Accordions, Malt Vinegar, and the Jitterbug

Accordions, Malt Vinegar, Jitterbug and the

The Life and Times of Newell R Walker

Accordions, Malt Vinegar, Jitterbug and the

The Life and Times of Newell R Walker

Compiled by Tara Walker

Copyright Š 2011 Tara Walker. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Family History

1

My Beginnings

6

Mom and Dad

6

On the Farm in Lewisville

8

Childhood 11

Relatives 13

Roberts 15

Bums and Hobos

15

The Accordion

16

Being a Boy

19

Conversion 27

The Jitterbug

29

Meeting Caroll

32

College 33 Getting Married

34

Newlyweds 37 Graduation 39 Brigham City

40

Idaho Falls

41

California 43 Malt Vinegar

47

Service in South Africa

55

Chaplains and Hospice

60

Odds and Ends

62

“On Bended Knee” is a poem written about an experience in 1951.

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Foreward When I first decided to record Grandpa’s personal history, I had no idea how great the final result would be. As of now, I have been working on the text for just over a year and a half, and it has sort of become my baby. I love it! Getting to the printed state has been no small feat, but I must say that it has been an unforgettable journey! I have always felt very strongly that I needed to get all of Grandpa’s stories down on paper. He always seems to be doing that kind of thing for everyone else, and I wanted to do something like that for him. Now, our families will always have his life with us.

Last summer I asked Grandpa if I could interview him for a project I was doing in one of my classes. For part of the project I had to transcribe a certain portion of the interview and then edit the transcription. The interview was rather extensive and I didn’t finish transcribing it for the class. Unfortunately I misplaced the tapes when Alex and I moved last summer, and so was unable to finish the transcription.

Then through a remarkable series of events I had the marvelous opportunity to work as an intern for Don Norton at BYU one semester. He works with WWII veterans to record their personal histories, and because I had already started working with Grandpa’s history, he encouraged me to finish it for my internship. So, I interviewed Grandpa again and was able to replace much of what had been lost.

Finally, this semester I had to take a graphic design class and naturally we had to design and print a book with our own text and images.

The assignment was no coincidence. Of course, nothing ever comes easy, and I lost everything off my flash drive the day before everything

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was supposed to be done. We couldn’t retrieve any of the files, but with the Lord’s blessing, I was able to recover some of my previous work through other ways. Consequently, I cannot promise that there won’t be flaws in this compilation!

I want to thank all of those people who helped me to complete this book. In reality, there are so many people to acknowledge that there isn’t room, but I hope you know who you are! To Grandpa and Grandma—thank you for all of your time and energy spent on this project! It would not be possible without all that both you! I love you with all of my heart. To Michael Pennock—thank you for being willing to scan and email me all of the photos on such short notice. You were a victim of my procrastination—thank you, thank you, thank you! To my parents—your love and support is a constant in my life, and without your generosity much of this would not have been possible (best early graduation present ever!).

Although I can honestly say that this has been one of the most difficult and tedious things I have ever done in my life (As a hairstylist that is really saying something), it has also been one of the most amazing experiences. Truly this has been a labor of love, and I wouldn’t trade the long hours spent for anything! I have learned so much about a man I love very much. Grandpa is a great example of faith and wisdom—his life is a legacy. Perhaps the two most important things I have learned from Grandpa are to trust in the Lord and to remain optimistic, even during times of adversity. I hope that this book will be a treasure for our family, and that each of us will always remember that life’s greatest blessings are the ones we love! Enjoy!

With love, Tara.

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Memories: listening to Donald Duck impersonations walking to Digital Doohickey’s, sharing popcorn, serving family at the Gangplank, dancing in the kitchen, sitting in the temple.

Dedicated to Newell R Walker. The dearest grandpa of all!

With granddaughter Tara, about age 2, 1988.

Family History

My mother was Maple Rapp. Rapp is kind of an unusual name, but her parents came over from Germany. When we went back and did research, we found out that the Rapps had actually come from France. It turned out that the area they came from was called Alsace Lorraine, on the border between France and Germany.

France and Germany fought many wars over that area. If France won the war, then it would be called France; if Germany won the war, then it would be Germany. So my mother’s parents were German-speaking people, but at the time they were born the area was actually part of France.

They came over to America and settled in Pennsylvania for a while and then later came to Salt Lake City. They didn’t move to Salt Lake because they were Latter-day Saints (they were Presbyterians), but because her father got a job working for the railroad. Her family moved from Pennsylvania, to South Dakota, to Salt Lake City, and finally to Rigby, Idaho. (Later on, my parents owned a café in Rigby, Idaho that my mother’s parents—my grandparents—had lived in at one point. It wasn’t until my parents actually bought the place that they found out her parents had lived there.) In 1918 they lost two little girls in the diphtheria epidemic, and they were so heartbroken they could no longer stay there.

My mother was the youngest of twelve children, but several of her siblings died at a very young age. Even though Maple Rapp’s parents spoke German, I don’t believe it was ever spoken in the home. My mother’s father died suddenly of a heart attack when my mother was eight years old. Later on, doctors diagnosed my mother with a condition called Saint Vitus’ Dance, commonly 1

known as Sydenham’s chorea, which they felt was brought on by the death of her father. Also when she was eight years old, her family lived right across from the Latter-day Saint church in Clark, Jefferson County, Idaho. Even though they weren’t LDS, the Relief Society would often come to my mother’s family’s home to quilt because there was more room there. So the women would bring their bread dough in pans and put them under the table to rise while they quilted. Afterward, they would go home and bake it.

During this time, my mother had a really good friend, who happened to be the daughter of the bishop, and my mother would go to Sunday School with her some. One day, in a really weird way, the teacher turned to my mother and said, “You know, you really don’t belong here. You’re not even a member of our church.” My mother went home and sobbed for the rest of the day. Her parents asked her what was wrong, but she wouldn’t tell them because she knew if she did, they would never let her go back to the LDS church again. As a result of that, my mother never went back to church again until I was a junior in high school. So from about 1915 to 1955, forty years, she didn’t go. It’s kind of a sad story; I always wonder what would have happened had my mother gone to church during that time. Even though my mother’s family was not LDS, when her father died they held the service on the grounds of the LDS church house because there were too many people to all fit inside the chapel.

My father’s family was strongly LDS. My Great-grandfather William Holmes Walker lived in Nauvoo with the Saints. He actually lived with the prophet Joseph Smith and his wife, Emma, for about three years. William’s father, John Walker, my great-greatgrandfather, had a wife who died and left him with ten children.

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After her death, John was moping around Nauvoo when Joseph Smith saw him and told him he needed to serve a mission so he wouldn’t waste away. John didn’t want to leave ten kids behind, so Joseph told him that he and Emma would take the older five to live with them in the Mansion House, and that they would farm the younger five out. So my great-grandfather, William Holmes Walker, lived with Joseph Smith from about age eighteen to twenty-one. He said Joseph Smith was the hardest worker and most honest guy around. William praised strong praise to the prophet Joseph. In his journal he recorded, “The Urim and Thummim were once placed in my charge, for the time being, and many other important trusts were confided to me. Which I am happy to say, were held sacred to myself.” He didn’t say that he looked at them, but it dawned on me when I was teaching seminary last year that my greatgrandfather had held in his hands the same Urim and Thummim that the Brother of Jared had held four thousand years ago. (We were talking about the book of Ether in class; when Joseph Smith received the Urim and Great-grandfather, William Homes Walker. First Thummim he was told that it was the missionary to South Africa. Served 1852-1855.

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same Urim and Thummim the Brother of Jared received from the Lord.) I think that is pretty amazing.

So my great-grandfather was very strong in the Church. He served as one of Joseph Smith’s bodyguards and as a patriarch in the Church. William was also one of the first missionaries to South Africa—the church had three missionaries go there in the early eighteen-fifties; and each of them went in one of three different directions—they didn’t go as companions—and he served in the Port Elizabeth and Grahamstown areas. Grandma and I served our mission in exactly the same areas that he served in: Grahamstown, Uitenhage, and Port Elizabeth. William had four wives and lots of children. In the Lewisville cemetery there is a monument for him with the four graves of his wives surrounding it.

My grandfather Welby Walker was married and had four children. His wife died giving birth to one of them (the child also died). About the same time as her death, a pump-handle fell on Welby’s head and cut it open. Shortly after, he went on a mission to Michigan. When get got there, the cut on his head got infected and he had to come home early. To my knowledge he then became less active in the Church and remained so for the rest of his life. I don’t know if this was caused by a broken heart because of the death of his wife, or by being hit on the head with that handle. (When my grandfather went on his mission, he farmed his children out to his mother. One of the children was my aunt, Veda Green. Veda’s daughter Leola had a son named Kieth, Kieth Walker Merrill, and he directed a big Hollywood movie called The Great American Cowboy. He also directed two church films, Legacy and The Testaments.) At the same time, my Grandmother Walker, who was named Sarah Hegsted, lost her first husband—Warren 4

Chauncey Taylor, to whom she was sealed—in a logging accident. (Sarah’s family came from Denmark. Her mother was Maren Borglum, and it was Maren’s brother Gutzon Borglum who sculpted Mount Rushmore. He started it, and then his son Lincoln Borglum finished it. Unfortunately, none of the artistic talent was carried down to Newell R Walker.) He was up getting logs when the wagon ran away with him. The logs fell, and he was crushed and killed. Because my grandfather, Welby, had just lost his wife, and my grandmother, Sarah, had just lost her husband, they married each other, since they were both living in Lewisville, Idaho at the time. He had four kids, she had three kids, and they had seven kids after they got married: his kids, her kids, and “our kids.” My dad always joked that one would say, “Your kids and my kids are beating up on our kids.”

My dad was near the youngest of all of these kids. He had two younger brothers, and a very sad thing happened to one of them, DeCarl, when my dad was about twelve years old. He was out in the barnyard with a pitchfork, pitching hay. Just as my dad went up with the pitchfork, his nine-year-old brother came around the corner of the haystack, and the pitchfork caught him in the eye.

His brother didn’t die from the bleeding in his eye, but he died from infection because the pitchfork had manure on it. I always wondered, but I never asked my dad how it affected him—that had to be a really climactic part of his life. Everybody probably said, “Well you should have done that,” or “you shouldn’t have done that.” I’m sure he was sick because he had done that. That all happened when my dad was twelve. When his brother Gene was 16, he drowned in the Snake River. He was fishing with his dog and it dog fell into the water. Gene tried to retrieve the dog, but forgot to remove his wading boots. Gene drowned; the dog survived.

5

When my dad was twelve years old the bishop interviewed him to become a deacon (during this time I don’t know what Church activity he had, but I don’t think his parents were that involved). The bishop told him, “You gotta do this, you gotta do this, and you gotta do this.” My dad said that that sounded like too many things to do, so he never went back to church again. He started using tobacco at the age of twelve and didn’t quit until he was seventy-two; for sixty years he used tobacco. My dad was also an alcoholic for a great part of that time. He didn’t drink every day, but when there was a lot of stress from running a restaurant, he would take off for a couple of weeks on a drinking binge. That happened about every six months. When I was a teenager in Rigby, I would have to go around to the different bars looking for him.

