings,  because Lila had to work so much to make ends meet.   Dani was the oldest of five children, three boys between Dani and her sister Torri.  Since the culture of the time seemed that all females worked and waited on the males, she waited on her brothers very much.  
Steven was born June 23, 1954 and was sick a lot which caused the family to incur high doctor bills.  In those days one would take the kids to the doctors for almost everything, hoping the doctors could tell them what was wrong and cure the ill.  Because of this they got behind financially as Arley’s income was not very high.  He was a hard worker but he worked for farmers who didn’t pay very good and didn’t want to find other better paying jobs.
They bought their first house from Ivan Brown.  Lila scraped decades worth of paint and wallpaper from the walls, finally reaching the bare plaster walls.  They never did have enough money to paint the walls.  Lila saved rags and sent them in so that she could purchase a carpet, which was cheaper if you sent in rags.  To her it was a miserable, barren life except for the kids.  Arley worked for Cunninghams for years on starvation wages, then went to work for Art Grover for the summers in Pocatello Valley, about 40 miles south west of Malad.  The family moved out there for one summer so that they wouldn’t have to be split up, but because of the living conditions, rattle snakes, having to share a 3 bedroom home with Lila’s sister Ann and her small family, they didn’t return the next summer, however, Arley did continue working for Art a few summers more.  Art cheated Arley out of most of the wages he earned while working the summers there.   Each fall Arley was supposed to settle up with Art, but he would only send a few hundred dollars through the winter, the family almost starved, but Arley would not have a confrontation with him to make him pay up.  This went on for several years, until, finally, Lila demanded they have a settlement, by this time he owed them thousands of dollars, they were still in debt with medical bills, falling deeper and deeper in debt.  Finally the two of them met Art in Tremonton, Utah.  He made a stupid little offer, Arley accepted, case closed.  Lila was furious, they had a case against the man and could have won if Arley had not caved in.  The lawyers were cheating them too, this was when she finally had reached the end of her rope.  She was let down, discouraged, emotionally she had run out of fuel.  Try as she would, she could not pull the family out of debt by her meager financial contributions.  
One winter Arley worked for Arimo Ranches for $90 a month and all the potatoes they could eat, they almost starved that winter, so in order to find him a job she advertised on the radio.  One man named Dale Koester who was a well known rancher in Lava heard the advertisement, called them up and hired them.  They moved to his ranch up Fish Creek, 5 miles east of Lava, in 1965, and lived in a small home on the ranch, next door to the large family home Dale had built for his family a few years before.  This was a lovely setting to finish raising the family.  Arley loved working on a farm and being Dale’s foreman.  He was now doing something he throughly loved.  But the wages were still not enough for the family to live on so Lila still had to work to help pay off the debt and went to work at one of the local cafes, The Silver Grill, in Lava.  
She seemed to experience disappointment after disappointment and finally wondered if she should get a divorce.  She prayed about it and felt that was what she should do.  She knew her answer was from God and knew that since she had the answer, she better go through with it if she trusted him.  Once she had her answer she had to remain in the home from September until April until she had enough money to pay for the divorce and make the move into town with her children.  She didn’t have the slightest idea how she would have enough money to support the rest of the kids, by now Dani had gotten married, but the rest of them were still at home.  
The move into Lava was hard on the family, as Lila had to work nights at the cafe trying to support the family and therefore the children started running the streets.  She then started her college years, but the commute to Pocatello took a toll on her car with the gas prices and oil so she move to Inkom.  One year there was enough for the children, their friends were all in Lava so she moved back and bought a little better car for the daily commute to Pocatello.  After her graduation she never got a job even though her score was among the top three.  She would go to job interviews all over the state, even drove to Lewiston, Idaho once, but no one would hire her.  After talking to her brother Raymond, who worked in the bureaucratic system for years, he told her that the registry was just a protocol and that they always knew who they were going to hire, but had to at least take interviews from the registries.  So she decided why spend her money running all over the state when she finally figured out she would never get a job from the state registry.  Since she didn’t have any connections she finally gave up and went to work at what ever she could find.  She and Torri  went to work in Wyoming for a few summers flagging on the road crews, she worked in grocery stores and as a waitress again.  
Forde, from the time he was a child, had to be surrounded by friends, Steven wasn’t that way so much, Lance wasn’t that way, I don’t think Torri was, Dani kind of liked friends, but could be alone too.  I think it is healthy to raise a child with time alone.  We socialize people so that their behavior measures up to other people’s expectations of them, which is a big mistake.  They don’t get to be their own person.
In Germany the Horst family had their own coat of arms, were sheriffs, from northern Germany, near Bremerhaven.  Raymonds father, Lila’s grandfather came over with a sister, Maggie who must have met someone on the ship because she got married and on the way west she stayed in Iowa.  He came to the Malad area with some brothers.  One brother named Henry settled in challis, mined gold and had a grocery store there.  Lila has been to the original house and met his daughter- in-law.  Another brother came to Malad and ran a saloon.  Lila’s grandfather got land a few miles south of Malad and while her father was a child he burned down the barn, they built a new barn which was a landmark for many years the Pony Express riders stopped there.  Lila has a chain and a few items off the old building.  It was on the old highway about 10 miles south of Malad. 
Agnes’s ancestors came from Germany, also. and were philosophers, musicians, doctors and advisors to kings, the Nuffers also have a castle at Nueffen, just south of Stuttgart Germany.  This castle was the Nueffer holdings and was used during World War II as a base for German anti-aircraft, it housed the famous Wine Black Tower and was in grape country.   One of the Nueffers’s was an advisor to a king, actually was the advisor to one of the sons, a prince.  When the father died the prince was still a child, when he grew up he had a child of his own, the child rebelled against his father, the Nueffers chose to side with the son who then lost the fed.   Therefore the Nueffers were forced to give up their families Nueffen Castle holdings.  Lila’s grandfather, John Nueffers, was converted by Mormon missionaries and served several missions to Germany while he was raising his family.  He was a well respected,  pillar of the community and built the Academy in Preston which was a college.
The Nueffer are intellectual and gentle, artistic people, as the Hurst’s are more rugged and austere.  The coat of arms of the Hurts shows an arm bent with a fist holding a big stick.