My Beginnings

For a while, my mother and dad farmed out in Lewisville, and that is where they were living at the time I was born, on December 12, 1937. Because it was wintertime, my mother went and stayed with my aunt (Fern Taylor Call) in Rigby so she would be closer to the doctor. Right before my mother had me, my family was invited out to another family’s 6

Age 3, 1940

for a goose dinner. They went and had the dinner, and then my mother started having labor pains. They took her over to Rigby, and then I was born in my aunt’s home. So the people who hosted the goose dinner always said that it was kind of like the goose dinner brought my birth about—that that’s what put my mother into motion for having a baby. I was named Newel, which is kind of an unusual name. Earlier, my mother had dated a fellow named Newel. I always wondered how it made my dad feel to have a son named after an old boyfriend, but my mother always said he was a good dancer. I was also the youngest of six kids, so maybe my parents ran out of names when they got to me.

Log cabin in Lewisville where my family lived at the time of my birth, 1937.

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Mom and Dad

My parents met while my mother was working in a bakery in Rigby. They had a tub full of peanuts in the bakery, and my dad used to always go in to get free peanuts. He said my mother was such a classy looking lady that he kind of fell in love with her. She thought he was a very nice, kind person. My mother was married once before she married my father. She married a guy when she was about eighteen, and I think it was because she grew up without a male role model, since her dad died when she was so young. I think she was attracted to that fellow (the first husband) and they had my oldest brother, Gail, and then they got divorced.

They were only married a short time. I didn’t know she had been married before until I was in high school because people just didn’t talk about things like that. She told me, and then I did some research about what was going on the week I was born. That same week, her first husband died in a trailer fire. He was asphyxiated. Up until about five years ago, I had never met any of her first husband’s family. But when I was doing hospice, I went to visit a lady, whose husband’s last name was Bate, which was my mother’s first husband’s last name. It turned out that they were related to my mother’s first husband. So I said, “I understand that there was a fire.” He said that in their family there is a different story. His wife at the time hated him, so she made an angel food cake and put rat poisoning in it and poisoned him to death. Then because they lived in a trailer, she started it on fire so it would cover up the trail. That was the first time I had ever heard that. So I had my oldest brother go with me to meet these people, because he had never met anybody in the family. They told him how his biological father was probably murdered by a wife that came along 8

later, who hated him or something. Apparently, my mother’s first husband was quite a womanizer. I think that’s why she felt really close to my dad, because he treated her with lots of respect. So that’s how they met.

Two interesting things about my parents’ names: First, my dad’s name was Mayor, and when he was born, being the twelfth of fourteen children, they literally had run out of baby names. My grandfather, Welby Walker, was serving as mayor of Lewisville at the time. My dad’s family was in church and had to figure out a name, when this Kinghorn guy (who’s probably related to Grandma Lindsay) reportedly leaned forward and said, “Why don’t you just name him Mayor after the mayor of Lewisville?”

So my dad’s name was Mayor. But he didn’t like his name and his older brother always called him Mike, so everybody just called him Mike. Second, my mother was named Maple Irene Rapp. The Maple came from the stove they had in their kitchen—”Maple” was the brand name on the stove. You always think she was named

Having retirement fun. Mom and Dad, 1977.

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Maple for maple syrup, but it was actually from their oven. Most people thought her name was Mabel or Mable because that was more common. But it was Maple. She was the youngest of twelve children, so I guess they had run out of names too.

Mother and Dad in front of our log cabin in about 1975.

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When my parents first got married they had a little boy from a previous marriage, and then my older sister Donna was born.

They lived in Grant, which is between Lewisville and Idaho Falls.

They lived with a patriarch of the Church whose name was John Webster. My parents, my mother not being a member and my dad being less active, were so impressed with this couple. They shared the same place, but there was a door between the two apartments, and that door was never locked. My mother was always so impressed that this couple trusted a newly married couple so much.

On the Farm in Lewisville

After Grant, they moved to Lewisville. My oldest brother is Gail, who was later legally adopted by my dad, and he went by Gail R. Walker. Then my sister Donna Lorraine Walker French, and then Noma Joyce Walker Marriott, and then Mayor Clyde Walker (but he went by M. Clyde), then Doyle W Walker (the initial didn’t stand for anything), and then Newell R Walker. I remember, as a kid, asking my mother what the “R” stood for. I understood that she told me it was Richard, because my grandfather’s name was Richard Rapp. When I went to church (everybody else in my family seldom went to church), they would ask what my name was, and I would always say Newell Richard Walker. So when I was getting ready to graduate from high school I ordered my birth certificate, and it came back with “Newel R. Walker.” So I asked my mother, “I thought you told me my middle name was Richard.” She said, “I never told you that.” But I had to get the 11

idea from somewhere. I thought, I’m going to change my name to Newell Richard. But you had to have two documents that were at least ten years old, or someone present when you were born, and I could only find one document. There were the ones where I told people, but they weren’t that old. So I just decided, Okay, I’ll be Newell R. Walker. I always spelled by name with two L’s, but on my birth certificate there was only one L. It’s kind of weird—I thought my name was Newell, two L’s, Richard Walker, and it turned out it was Newel, one L, R Walker.

I did change my name legally to Newell with two L’s but just kept the initial R. So it doesn’t stand for anything. I decided I would never do that to one of my kids. I don’t know that I would give them three middle names either (This is in reference to Alex’s three middle names). But on the other hand, I would give them

The family at mom and dad’s golden anniversary 1977. Back row, from left: Gail , Newell, Clyde, Doyle. Front row, from left: Donna, Mother, Dad, Joyce

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more than an initial. Not that there’s anything wrong with having three middle names . . .

We farmed about forty acres in Lewisville, which was a fair amount of land back then. My dad farmed at the time they used teams of horses to pull the farm equipment. We moved off the farm when I was about eight years old for two reasons: my dad’s back bothered him a lot; tractors were just coming out, and with only forty acres, it would have been hard to afford one. So because of those reasons he found a business venture in Roberts, which at that time was kind of a forsaken place. It was a hotel, café, and bar.

I will share a couple of personal memories from while I was on the farm. I probably didn’t do a lot of work because I was younger.

They milked cows. I remember they had a cow named Spot that gave a lot of milk. Then also, there was a cow that I named Newell.

I always liked to ride in the back of the car for some reason, and one day we were driving down the road and I was in the back seat.

(At that time, car doors opened differently than they do now.

They opened that same direction.) When I noticed that my door wasn’t shut, I said, “I’m going to close my door.” I thought my dad heard me and slowed down, but he didn’t. I opened the door to pull it shut, and when I opened the door, it just pulled me right out. My dad was only going twenty or thirty miles an hour but I fell out of the car, hit the pavement, and rolled into what we call the barrow pit there along the side of the road. (They are called “borrow” pits because they would borrow the dirt from the edge of the road to put on the road way. So it was a borrowed pit, if you follow me, and there’s logic behind it.)1 I hit the pavement, rolled

1

This explanation for a barrow pit is a folk etymology. The term comes

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into the gutter, and I remember that my face hurt a lot, obviously.

And my dad kept driving on. I thought he didn’t know I had fallen out, but he stopped and came back. It seemed like he went a long ways, though. There was a team of horses coming down the road, and I thought they were going to run over me. I remember that feeling. I went home and I hadn’t broken anything. However, that is why my face is extremely disfigured. . . . So I have an excuse.

But it hurt to drink milk, so we went out into the straw stack and literally got a straw that I could suck the milk through, because we didn’t have commercial straws at the time. Or if they did, we didn’t know about them because we just lived on a farm. So the straw made it so it didn’t hurt when I smiled or laughed. . . . like I’m doing now.

Childhood

My oldest brother, Gail, was called into World War II, and I remember him coming home on leave. I don’t remember Pearl Harbor; I was four years old when it happened. I just remember my brother being in the war. He would come home on leave, and that was always so exciting. I remember when the war ended in 1945. I was eight. My sister Joyce grabbed me and said, “Gail’s gonna come home, Gail’s comin’ home!” I thought he would be home the next day, but it was quite awhile before he came home.

We had a little dog named Trixie, which was a mongrel dog. This dog loved to eat bread. At first he would eat bread, but then he didn’t like the bread unless you put butter on

not from the word borrow, but actually from the word barrow, which is a mound of dirt that leaves a pit.

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it. Later, he didn’t like it unless you put raspberry jam on it. He got really fussy, and he was just a little tiny dog.

I used to play a lot with ants. I loved to put them in with soap and see how they would do with it. I loved to dissect them, or watch while they burned when we burned trash. I could poten-

WWII ration book, 1941.

tially have been a really bad person because they say if you torture animals it sometimes relays over; and I really did take advantage of ants.

Another interesting thing happened when I was in Lewisville2

2

Lewisville was named after Meriwether Lewis—the leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition—who lead an expedition party to the Pacific

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(Residents of Lewisville pronounce it “Lus’ville.). Once my brother Doyle went across the street to flip a switch that turned on the pump where we had to go to get water, and he got electrocuted. Somehow the current released him, and he hit the ground.

But I remember that it was kind of scary. Doyle was kind of a character. One time my mother’s youngest brother died, so my parents went to the funeral in Idaho Falls, and they left Clyde, Doyle, and me at home. We made some chicken noodle soup out of the packages, but we couldn’t find any crackers. So Doyle found some graham crackers and crumbled them up in his soup and told us it was really good. But really, it was bad. So Clyde and I crumbled up graham crackers in ours. We could have killed him, because he tricked us into ruining our soup since he had ruined his.

I started school early when I was five. My birthday was in December, so I was past the deadline. My first grade teacher was Dora Erickson. (Now there is a school in Idaho Falls named after her.) She was also a relative and somehow related to the Walker line. She called my parents and told them she didn’t have a lot of first graders that year, and if they wanted to have me start early that was fine. So that is why I started early. I was always the youngest in my class, and that’s why grandma is a whole year older than I am. . . . It is also why I dye my hair white, in order to look

older than she is.

I was really good at high jump in school. The third grade had a track meet and I high jumped for it. But we didn’t high jump like they do today. Back then you literally just jumped over the

Ocean from 1801 to 1805.

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stick—so I probably didn’t jump very high. I finished the third grade in Lewisville, and then we moved to Roberts.

I got baptized a few months after I turned nine at the Rigby Tabernacle. I was blessed in the Church as well, but I didn’t go very often. I do remember that they used to have Primary after school. We would have dances for the Primary about once a month, and we would dance with our teachers. The steps were literally two steps forward and one step back, then two steps forward and one step back while leading the other person around. I remember the teachers always telling me that I was such a good dancer. I enjoyed dancing the schottische and the Virginia reel. I thought I was a pretty good dancer at an early age.

Relatives

I had a lot of relatives who died when I was about ten. My Grandpa Rapp died when my mother was eight, and my Grandma Rapp died when I was two, so I don’t remember her. She was a German lady and would come to stay with her kids when they had babies, so she stayed with my parents when I was born. She hated to discuss politics and religion. My dad was kind of a tease so he would always bring up both of them. My dad was LDS and she was Presbyterian, so talking about those things would really upset her.

I don’t remember much about either my Grandpa or my Grandma Walker, because they both died the same year when I was about ten. That’s why, growing up, I really didn’t have any grandparents or any relatives either. So I have always liked being 17

around older people. Now I work in hospice with them. I love talking to older people and learning about their lives. I probably got a lot of that desire to be around older people from never having had the opportunity to know or have relatives around while I was growing up.

My Grandma Walker had a big green bin in her kitchen area, and it had a sloping lid. We would sit on the lid and then slide down it. She made cottage cheese—homemade cottage cheese— that squeaked when you chewed it. We thought that was kind of cool. I do remember my grandpa having cows, though. They pastured on the lawn in the front yard. My Grandpa Walker played the accordion and he was really good—he was like a one-man band. While he played the accordion he had a bracket that came around his head and held a harmonica, and then he had a drum that he beat with his foot. He often played for local church dances

In front of Grandpa and Grandma Walker’s house, 1946.

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in the area. I don’t recall this, but my brothers and sisters say that he used to play “Turkey in the Straw.” This is weird but it isn’t Pentecostal—the kids would literally lie down on one side of the cultural hall and roll across the floor. Then they would roll back across to the tune of the music. I never did do that. And I don’t actually remember ever hearing my grandfather play the accordion, but I was aware that he played.

Roberts

At that time Roberts was a really weird place. While we lived in Roberts there were a lot of bums or hobos that came through there. Roberts was on the railroad line between Ogden, Utah and Butte, Montana, so people would stop there to stay. My dad would have strangers knock at the door in the middle of the night and then ask for a room. My dad had a room at the back of the hotel that vagrants could stay at for free. Usually they were winos, and some would drink rubbing alcohol because they couldn’t get wine or beer. When they stayed, they would often want to work in order to earn a meal. My dad’s theory was that you can’t expect a man to work on an empty stomach, so he would feed them before he would give them a job. Most people wouldn’t do that—they would make them work, and then feed them. Those men would do all kinds of things, like cutting kindling wood into smaller pieces, carrying coal, and peeling potatoes for the restaurant. It was a wonder that he wasn’t ever held up and robbed or something.

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Bums and Hobos

Some of the bums were really funny. One of them would hold a firecracker between his fingers and let it go off. Sometimes he would put it in his mouth and light it and then it would explode— he did it just to entertain us kids, and we thought it was pretty funny. There was a hobo with a big white beard who came to the hotel and bar a lot. One time he asked Doyle and me if we would paint his beard black. We didn’t have a problem with it, but he was drunk. We went into the house and got some liquid Shinola—the brand-name shoe polish—and we painted his beard black. The next morning he woke up with a black beard, and he was just livid because he didn’t remember a thing about the night before.

My dad knew that Doyle and I were the only boys around, so he came to us and asked, “Do you know what happened?” We said, “Yeah.” “Who did this?” We told him, “We did.” We didn’t try to lie because the bum really had asked us to paint his beard. But my dad didn’t believe us. The sad thing is, is that that’s why you write things down, because I don’t remember the end of the story. I can’t remember if this guy was able to get the shoe polish out of his beard, or if he had to shave it off, or if he had to wait until it grew out. I don’t know. And Doyle’s dead, so I can’t ask him.

One time somebody who needed money came by the hotel.

All he had was a 12 bass accordion, so he hocked it to my dad for about thirty-five dollars. He never came back for it, so my dad gave it to me because my grandpa had played it. This accordion had piano keys on one side and buttons on the other; most are like this but they can have buttons on both sides. There were twelve buttons on mine, so it was called a 12 bass accordion. It isn’t the one that I have now, but it is why I started playing.

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The Accordion

I took lessons in Idaho Falls for about six months. I wasn’t very good at it, and I ended up losing interest. But my family all thought that I was really good because nobody played any kind of instrument. At all of the Walker reunions they would have my grandfather play, but a few years after he died, I would play the music instead. I was only twelve or thirteen, and I just played really simple songs, but everyone thought it was great. Then I thought if I had a bigger accordion I would be able to play better. So I got myself a 120 bass accordion. But I never did take any more lessons after that. So now I can’t play any better than if I only had twelve buttons, but it is a bigger accordion. One time I was asked to play in sacrament meeting—probably when I was about eleven. I found a simplified version of “God Be with You Till We Meet Again,” and I marked the note I started on with some fingernail polish. But when I took the accordion out of the case I accidentally pulled a key up so it was With my new 120 bass accordion and a neigh- raised an inch above all bor boy, 1949. Age 12. the others. I didn’t notice 21

that I had done that, and when I went to play my finger kept hitting against it. I was already pretty nervous about playing in church, but I was able to compensate and I did fairly well.

In Roberts there was a talent contest, and I entered to play my accordion in it. I wasn’t very good, but I practiced really hard on a tune called “Jealous Heart.” It was kind of a western tune and went like beep beep beep beep, dah duh duh, dah duh dah, duh dah duh. It was a base-heavy song. Well, this other girl in the competition was really good on the accordion, and she played a difficult song called “Harbor Lights.” But she muffed up her song and I played my simplified “Jealous Heart” really well, so I won the talent contest and actually got to play on KID Radio. It was so embarrassing because this girl could play a 110 times better than I could—she just messed up.

When my mother was born, her oldest brother, Ez, was twenty years old. After the birth, a little neighbor girl of about eight came over to see my mother and said, “I wish I could have a little baby sister.” So Ez asked, “What would you give me for her?” The little girl said, “I could give you a goose.” Then he told her, “I’d trade her for a goose.” So this little girl went home and got a goose, thinking that she was going to swap it for my mother. Of course my grandmother said she couldn’t do that, and the little girl went away crying. It was just a big brother teasing the little next-door neighbor, but she thought he was serious.

When my dad was a baby he had a weird thing happen to him.

His parents took him to Rigby to have his baby pictures taken.

He was in a dress, because that’s what even little boys wore in their pictures back then. There happened to be a couple there from back east. They saw him—they had never been able to have children—and they offered my grandpa and grandma a million 22

dollars if they would give him to them. But my grandparents refused. My dad said he couldn’t figure out why they didn’t get rid of him and get a million dollars. They had fourteen kids and couldn’t afford all of them. That would have been a lot of money back then, and the story was a legitimate thing. So in a little booklet that I wrote about my family I have some pictures with captions; the one of my mom says, “Mother was worth more than a goose.” And the other one says, “Dad was a million dollar baby.”

My mom’s older brother Ez was a lot like a father to her, and so she really sobbed when he died. My dad had all of these halfbrothers and sisters, but then he had a real brother. When he died, my dad cried. It was the first time in my life that I had ever seen my dad shed tears. It was really touching to me. I had several aunts and uncles all die. And by the time I was eleven or twelve I really didn’t have any left. Even though my parents came from huge families, they were the youngest in their families, and I was as well.

The restaurant part of Dad’s unit in Roberts was a service station at one point. So when we first got there, there was oil and grease all over the floor. We had to scrape all of it off first, and then we turned it into a restaurant. My dad had only ever cooked food over a campfire when he went fishing. He knew how to cook coffee and bacon and eggs. And the suddenly he owned a restaurant.

So my parents hired a cook to do the cooking for them.

Underneath the hotel, café, and bar—the building still exists in Roberts today and is now BJ’s Bayou, a New Orleans restaurant—there were a couple of big furnaces and some huge ducts.

We fueled them with coal and wood, and they would heat the whole building. There was a crawlspace down there, and it was kind of creepy. One time it was reported that a guy who robbed 23

a place had gone down there and was hiding beneath the café.

My dad said, “Newell, I need you to go down there with me.” My dad went down there with a pistol and handed me a flashlight.

I was supposed to crawl around and see if anybody was down there. And my dad was going to shoot them or tell them to come out. I was probably about ten or eleven, and I can’t even describe the feeling I had—Oh how I hope there’s nobody here. I was just praying, because I thought they would probably beat me up first.

Luckily I didn’t find anyone down there.

Being a Boy

Sometimes Doyle and I would play around the post office with our friends. Once, when we were about twelve and nine respec-

Robert’s Hotel, Cafe, and Bar, 1947.

24

tively, somebody broke into the post office and stole some of the mail. Some FBI agents actually came to investigate the robbery.

Someone reported that Doyle and I had been seen around the post office. So the agents came to school and called Doyle and I each out separately to question us. Well, we hadn’t done anything, but we just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The agent asked Doyle, “If you were to rob mail out of the post office, would it be hard?” And Doyle said, “Oh no, it wouldn’t be hard at all. You’d just lift up the flap and then reach your hand in through the door and take it out.” If we weren’t suspicious before, we were then.

At the time my parents were running the hotel, café, and bar.

It was also during World War II, and so my parents had submitted paperwork in order to get some sugar. They never heard back about it. Later, when my dad was cleaning the hotel he found a bag of mail under one of the mattresses. He looked in it and found his letter requesting sugar. It turned out that it was in the bag of mail that had been taken from the post office when it was robbed.

Growing up, Doyle and I delivered newspapers around Roberts. We each had a route. I would ride my bike and go east of the tracks. The road over there had a big slope to it. And there was a lady living there from Czechoslovakia—I thought that was a fascinating word to say. I didn’t know where it was, but I think I wrote a report about it in school—and she had a German shepherd. It would chase me every night. So each night I would pedal really hard to the top of the hill and then put my legs up on the handlebars. Then I would throw the paper, and that dog would chase me. I would just hope that I didn’t run out of steam and have to put my feet back down, because I knew that dog would bite me. Luckily, it never did. Once, another German shepherd 25

did bite my shoulder and I still have the scars from it. I had to go get a shot for rabies, and then I had to wear my arm in a sling for several weeks. That year all of my friends went to Rigby to take swimming lessons, but because my arm was in the sling I couldn’t go. Because of that I didn’t learn to swim until I was an adult.

A guy named McCullough also lived across the tracks. He had a pen full of rabbits in the yard. It was quite a large pen and the rabbits would just sit in there and eat the grass. I think he had ten or twelve of them. My friend Bob French and I were talking one day, and we thought it would be really neat to have some rabbits.

So I told Bob that I knew this guy who had a bunch of them. We decided that he wouldn’t miss them because he had so many. One day he went to Idaho Falls and we went over to his house and stole five of them. We stole like half of them, but we still didn’t think he would notice they were gone. Well, Bob, whose dad was the town marshal, had a set of empty rabbit pens behind his house.

So we took the rabbits over there in a gunny sack in the middle of the day. On the way, George Marriott, who is now my brotherin-law, passed us and asked, “What have you got in your sack?”

And we told him, “Well, we have a rabbit. We’ve been over to McCullough’s to get it bred.” But I’m sure that he could tell there was more than just one in that sack. We put them in my friend’s rabbit pens and thought we had executed the perfect crime, even though we had stolen five rabbits in the middle of the day and placed them in plain view behind the marshal’s house. The owner of the rabbits came home from Idaho Falls and saw that half of them were missing. So he called the marshal to report it. When the marshal’s wife answered the phone, he said, “I’m missing five rabbits.” Well, she knew that we had delivered rabbits within the hour, so she came out to talk to us.

26

There happened to be a farmer outside of town who had promised Bob that if we came out there we could catch some wild rabbits. So Bob’s mom said, “Where did you get these rabbits from? Mr. McCullough just called and said that somebody took some of his.” My friend said, “Oh, we went out to the farmer’s house and caught them.” She said, “Honest, Bob?” He looked her in the eye and said, “Honest, Mom.” Then she looked at me and asked, “Is that what happened, Newell?” I looked at the ground and said, “Yeah, that’s what happened.” I have a hard time looking people in the eye even if I’m telling the truth, but I was lying that time.

The whole thing was kind of stupid, because five rabbits were missing and five rabbits showed up in the same day. So that night I went home, and I remember confiding to my sister that I was really nervous. But there was a jail in Roberts that had an outside door with a grate on it. So we kidded our friends that they could come and play checkers with us through the bars and then slip candy to us. We thought it was all “ha ha ha.” So we confessed that we did it. We took the rabbits in the back end of the town marshal’s station wagon to Mr. McCullough’s, who said, “I wonder if you boys ought to spend some time up in Saint Anthony,” which was the reform school. That possibility had never dawned on us, and we were really frightened. But he told us, “I’ll tell you what. If you promise you won’t ever steal anything again, I won’t press charges.” Since then I have never even stolen a grape from the grocery store. My life of crime came abruptly to an end. But it was so funny because we thought that we had a perfect crime.

Later I actually ended up buying rabbits from Mr. McCullough.

I kept them in a pen in the backyard behind the hotel. I always liked rabbits. I had a little Angora rabbit with really long hair. You 27

could take it out of the pen and it would hop around. You could catch it because its hair was all matted. I think you were probably supposed to cut the hair.

At one point they were starting a band at school in Roberts.

I wanted to play the trombone because I love trombone music.

We only had a trumpet at home—my brother had used it and so had my sister. So I had to play the trumpet. But I never could hit the high notes. I played in the band there in Roberts and then in Rigby once we moved there. I never got very good at it, though.

One time I played hooky in Roberts. Other boys played hooky—you know, skipping school—and they only had to stay in a few recesses. So we thought that was all that would happen to us. It was in the spring of that year. There were a bunch of trees and a canal behind Roberts, so a lot of magpies and other birds laid their eggs there. But magpies are scavengers and they eat the crops. So if you turned in the head of a magpie you got a quarter, and if you turned in an egg you got a nickel. We decided we would sluff and go out and collect some magpie heads. (It was kind of gross because you had to twist their heads off. But it wasn’t like we were killing Robins or Blue Jays.) We were out there for the afternoon, and then we waited behind the school for the day to end. The teacher sent word out with another student, who told us, “If you come in now, you can get back into school. But if you don’t come now you’re expelled.” We had never known anybody who got expelled, and we were just proud enough that we didn’t think the principal would really do it. Besides, we had already had so much fun that rather than being smart and going back in, we stayed out there for the next half hour.

The next morning we all came to school, but the principal met the four of us at the door and said, “You guys are expelled.” We 28

had to go home and talk to our parents and get their permission to get back into school. I lived right in town, but a couple of the kids had to walk clear out in the country. When I told my parents I remember that all of a sudden it wasn’t funny anymore, and I was really anxious to get back. It made me feel very serious. So when I went home I told my mother, “Hurry, you’ve gotta sign this paper so I can go back to school.” And my mother said, “You need to talk to your dad.” I talked to my dad and I remember him saying, “Okay, in a little while.” And suddenly it was just so urgent to get back to school. I don’t know if my parents were deliberately making me sweat it. I don’t know that they were that smart psychologically, but they did make me wait for a while. I remember being so anxious. Finally though, they signed the slip—they either signed a slip or called the school. I can’t remember, but we did get to go back to school.

In elementary school we had a teacher named Miss Serby.

She was an old maid and she seemed really old. She was probably about fifty-five or sixty years old and she was from Omaha, Nebraska. She was also an Episcopalian. We didn’t know what an Episcopalian was, but as boys we sure thought it was a fun word to say. Some of us were LDS. We were preparing our primary program and we had to sing “The Mormon Trail.” One day we went for a fieldtrip out to the Robert’s slough—which is an area of land with excess water that is kind of shallow. We were walking around out there and we started singing “on the Episcopalian trail” instead. We thought it was pretty funny, but I’m not sure that she appreciated our humor.

Miss Serby was quite mean. In class she was the kind that would take a ruler and hit you over the head. One day she went to hit a kid and he moved his head out of the way, and she smacked 29

the desk instead. That really made her mad. A kid in our class named Eddie Rinker was always teasing the girl in front of him.

For punishment, Miss Serby put a mousetrap on his ear and left it for half of the day. None of us knew what would happen when he took it off!

The high school kids always came over to the elementary school to eat lunch. One day some boys took a tub full of floor cleaner—it was a powder that you swept up and would supposedly get rid of the dirt—and when Miss Serby was walking down the stairs during lunch hour, those boys dumped that whole tub of cleaner on her head from the top floor. It went all through her hair and her dress. After lunch hour she came to class crying. We always had a story right after lunch so we got out our books and looked at each other. We all thought she had gotten fired and we were really kind of happy, but we didn’t want her to notice.

Truthfully, it was a sad and dirty joke.

It came time for my parents to sell their café and hotel. Owning a bar was not a good thing for my dad with his alcohol problems.

They decided to find a different business. They found some prospective buyers and they went to sign the agreement in Rigby.

That day a guy in Roberts rounded a corner in a dump truck filled with sand. He was going way too fast and he smashed into the side of our hotel building. There was a butane gas line that went down beneath it. My sister Donna lived up above it. So, the fire department had an evacuation and they told everyone not to light a match or a cigarette because it would blow the whole thing up. When the guy hit the brick building, it pushed the pool table clear across the room and smashed the jukebox. I remember the guy getting out and trying to explain what happened, but he had a speech impediment. When my parents got home from signing 30

the contract they found a big hole in the side of their business.

They thought the people would back out, but they didn’t and we bricked up the hole. Now, there’s brick there that doesn’t look like the rest of the building, but my parents sold it anyway.

After that we moved to Lewisville and rented a house there for the summer. Because I had lived there in grades one through three, I knew a lot of the kids quite well. At the end of that summer we moved to Rigby. For a while we lived in an apartment over the Rigby Star Publishing Company.

Then my parents purchased a place called the Main Café. It was right there on Main Street—very imaginative name—and had originally been a quality store years before. I think it was a Golden Rule Department Store that had burned down. The café was kind of built on stilts so it would be level with the street, and underneath it there was a great big hole where people would dump old radiators and lots of other junk. People would actually just walk right by and throw stuff down the hole. When my parents bought the place, they decided to build an apartment underneath it so we could live there. We had to haul all of that junk out—truckload after truckload, after truckload. It was literally a junkyard down there.

After that, we planted grass and it turned out quite nicely. My parents called the restaurant Walker’s Café and they were famous.

They served scones and honey butter and had really good food.

People came from all around. At that time there wasn’t a Highway 20 that went from Idaho Falls to Rexburg, so all the traffic going to and from Yellowstone National Park had to go right through downtown Rigby. All that traffic had to turn right in front of my parents’ café, so we were always swamped on holidays like the Fourth of July and Memorial Day. It was in a really good location.

31

Unfortunately, that’s when my dad would stress out; he would go up town to pick up meat or something else we needed and then take off on a drinking binge. He would be gone for a couple of weeks and then we would have to go up to Island Park and retrieve him. That was all during my teenage years. It was a different kind of growing up experience having to do that.

Conversion

It was about the same time that I became active in the Church. I was the youngest of six children but none of my family were very involved. My dad had always been a member but inactive. My

Walker’s Main Cafe, Rigby 1950.

32

mother was not a member of any church, although her mother had been Presbyterian. I went to seminary though. At the time, the big question was whether or not you should go to the movie on Sunday. In Rigby there were two movie theaters, and I lived right next door to one of them. So almost every Sunday I would go to a movie. When everyone debated whether you should go or not, I always thought it was okay. I didn’t have an attitude of total compliance or obedience. It was kind of like, “What’s wrong with that?”

The only scripture I had ever read was the next verse in Sunday School or seminary. In Sunday School I knew that there were good guys and bad guys in The Book of Mormon, but I never could recall if the Lamanites or the Nephites were the good ones.

So I never remembered which side we were on.

One Sunday I was home alone and I had a desire to read a book. I was a good reader, but I never read anything unless it was assigned. I went over to the bookcase and pulled out a copy of The Book of Mormon. I don’t know how it got there. I don’t know if the missionaries left it there for my mother as a prospective member, or if the home teachers left it there for my dad. I doubt that anybody had ever opened it. I assumed that I wouldn’t be able to understand the book, because a lot of the words that I had read in the scriptures before were things like begat and it came to pass—all words that I normally wouldn’t use. I opened the book and I read the first verse, all the while thinking I’m not going to understand this. Of course it starts, “I Nephi having been born of goodly parents,” and I understood that. I was so surprised that I had. I was amazed that it was so simple. I went on to the second verse and I understood it too. I started reading The Book of Mormon in August of 1953, and I couldn’t put it down. I was 33

Written about my conversion in 1953.

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going to be a junior in high school that upcoming year. Nobody knew I was reading it and it wasn’t an assignment. It was just that I was drawn to it. Parley P. Pratt said that the first time he read The Book of Mormon he didn’t eat or sleep. The first time that I read it I ate and I slept, but I kept going on.

When I hit 2 Nephi and the words of Isaiah, I didn’t understand anything. I didn’t even know there was a guy named Isaiah.

The rest of The Book of Mormon could have gone like that and I wouldn’t have known. It wasn’t as if somebody told me to go through those difficult pages and then I would pick up on the story line again. Luckily, I skimmed the Isaiah passages and then found the story again. When I hit 3 Nephi, I was blown away by the Savior coming to America. If I had ever heard that before, I didn’t remember it. I couldn’t really remember any gospel knowledge before reading The Book of Mormon because it all went over my head.

In December I finished The Book of Mormon. I started in August and finished in December—for a fifteen-year-old that isn’t bad, especially because nobody knew I was doing it. I read the promise in Moroni: If you want to know if the book is true then ask God. Fortunately I had enough gray matter to know that “ask God” meant pray. It sounds simple, but I really didn’t have very much gospel knowledge. Up to that point, my prayers were literally, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul will keep.” I would pray for all my family too, but that was about the essence of my prayer. I remember very specifically asking God if The Book of Mormon was true. I had been reading about angels and voices, so in all honesty I thought I would see or hear something, but I did not. When I got up I was kind of bunged out (disappointed), but I felt something. That’s what the 35

promise is—that the Holy Ghost will confirm to us whether or not the book is true. And the Holy Ghost affects us by feeling. But I didn’t know that because I didn’t know how the Spirit worked.

But I felt it and I knew that the book was true. I knew it more than any other thing in my whole life. It had a huge impact on my—I never went to a movie on Sunday again, and nobody ever had to tell me not to.

The Jitterbug

At the same time I was dating my future wife, Caroll. We went to a lot of movies and also a lot of dances where we would do the foxtrot and the jitterbug. We used to trade partners with other couples at the dance. Now they don’t do that anymore. We did a lot of ballroom dance performing at different floorshows, church dances, and wedding receptions in Rigby, Rexburg, and Idaho Falls. It was just the two of us, and we danced the tango, the waltz, and the samba. We did a pretty good job too. On a lot of our dates, believe it or not, we would talk about The Book of Mormon. I was just like a sponge; I just couldn’t get enough. Often we would get home kind of late from our dates. It doesn’t sound very believable, but we really would be talking about the gospel. I’m sure I probably had my arm over her shoulder while we were discussing everything, though.

During this period of my life, the stake missionaries in Rigby were sending missionaries out to Dubois, Idaho, kind of an antiMormon town about forty-five minutes from Idaho Falls. It’s interesting, because if you go forty-five minutes one way you 36

run into Rexburg and St. Anthony, which are both about ninety percent LDS. If you head the other direction towards Butte, Montana, it’s the opposite. They were trying to open up missionary work in the Dubois area, and so I would go out with the stake missionaries. I had talked a couple of times in sacrament meeting, so they asked me to go with them. I was only sixteen, but I went because I knew the Church was true.

One night they didn’t have enough missionaries. They called me to see if I could find someone to go with us. I told them I had a girlfriend who would probably like to go. So Caroll and I went out with the missionaries in Dubois. When we got there, the mission president needed us to go and visit a nonmember on our own, so we told them we would go. I asked the president what the lesson was about, and he told me it was on The Book of Mormon. Even though I hadn’t learned any of the missionary lessons, I knew that it wouldn’t be a problem because of my testimony that The Book of Mormon was true. So we went and taught that man.

Fast forward maybe forty years. The man we taught had a wife whose sister lived in our ward when I served as bishop. When she died, that investigator’s wife was there. Her last name is Leonardson, and I asked her, “Do you rememAge 16, 1954. ber when your husband 37

was taking the missionary discussions that my wife and I came as teenagers to teach you?” She said, “Oh, I do remember.” So I asked her what the end of the story was. She told me that her husband had joined the Church, and then she introduced me to her two sons, who had both become bishops. That was our first success with missionary work.

It wasn’t that I lived perfectly at that time, but I had a greater desire to do so. Eventually every one of my brothers and sisters came back to the Church. All six of us were married or sealed in the temple. Before my experience serving with the missionaries, I didn’t know there were missionaries. Once I did, I thought it would be neat to have my mother take the lessons. She did, and then she got baptized. Back then you had to be seventeen to be a priest, and at the time of my mother’s conversion I was only sixteen. So Doyle baptized her and Clyde confirmed her. But I taught her how to pray. It was like the roles had been reversed.

My mother and I would kneel down together and I would say, “Heavenly Father,” and she would repeat, “Heavenly Father.”

Then I’d say, “Thank you for our blessings,” and she would repeat, “Thank you for our blessings.” It was a neat experience teaching my mother to pray.

My mother had a great personality, but she was used to visiting with people when they came to the restaurant. It was hard for her to go out alone into new situations that she wasn’t comfortable with. Because my dad didn’t go to church, she never really did start going. The first time that I remember my parents coming to church with me was for my seminary graduation. I was a junior in high school, but back then you only had three years of seminary because I don’t think they taught Church History or The Doctrine and Covenants. At my seminary graduation Elder 38

George Q. Morris spoke. It was very different from today because we had an apostle at our graduation in Rigby, Idaho. I was asked to speak right before him—it’s the only time in my life that I’ve ever spoken with an apostle.

Meeting Caroll

I moved to Rigby after my ninth grade year when my parents bought the Main Street Café. Caroll says that she remembers all of the kids talking about the new boy in school. I’m sure it was love at first sight. We started dating our sophomore year and then we dated that year, our junior year, and our senior year. We danced together, we were in the same ward, and we had the same group of friends. Our senior year I was elected to be the student body president and she was elected to be the student body secretary. Pretty much everything we did, we did it together.

During high school Caroll and I were the dance directors for our ward. We would actually give dance lessons to the Beehives and the Scouts, even though we were pretty young ourselves.

In June the Church held a youth conference that was almost as big as general conference. The conference was held in the Tabernacle, and I was able to go up before the meeting started and shake hands with President David O. McKay. It was the first time I had ever seen a prophet. In connection with the conference they would have an all-church dance festival. In preparation for the dance festival each ward would learn the dances. Then all the wards would go up to the University of Utah football stadium. All the dancers would cover the entire field, and then 39

“One-arm Driving,� was written about dating Caroll in 1954.

40

everyone would do the same dances together. It was really a neat experience.

College

It came time for me to go off to college. My older brother and sister had both gone to Utah State University, but neither one had graduated. They were the only people I had known who’d gone to college, so I decided that’s where I would go. Then one day a kid I was with told me he was going to BYU. In all honesty, as a senior in high school, I did not know what BYU stood for.

I had never heard of Brigham Young University—I was pretty naïve. I had heard of SMU because they had a really good football team, but I didn’t know that it stood for Southern Methodist University. I had always rooted for them, though. (At that time I won a pair of shoes at a local store for predicting the winners of some college football games. I recall that Oklahoma had an unbeaten record, and was ranked number one for a long time.)

I changed my mind and went to BYU instead. In high school I was probably a B+ student because I played a lot, but I got straight Rigby High School Graduation, A’s my freshman year of college.

1955. Age 17.

Because of my good grades, I got 41

a letter in the mail saying that I was eligible for a scholarship. I didn’t know there was such a thing, but the scholarship paid for my tuition each quarter. I had decided to study accounting when I graduated from high school and I loved it. I took bookkeeping in high school, and I loved to keep sports records. I particularly followed baseball, and I kept all these records of different teams.

I still have scrapbooks of them. When I found out that you could get paid for keeping records, I thought that was great.

One semester I took square dancing, and Ezra Taft Benson’s daughter was in my class. That was kind of fun, but all of my heart was back in Rigby with Grandma. She couldn’t afford to go to school because at the time she was the oldest of seven children.

(Later, two additional children were born.) Instead she worked as a secretary, which she loved, for Tandy and Wood in Idaho Falls.

We called one another occasionally, but mostly we wrote letters.

I came up about once every three months for the weekend. Back then it was pretty unusual to make the drive from Provo to Idaho Falls. When I came up I would be so excited to see her, but it seemed like every time our date would just bung out. We just didn’t get along. Then I’d go back to Provo all depressed because I wasn’t going to see her for another three months. Still, we wrote all of the time. I think she wrote me every day, but I probably only wrote her every other. We kept all of those letters, and they are pretty interesting to read.

Getting Married

I started thinking about going on a mission, but at that time you 42

had to be twenty to go. I had started school early and graduated when I was seventeen. I had already gone to BYU for a year, and I was only eighteen. I would have had to wait another year and a half until I would be able to go. Back then, if you learned a foreign language you served for two and a half years instead of two. Then once you got home you had a military obligation. I was adding all of these things up in my head—We’ve already dated for four years. If I wait another year and a half to go on a mission, eight years will have passed by the time I get back, and Caroll won’t be around anymore. I really had a strong feeling that she should be my wife.

So I talked to our home bishop and told him my dilemma. At that time very few young men served missions. I didn’t have anyone in my family go, and only a couple kids in our graduating class went. Serving a mission just wasn’t a talked about thing. When I talked to my bishop, he told me that we should go ahead and get married, then serve a mission later. We were both in his ward, and he thought we were mature, even though I was only eighteen and grandma was nineteen. So that’s what we did.

I figured we would save enough in postage to pay for our rent—that probably wasn’t the reality, though. I decided that Christmas Eve would be a good time to give her a ring. We had already talked about marriage a little bit, and her parents, Grandpa and Grandma Lindsay, really liked me. They thought I was a good person, so I knew they would be in favor of whatever I did. I bought her a diamond ring and then we went to the Paramount Theater in downtown Idaho Falls to see White Christmas when it first came out. I started getting really nervous, and so I kept going to the bathroom. Then I would come back and watch the movie. At one point I decided that I shouldn’t give her the ring that night. I thought maybe I could find a substitute gift. I went 43

out to the street. There was a Fog Drug close by, and they carried sets of hairbrushes, mirrors, and combs. I thought maybe I would be able to find one there, but they were closed. I was left without a Christmas gift.

Wedding day, August 17, 1956.

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She always says that I never watched much of the movie and she didn’t know what the problem was. It was because I was so nervous. After the movie we drove over by the north side of the temple. I pulled up and said, “If you want your Christmas present, it’s in the jockey box.” (That’s what we called the glove compartment.) She opened it up, and there was the engagement ring. I asked her if she would marry me, and she said yes. I was pretty happy. The next morning I went out to her parents’ house to seek their permission. After I told them I had proposed, Grandpa Lindsay said, “Well, can you support a family?” All I could think was, Wow—I hadn’t thought of having a family right of the bat! We had no money at all. Then he laughed and said, “There’s nine of us.” Then I knew he was joking, and so I laughed with him.

We got married on August 17, 1956 in the Idaho Falls temple.

I was the first person in my family to get married in the temple, so my parents couldn’t go. My mother cried when I went out the door because I was the first child she wouldn’t be able to see getting married. I was also her baby boy. It was pretty tough on her.

I had to leave at five o’ clock that morning because back then you received your endowments on the same day that you got married. My brother Clyde told me to take a towel. I had no idea what went on in the temple, but then I figured you must shower at some point. All I knew was that I was going to the temple to get married. I knew nothing about the initiatory—I don’t think I even knew I was going to start wearing garments. When we went into the endowment session, I thought it was part of the marriage ceremony. She went and sat on one side and I sat on the other.

The whole time I just kept thinking, With all of these other people here, how will they know that she is the one that’s supposed to be sealed to me? Afterward I didn’t remember anything that was said.

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I wished that somebody would have told me that the endowment session preceded the sealing, because then I would have been totally relaxed and able to listen. At that point in time, though, it seemed to me that even the word temple was rarely said because it was so sacred. People just didn’t talk about it.

At our sealing, Grandma’s parents and my brother Clyde were both with us. We also had a few other distant relatives there as well. Afterward we celebrated. We had a luncheon where Dora Erickson, my first grade teacher, gave a reading. Back then wedding dances were the tradition. Friends and family would bring gifts, offer their congratulations, and then dance. People were just starting to have wedding receptions with a receiving line. We were right in between the two, and so we decided to combine them.

We had a line first and then everyone stayed to dance. We went on our honeymoon to Glacier National Park. We borrowed my brother’s car—it was a really cool looking yellow car with black stripes—because we didn’t have one yet. After, we bought a ‘52 Chevy two-door coupe for five hundred dollars from a man that Grandpa Lindsay knew. Then we went off to school.

Newlyweds

The first place we lived in at BYU had a kitchen, a bedroom, and a bathroom all separated by a landing. If you wanted to get to any of the rooms, you had to go out on the landing first. That’s also where the stairs were that led to the apartment beneath us. Then we moved into an apartment that had the pipes for the Provo City sewer system running through the ceiling. I thought it was so cool.

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When we first got married we decided to hold off on having children. Then all the other young couples in our ward started having kids, so we decided that we would to. We went for a while without getting pregnant. One day Caroll was out working in the yard when she got stung by a bee. Her finger swelled up, and then so did her arm. We took her to the doctor, and he ran some tests. When he came back he asked, “Did you know that you’re pregnant?” We actually didn’t know. So we really do believe in the birds and the bees. I really don’t know who fathered Greg, but that’s how she got pregnant. We drove up to Idaho Falls to tell our parents the news. She had had a lot of morning sickness, and on the way she got sick in the car. We had to stop and she ran over to the side of the road to throw up. I ran over there to be with her and then I threw up too. I decided that was the epitome of empathy—if you’ll throw up with your wife.

She had a really sensitive sniffer; she still does. When I was in college I would make popcorn every night to study accounting.

During her pregnancy she worked above a popcorn place, and it made her so sick to smell the popcorn all day that I couldn’t make it anymore. Then it got worse. She couldn’t stand my smell.

I would shower, but then I would still smell to her. I’d brush my teeth a second time, but I still smelled to her. That’s pretty difficult when you’re a fairly new husband.

Caroll was also very emotional, and she would cry a lot. I had never been around a pregnant woman before because I was the youngest in my family. I always assumed that a person only cries if they have a reason. So I would frequently ask her, “What’s the problem? Did I say something?” “No.” “Did I not say something?”

“No, it’s not you.” “Then why are you crying?” And she would just say, “For no reason.” That was definitely kind of an adjustment.

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When our first child, Greg, was born it had to be one of the greatest thrills of my life. It exceeded anything that I had expected. I felt like Alma in The Book of Mormon: “Oh that I were an angel.” I was so happy that I wanted to tell the whole world I was a new dad. I was happy when all of the rest of the kids came, but it was particularly special with the first. He came right during my finals week in cost accounting. It couldn’t have been a worse time. Caroll was in a long labor—something like thirtysix hours. It went on and on. They told us that the pains had to be long enough and close enough together. First the contractions would be close together, but not long enough. Then they would be long enough but not close together. Finally the two were in sync and she had the baby naturally. She breastfed Greg, but then got mastitis, which is a breast infection. Caroll had a fever of a 104º. My dad always said that if you get a fever of a 105º you were going to die. I remember going into her room and asking, “Do you feel like you’re dying?” because I thought maybe she was. I had never been around a baby much before, so Grandma Lindsay had to come down and help me boil the formula because Caroll had to stop breastfeeding.

Graduation

I graduated from BYU in accounting. It was earlier than planned because I went to two summer school terms. I finished in December of 1958, right before my twenty-first birthday. When I graduated from college it was the happiest day of my life, not because I graduated but because I was so happy to be done. Every 48

day I had gone to school in the morning, worked in the afternoon, and then studied in the evening. I worked two and a half years in Springville, Utah, for Jay Strong. (Later his son Kenneth worked for me at the Gangplank while attending Ricks College, and then his other son Neal became Jennifer and Neil’s stake president.)

Even though it was so hard, we needed the money.

We were so poor that when we went home for Christmas after my final semester, we only had five dollars to fill up the car with gas. That was literally all the money we had. We could have gotten money from our parents, but there wasn’t time. We started for Idaho but when we got to Inkom we were running out of gas. So I stopped and hocked my flashlight in exchange for some gas. On our way back through, we brought a check, and I got my flashlight back.

Brigham City

Every time we drove from Provo to Idaho Falls, we always passed through Brigham City. We thought it was so nice. They had shade, they had fruit, and they had flowers. They even had a fountain in the middle of town where you could stop and get a drink. It was like an oasis. After graduation I found out that Thiokol Chemical Corporation was hiring there. We were so excited. I applied there and got accepted. On my application there was a place to put your expected salary. At the time four hundred dollars a month sounded like a lot to me, so that’s what I put. I had never applied for a job so I didn’t really know. I actually could have put six hundred dollars down, but I hadn’t ever heard of that much money 49

before. Because I hired on at such a low salary, I was underpaid the entire time I worked for Thiokol, even though I was in management.

Thiokol had a system where new employees could buy meals, and then they would reimburse you (This was only until you found permanent housing). But we didn’t have any money to buy our meals. We could have been eating steak; instead we would go to the grocery store and buy a loaf of bread and a can of tuna to eat in our apartment.

We loved living in Brigham City. In June, we went back to Provo for my graduation ceremony. Caroll was very much pregnant with our second child. (Lesli was born in September during the Peach Days Celebration.) When we looked at the program we noticed that I was on the high honor roll. I had no idea, and for a kid from Roberts and Rigby to be on the honor roll it really was a high honor. I remember being so surprised. I always got A’s in my religion classes, except one time I got a B. I recall the question on my exam—it was at the end and it was for extra credit. It said to list five of the ten tribes of Israel, so I listed five. If I had listed the other five I would have gotten extra credit, but I didn’t know that.

Because I only listed half of them I got a B out of the class. I was so ticked off. I always got really good grades in all my other classes too. I think I only got one C. It was in a geology class, and Mother and I wanted to go to the movies the night before a test. I thought I knew the material well enough, but I didn’t. Still, I did graduate on the high honor roll at BYU.

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Idaho Falls

I worked as an accountant for Thiokol for about five years. I started in general accounting and then moved to cost accounting and budgets. Then Gary was born in December. He was due right at Christmas time, so the doctor told us if we wanted the baby to come a few days earlier he could induce Caroll. So we got to pick the day, and that’s why he was born on the fifteenth. It was just blizzarding cold the day he was born. Eric was also born in Brigham City. It was in June, just two years later. Then Thiokol had a big layoff. I was hired as badge #850, and the list of employees went all the way to six thousand. After the layoff they were down to three thousand employees. I don’t think I would have been laid off for a really long time, but because it was the only job I had ever had, I felt like I needed to get some more experience elsewhere. So we decided to move. I found a job with the Rogers Brothers Company in Idaho Falls. The company was a potato dehydrating plant.

In order to move we had to sell our house. Because of all the layoffs, there were houses for sale everywhere. On each side of our street alone there were five houses for sale. There were for sale signs all over Brigham City. So I started thinking if we listed with a realtor, why would they show our house versus the other three thousand? So grandma painted a sign that said, “For sale by owner,” and put it in the front yard. In one week we sold our house. I went to church that Sunday and the bishop said, “I understand that you sold your house.” Other people in our ward had had their houses on the market for a long time. I said, “I know, I’m so surprised.” He said, “Why are you surprised? You’re a full tithe payer.” That was the first time in my life that I had ever heard that 51

there was a correlation between obedience and blessings. I had never known that before. I thought that you paid tithing because you were supposed to. I didn’t know that you were supposed to expect blessings. This was a whole new idea for me.

We bought our three-bedroom house for $13,250 and sold it five years later for $13,500. There was no such thing as inflation. A hamburger cost twenty-five cents when I was in high school, and it was probably only up to thirty cents ten year later. There was no such thing as higher prices. After we sold our house we got ready to move to Idaho Falls. Unfortunately, when Gary was about two he had an undescended testicle that had to be operated on. The doctors wouldn’t let him leave for Idaho until he urinated. I can’t remember if I had already gone up to start working, but we stayed with our close friends the Bennetts while we waited. One night Gary wet the bed. What normally would have been bad news was now good news, because it meant we could all move to Idaho.

When we moved to Idaho Falls that September, we lived over by the temple. You could see it out our windows and every night I would talk to Lesli about getting married in that temple.

It became her temple, and years later she got married there.

Our house was right across the street from the church. There was no reason for us to be late, but sometimes we really had to hurry to get over there on time. We only lived there a short time. Then Rogers Brothers bought a vegetable dehydrating plant in Turlock, California called Puccinelli. I had been doing their accounting from Idaho Falls, but the manager wanted me to come to Turlock and be his assistant manager. I thought getting into management would be a good idea, so we decided to move again. We had never heard about Turlock, but everyone thought that because it was in California there would be 52

freeways everywhere. It turned out that Turlock was just a sleepy agricultural town.

California

Because the town was so small, the ward was small also. Mother had four or five church callings and I had two or three. For a while I served as the Young Men’s President and I also helped with the Explorers. Caroll was the Laurel advisor, so we both had to be at Mutual. We had a babysitter for our kids, but Eric would bawl the entire time we were gone. We would get home and the babysitter would be crying too. I think he had really gone through a lot with all of the moving—he celebrated his first birthday in California, so by age one he had already lived in three states. Eric never liked change. He was a perfectionist, and he liked things to be the same.

I’m sure we had done the worst possible thing for him. So Greg, Lesli, and Gary asked us if we could take him to Mutual with us.

She would tend Eric while I conducted opening exercises, and then I would take him during mutual while I went out and did things with the Explorers.

Unfortunately, my boss at Puccinelli turned out to be a crook.

The Vietnam War was going on, so they helped to supply troops with dehydrated vegetables. When you dehydrate a cabbage you’re supposed to take out the core. My boss would leave the core in some of the cans and then pack those cans in the middle of the stack. He would also dehydrate peppers and then leave the desiccant bags, which absorb the moisture, out of the inside row. Then when the government inspector came to check them, 53

the cans appeared to be correctly packaged. By doing this, he got more yield from the vegetables than usual. Consequently, the home office in Idaho Falls thought he was great. Nobody knew he was being dishonest except the quality-control manager who the government inspector knew. He came to me and said, “What should I do?” I had never worked for a dishonest person before and I didn’t know what to do. I knew that if I told the Idaho Falls office they wouldn’t believe me because his numbers were so good. But I knew that I couldn’t stay there and tolerate his dishonesty. So I decided to change companies.

I switched over to Varian Aerograph—a new company in the Walnut Creek area—where I was hired as a division controller.

We manufactured scientific instruments which were marketed in Europe as well as the United States. Consequently, we moved to Concord and lived there for about five years. I remember being very busy because I worked a lot of overtime then. In 1967, while still working for Varian, I went on a five week business trip to Europe.

I visited our company’s offices in Scotland, Germany, Switzerland, and France. It wasn’t all work. On the weekends I was able to do some sightseeing. One weekend I attended a session at the LDS temple in Bern Switzerland. Another weekend I visited the Louvre in Paris with the company driver from California. I thought we had planned to spend the entire day there, but the driver didn’t want to go inside. He gave me two hours to see the entire museum while he sat outside on the steps. I saw da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and the famous Greek statue the Winged Victory of Samothrace. One weekend I even went behind the Berlin Wall. I saw where the 1936 Olympics were held—they were the games at which Jesse Owens won four gold medals. Hitler was there and presented medals to every winner except Owens because he was black.

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It was a time of great personal growth. I was called to serve as the stake mission president. The stake covered a huge area, and we had about twenty stake missionaries and about sixteen full-time missionaries. It was a little bit like being a mini-mission president. While we lived in Concord, the city had its hundredth year anniversary. (They had a transportation system called the BART—Bay Area Rapid Transit Line—that went from Concord to San Francisco. In the olden days there was a villain named Bad Bart, so the theme of the centennial was “Bart to Bart.”) They had a huge celebration. As the stake mission president we put up a display from the LDS Church. Our display discussed several things: How some members of the church had helped to discover gold

Working as a controller for Varian Aerograph in Walnut Creek, CA, 1968.

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(Poem written regarding a visit to the Berlin Wall in 1967.)

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in the area, the temple in Los Angeles, and families. I thought it would be really neat if we had a picture of a large family. We found a good looking one that had five kids in it. While looking at the photo someone said, “I can’t believe in this day and age that you would show a family with five kids. We’ve never heard of such a large family. That’s just terrible that people can’t control how many kids they have.” That was when people first began tossing around the concept of limiting the size of your family. Personally I thought it was great to have five kids.

Once we invited some Catholic priests, who were in training for a seminary, to come by to the open house of the new Clayton Valley Chapel in Oak Grove. (That is actually the building where Karen attended church.) It was really cool because the priests all came in their long flowing robes. Then they invited us to come and teach about our church at their seminary. We taught them about President McKay and the teachings of the Church. They also gave us permission to pass out copies of The Book of Mormon. When we finished, a man raised his hand and said, “Isn’t it possible that there could be two heads of the Church—The Pope and President McKay?” I guess we had done a pretty good job. Another time we were invited to teach Sunday School at the Methodist Church.

We really did have some amazing experiences.

Because I was so busy, it was a sad time in Caroll’s life. She started having health problems. Then the doctors told us she couldn’t have any more children because her uterus was tipped.

Somehow, though, she got pregnant anyway, and Jennifer was born. The doctors told us we shouldn’t let that happen again, so we stopped having children. It is one of my biggest regrets, because we didn’t decide prayerfully. I don’t know that anything would have been different, but we just went by what the doctors 57

said instead of using inspiration. That’s why we have five kids and not any more. Mother stayed at home with our five little kids. We only had one car, so on Sundays I would have to leave early for meetings. Then she would have to call several people in order to get everyone a ride to church. On weekdays, if she wanted the car she had to get up early and drive me to work. It was not an easy time for her.

Despite all of the difficulties, a lot of good things happened during this period of our lives. While we lived in Concord the Barfuses were in our ward. That’s how Greg and Lori got to know each other. Karen actually lived in another part of our stake, but we never did know her family. Greg and Lesli were both baptized in Pittsburg, California—a little ways out in Concord—because

The California Walkers, 1968. From left: Gary, Lesli, Jennifer, Caroll, Greg, Newell, and Eric.

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they had the baptismal font.

Then we moved to Clayton Valley. Gary was the first person to be baptized in their brand-new chapel. That chapel is still there today. While in Clayton Valley we decided to buy a home.

At that time, if you spent thirty thousand dollars on a home in Utah it would be a one-of-a-kind-on-a-mountain sort of home.

In California the cheapest I could find was twenty-five thousand.

All I could think was that my dad would never believe we would spend that much for a house. I could hear him saying, “What, did you move to California and lose your senses?” But we didn’t have a choice, so we bought the house and loved it there.

Malt Vinegar

Despite being happy in that area, I got tired of working for a large corporation—too much politics. I sat myself down and took a good look at my life. I asked myself what I wanted to be, and I decided on a retail businessman. My parents had always had a restaurant, but I was no chef. I am really good at pouring water, but I really can’t cook. I knew that I didn’t want a full-blown restaurant, but we started throwing around some ideas. One day Caroll was coming home from the temple when some people told her about a new fish and chips chain called Arthur Treacher’s. We had eaten fish and chips at a place in California called H. Salt’s and liked it. I found out more about it, and then we visited an Arthur Treacher’s in Southern California. I decided that was what I wanted to do.

I took a week off from work, drove Caroll and the kids to Idaho Falls, flew to Columbus, Ohio, and signed the contract, flew back 59

to IF and selected our location across from the golf course, and then flew back to California. It was one crazy week. One of our biggest problems was that it cost five thousand dollars to start the franchise, and we didn’t have any money. We had been living paycheck to paycheck. It’s hard to catch up financially when you have five kids in eight years. One day my boss, T.Z. Chu, who was a Chinese millionaire, asked if I needed any money for my new business. When I told him that I needed five thousand, he wrote me out a check. He didn’t have me sign anything. He just told me, “I don’t need any interest, just pay me back once you have the money.” It was a blessing, because that’s how we bought our franchise. In a few years I paid back the money.

We sold our house and moved to Idaho Falls in August of 1970.

We found a brand-new house that we loved on 25th Street. When I went to apply for a loan, I was told I didn’t qualify because I wasn’t employed. It hadn’t even dawned on me that I had quit my job and we hadn’t opened Arthur Treacher’s yet. After we opened, I went back in and the bank approved me for the loan.

Arthur Treacher’s had a rule that you could only use malt vinegar, because English “fish and chips” is never served with tartar sauce. But after a few days, we added tartar sauce as requested by customers. Also, in order to open, Arthur Treacher’s required that you spend a thousand dollars for your grand opening. Some of the franchises were located in big markets like Detroit and Chicago, so the amount didn’t seem like a lot. But for Idaho Falls a thousand dollars was. We took out full page ads in the Post Register, and had commercials on every radio and television station. We even had one of those big spotlights that shoots up into the sky at night. We told pretty much everybody in our world. Opening day we had crowds like you wouldn’t believe. The line went from the 60

cash register, out the front door, and wrapped clear to the back of the building. It was like that all day long! That first day, when the front door finally shut, we still had a line right up to it. We felt like we were nearly caught up because we could finally count how many people were actually in the line. The crazy part was that each person in line wasn’t placing a single order. They represented a car full of five or six people! We served so much food that day that we had to stop and clean one of the fryers in the middle of the day because the cracklings from the batter got too high. One employee just made batter the entire day. We weren’t always giving out the best product because we were all new to the menu, but the grand opening was just amazing anyway.

When we opened, Arthur Treacher’s headquarters advised me that they were going to come and visit on a Sunday. I told them that I didn’t open on Sundays and they said, “Well, you will this Sunday.” That day of training was the only Sunday we were ever open. It’s funny because my mother never understood that concept. One day she told me that she ran into some friends while fishing and they said, “We wanted to go to Newell’s to get some fish, but we went down there on a Sunday afternoon and he was closed.” She said, “I just told them, ‘Don’t blame Newell.

Arthur Treacher’s makes him close on Sundays’.” I was the only one out of seven hundred and fifty shops that closed on Sundays.

Sometimes a guy has no honor in his own family. My parents didn’t understand, because they had always opened their restaurant on Sunday.

I had an experience when I was studying at BYU that impacted my decision to never do business on Sundays. During high school I had always studied on Sunday, because I never knew otherwise.

One of our first devotionals at BYU was with Elder Mark E. 61

Peterson. His story changed my life. He said that he knew of a young man who went back east for his doctorate. The young man had never studied on Sunday before. Elder Peterson told how the man’s dissertation, which was an oral exam, was on a Monday, but his family had arrived from Utah for the weekend. They wanted to see the city, so instead of studying on Saturday he showed them around. On Sunday, he studied for the very first time. On Monday he flunked his dissertation. The man was a top student and his professor couldn’t believe that he had failed. He asked him what had happened and he told him the story. Fortunately, they allowed this young man to take the test over again. Then Elder Peterson promised us that if we never studied on Sunday that the Lord would bless us. That was all it took for me. I never studied on Sunday again. I would get up really early on Monday mornings, but I didn’t study on Sunday.

My roommate in college was also from Rigby. We had both probably gotten the same kinds of grades in high school, and we were both accounting majors at BYU. (His name is Dennis Lake and he is now one of the leading state legislators in Idaho.) He studied every Sunday, and I never did, and in every class that we both took I always was one full grade ahead of him. I know that because I chose not to study on Sundays, I graduated on the high honor roll. The whole experience kept me from opening on Sundays in business.

We opened a shop on Overland Street in Boise in 1972. I got behind on the franchise fees (about four or five percent of the total sales), because Idaho Falls wasn’t used to having fish; they were really big into beef instead. Our volume at the shop wasn’t as high as it needed to be, so I met with the president of Arthur Treacher’s about my problem. He was a Catholic, and the first 62

At the Gangplank with hand-carved fish, 1998.

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question that he asked me was, “I understand that you close on Sunday.” I told him yes and he said, “Can you tell me why?” I said, “It has a little bit to do with my religion and striving to keep the Sabbath Day holy.” Even though I know some Latter-day Saint people stay open on Sunday, I don’t judge them. But I chose not to stay open because of my personal commitment to do what I believe is right. Sunday was the third busiest day in the business, so I thought that his next statement was going to be about the logic of staying open on Sundays in order to increase our volume.

But he didn’t. He said, “If you feel that strongly about it, as long as I am president I won’t require you to open on Sunday if you don’t want to.” Then he said, “We just came out with some television advertising, and I would like you to try it in the Boise market.”

So we tried it and our volume went up about fifty percent. At that time we only had three or four major television networks, and there weren’t videos and DVDs, so we didn’t have to compete for people’s time in the evenings like you have to now. Many would see the ad and then come in to eat. They would say, “I’m here because I saw your ad last night.” Our sales increased by a lot; the TV advertising kept us from going belly up.

Later we opened another store in Boise on Fairview, and then another in Twin Falls. But by that time, our great friend and patriot Jimmy Carter had become president of the United States.

Interest rates went to twenty-one percent prime. That meant that when you borrowed money you had to pay back twenty-four percent. There was just no way you could swim fast enough to stay ahead. Inflation had also taken over, so every time I bought fish the cost would be higher. If I tried to pass that on to the consumers, they would get mad and say, “I’ll never come back because you raised your prices a dime.” The unfortunate part was that 64

I really should have raised them a dollar. I hated raising prices.

Because we couldn’t keep up financially, I had to sell the two Boise stores. I didn’t get anything out of them either. Then I had to sell the restaurant in Twin Falls. We ended up owing money on it, so the buyers just settled for less. Fortunately I was able to keep the one in Idaho Falls.

At about the same time Arthur Treacher’s started having problems nationally and they were giving little service to the franchisees, so I broke away from them. We needed a good name for a fish place. Greg came up with the name “The Gangplank” and we switched over in about 1980. I operated it for the next twentytwo years. All of our children worked there. We also hired several kids who were going on missions to work there while they saved up. We had limited resources, so I mopped the floors and worked long hours. I did my own accounting, my own advertising. . . . I did everything, but I was okay with it because it was just what I did.

When our kids were in high school we went to a ton of ball games. They played basketball, football, baseball, and volleyball.

We really enjoyed watching them play. One year we were selected as boosters of the year—it was probably because of all the games we went to.

At one point I was involved on an education committee that selected the new superintendent for the Idaho Falls school district. Grandma and I started the RID organization for Idaho Falls (Remove Intoxicated Drivers). It’s kind of like MADD—Mothers Against Drunk Driving—except that the beer companies gave them money for their advertisements. The ads weren’t necessarily to discourage people from drinking, but from driving drunk. We thought that was kind of weird, but RID didn’t do that.

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During that time I served on the high council for our stake.

Then I served as bishop. I got to be Gary’s bishop when he left on his mission and Jennifer’s bishop while she was in high school.

Being a bishop was one of the neatest callings I’ve had. It was also really difficult, because we were having severe financial problems.

That was the most challenging period of my life, both spiritually and temporally. I closed the shop on Sunday, I paid a full tithe, I had Gary on a mission, and everything was going from bad to worse. I knew God was up there, but it seemed as though he had forgotten his promise that everything would be okay if we paid a full tithe. But I never doubted that he was there. I read a statement from Elder Neal A. Maxwell’s book that I shared with my grandson Alex at a recent family reunion. It said that there will come a time in each of your lives that you will have a trial of our faith. You will feel like you are on the edge of a cliff and you are teetering. But the Lord will never allow you to go over. That’s exactly how I felt—I couldn’t have put it any better. I felt as though I was teetering on the edge of a cliff. I knew God was there, but my situation only kept getting worse. Looking back on the experience later, I felt that one reason I was called to be bishop was that while Bishop Walker of the Idaho Falls 31st I was continually bearing my Ward, 1980.

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testimony to others about paying tithing, I was also bearing it to myself.

We had a property in Pocatello where we had hoped to build another shop. I was going to be my own owner and lesser this time. I was trying to make payments, but I didn’t have enough money. The bank decided they were going to foreclose on it. I owed the bank $65,000, but the property was worth $300,000.

The bank was willing to sell the property for $65,000 just to clear their debt. I engaged a couple of local realtors and even put an advertisement in the Wall Street Journal to see if anybody back East would want it. Nothing was happening, so the bank called me one day and told me I had until Friday at five to sell. If I didn’t have a buyer then, the foreclosure proceedings would begin on Monday. I told them that I knew they had to do it. On Friday at three-thirty we got a call from a realtor. He told us we had received an offer on the property from Arby’s. At four we got a call from another realtor for a different offer. So after going through six to twelve extreme months, the day everything was supposed to fall apart it didn’t. At that point you kind of want to ask Heavenly Father why it didn’t happen a month ago. It was truly amazing—a miracle. We had no idea we were going to be able to sell, but we did. We had accumulated so much debt because of interest that we had to take out a second mortgage on our home. Caroll and I weren’t sure if we would ever be able to serve a mission, because you can’t have any mortgage to go.

In about 2001, Neil Taylor’s parents were serving a mission at the MTC in the Philippines. He needed a counselor and they asked if I would like to serve in that position. At the time you could request missionaries. We began considering it. We had a man start evaluating our business but then September 11 happened.

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That put an end to the idea of selling. The Taylors needed us there in February, but we had to let them know we wouldn’t be coming. We basically forgot about selling and just decided to work hard. Around March of 2002 the broker called to tell us he had a buyer. We added up all of our debts, including tithing and taxes, and came up with one number. When the broker evaluated what our business was worth, he came up with almost the exact same number. If we sold, we could clear everything. We wouldn’t have any money left over, but we would be free of debt. I wanted to cash out because I didn’t want to have to take over the business when we got back from our mission. The buyer wanted to take the Gangplank over in March of 2002, so we sold it to him. Shortly after that, grandma had to have knee surgery.

Portrait taken in 1990.

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Service in South Africa

In 2004 we left on a mission to serve in South Africa. It was such a great experience. My great-grandfather, William Holmes Walker, was one of the first three missionaries to South Africa. We could have been sent to any other city there, but we served in some of the exact same places that he did: Grahamstown, Port Elizabeth, and Uitenhage. It was a really hard time for Caroll because she is extremely meticulous. Normally fleas, cockroaches, and big, heavy, sweaty women kissing you all over would have bothered her. But she had a special experience when we first arrived there.

Our first Sunday in South Africa we were asked to share our testimonies. Caroll looked out over all of those black faces, and she felt such a deep love for them that she never felt a concern about those items again. We had struggles, but we have never regretted serving a mission to South Africa.

We didn’t request to serve foreign. Caroll’s cousin Brent Kinghorn requested that we go to Albania where he was serving as mission president. We felt that the Church discouraged people from doing that, and I wanted the Lord to call us where we needed to go. I was really excited because I had been missionary minded my entire life, and I had always wanted to serve a mission.

I had never had a feeling about where we would go. I just avoided thinking about it; I didn’t really want to serve in the Philippines because it is so hot and humid. One night I had a dream that we had been called to Belarus. For some reason “b” words were important because I asked, “Why can’t we go to Belgium or Brazil.” A man replied, “You can’t—it’s Belarus.” The next morning I told Caroll, “I know where we are going on our mission. We are going to Belarus.” She had never even heard of Belarus. After 69

we opened our call, Gary said that he knew we would go to South Africa. “Where else would a Walker go?” That shows you what kind of inspiration I get for where we are going to do things.

I served as first counselor to President Marriott from Utah. It was very challenging. We served most of our time in the black township, KwaNobuhle. We learned to love the black people, probably more than the white people. Some of the white people there are Afrikaans, and they seemed to have a “holier than thou” attitude. On the other hand, the black people have a subservient “yes master” attitude. I had never been around black people before, but didn’t have one ounce of prejudice in my body. I was totally comfortable with the blacks, but I was embarrassed by how the whites acted as if they were better. I didn’t feel that way; I felt like we were all equal. The blacks were really poor and really humble. They loved God. They loved the hymns. They loved the prophet. Before we left to come home the branch president said, “You have been like Christ to us.” That was the highest compliment we had ever been paid. We really loved those people. To this day I stay in touch with several of the black missionaries and converts on Facebook.

While we were there we had a lot of missionary experiences.

I frequently had the opportunity to proselyte. I went up and down the streets of KwaNobuhle with Chumani Magwa. I baptized one young man, he baptized another, and then I confirmed them both. Once we met a street vendor from Zimbabwe in Port Elizabeth. He was selling trinkets and souvenirs. I thought it was interesting that his name was Joseph and we were teaching him about Joseph Smith. He seemed very interested. Joseph’s brother Roderick Chimombe was also there. He was a great big guy and he ended up being the one who came to church. After Caroll and I 70

came home I kept wondering what had happened to him. I found Roderick on Facebook recently. He actually was baptized after we left. Later he got married and they had a son. Unfortunately his wife died—I don’t remember from what, maybe AIDS—and left him with their little boy. Those three people I met who got baptized were all very special.

I gave out a lot of copies of The Book of Mormon while we were there. Nearly every time I went into a restaurant I would ask the waiter, “Have you heard of The Book of Mormon before? If I gave you one would you read it?” We would stop and do that at the petrol stations3 too. I kept a list, and I gave out close to three hundred copies of The Book of Mormon. Someone in the mission presidency told us that we should no longer give out so many of them. His worry was that they might never actually be read.

I just remembered President Benson saying that we needed to flood the earth with The Book of Mormon. Because I was really the only one giving them out, I kind of took it personally. But I always got a commitment from them to read it. I don’t know if any of them did read it, or if they got baptized, but somewhere in South Africa there are a lot of copies of The Book of Mormon.

One of our mission’s goals was to help create the first stake in Port Elizabeth. When we arrived, it was a district. They had tried to make it a stake under a couple of the previous mission presidents, but they just didn’t have the numbers. President Marriott said that was his goal, so it became our personal assignment. We stayed working in the same place for the entire year and a half that we were there. At one point they were thinking of sending us

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In South Africa the gas stations are called petrol stations.

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up to Namibia, which I thought sounded exciting, but President Marriott wanted us to stay. We worked with two branches that made up about half of the proposed stake membership. Grandma worked with the music (which was great for her), and I updated church records; then we both trained leaders and worked with reactivation. We spent a lot of time proselyting and visited so many people that weren’t active. About three weeks before we came home they created the first stake in Port Elizabeth.

Our mission to South Africa truly was the ideal time of our life, but it was also very challenging. When we got home we were both extremely tired. We had such great love and concern for those black people that we had gone out of our way to help them.

Often we had pushed the limit on how much we helped them.

It’s so hard though not to help people who are really struggling.

For the first couple of months after we got home, Caroll would usually start crying when anybody asked us about our mission.

She wondered if maybe we needed to see a psychologist. I said, “Let’s wait a few months and see if we can work through it.” Our greatest concern was not about us, but what would happen to all of those black people. Every time a young man would go on a mission we would help them to get clothing. Once we left, there wasn’t anybody to do it. I think it is interesting that since the time Babalo Kona got home from his mission, there have only been three other missionaries sent out from the two KwaNobuhle wards where we served (they are currently serving). I’m not trying to imply that it was because of us; it was just really hard for a missionary to leave without help from couple missionaries.

A few years after we got home, we seriously thought about going on another mission—maybe a temple mission. Our very favorite place to feel the spirit is Palmyra, New York. We had 72

worked as temple officiators before our mission, so we thought that we could do that in Palmyra. I met with the Idaho Falls temple recorder and we submitted our name. He told me we would find out in September. We waited and waited, but by October we still hadn’t heard anything. They only call a few couples there each year and went I went back in to talk to the recorder he said, “They’ve already filled those two openings in Palmyra. You were supposed to give me your name for submission.” I said, “I did.”

And he said, “Oh.” Then he opened up his drawer and found our name still in there.

We weren’t sure that we should go on another mission because we had a couple of grandsons who were struggling church-wise.

We thought maybe that was our mission. Then in November, just one month later, I got called to be second counselor in the Central Stake Presidency. Seventy-two is kind of old to be a counselor. When we met with Elder Samuelson, the current president of BYU and general authority who came to call us, we told him about our desire to serve another mission. He looked at me and said, “This is your mission.” Then about six months ago someone from the temple called us and said, “We have an opening for the Palmyra Temple. Are you still interested?”Caroll told them we couldn’t go. So I told her that when I’m released, I’ll be eightytwo, maybe we will still be young enough to serve in Palmyra.

She said, “You’ll be so old when you’re released that you’ll be up there on a cane.” I just told her, “If I’m up there on a cane, I will wave it at the congregation like somebody else I know.”4 Our

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This is in reference to President Hinckley, who would always wave his cane at the congregation.

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Stake President, James Hunter, died suddenly of a heart attack at age 54, two years after we were called. Ironically, we had served a two-year “mission” in Idaho Falls.

Chaplains and Hospice

Before our mission, Jared Fuhriman, who is now the mayor of Idaho Falls, asked me to be a police chaplain. We would go out and visit people after they experienced something traumatic— like a suicide or car accident. We were responsible for taking the news to the family. Up until that time the police had handled it.

They would just go up to the door and say, “You’re son died,” and then leave. The chaplain, on the other hand, would say, “How can I help? Would you like prayer? Would you like me to contact your bishop or minister?” Most of the chaplains were ministers of other churches, so I really enjoyed this because I love working with people from other races, religions, and cultures. I was working as a chaplain when we sold the Gangplank. Then one of the other chaplains, a Lutheran minister, asked me to work as a hospice chaplain. He said, “We just had a chaplain leave, and we need someone who is LDS. because so many of our patients are LDS.” I didn’t even know what hospice was. I had never even heard of it.

So I went and talked to the director. I could tell that he was worried I would try to proselyte, but I assured him that I wouldn’t.

Because so many of my mother’s family members aren’t LDS, I know how to be sensitive around different religions. I started working for Eastern Idaho Hospice. Then Robert Collette called and asked me if I would work for Aspen Hospice. I didn’t have a 74

reason to quit my other position, but he asked me if I could work for both places. I said, “It doesn’t bother me. When I go to see people, I go to see people. I don’t care who signed them up.” It was kind of an unusual situation, but both companies gave their permission for me to be dually employed. Then we went on our mission. When we returned, Eastern Idaho Hospice had already gotten a couple to serve part of their full time mission as the LDS chaplains. So I started working with Aspen Hospice and I am still doing that. I go and visit around sixty people from St. Anthony to Moreland. I make visits for the Rexburg, Idaho Falls, and Blackfoot offices. I get to meet a lot of really great people. A few weeks ago I conducted my first funeral service for a Catholic at a funeral home. I have also conducted a Protestant service. I gave the family prayer, the opening prayer, the sermon, and the closing prayer.

I was paid $150 by the funeral home because they always charge the family, but I told them I would do it for free.

Before our mission I was also asked by the Idaho Falls stake president to be a chaplain at the 3B Detention Center. The detention center houses young men, from ages twelve to eighteen, who are striving to overcome alcohol, tobacco, or drug addictions.

I met with them individually and held discussion and prayer. I had a group writing class where they wrote poetry, and I shared my writings as well as some of my favorite classical music. One time I even shared excerpts from some famous operas. I wrote a poem entitled, “Beethoven at 3B.” While I was working there, one Indian boy committed suicide and the other young men then wrote about their feelings. I attended the viewing for the young man. He was dressed in his Indian clothing and moccasins. The viewing was held in a teepee at Fort Hall, which was adjacent to their family home.

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Odds and Ends

After our mission I was asked by Mayor Fuhriman to serve as an Ambassador on the Mayor’s Race Relations Committee. I got to work with many people of other races. I got involved with Cinco de Mayo, Martin Luther King Day, and other holidays like that. I really enjoyed doing that, but I resigned when I was called to serve in the stake presidency, as I felt I was over-involved in things.

In 2007, Caroll and I were invited to attend the centennial of the re-opening of the Tongan mission. Caroll’s grandfather had been one of the first missionaries to Tonga in 1891. Her cousins Linda and Bill Lyda accompanied us. (They are from Twin Falls.)

We spent ten memorable days visiting several islands and hearing the history, music, and testimonies of Tongan Saints. I love to meet people from all cultures and even today I enjoy chatting

From back left:Brandon Walker, Landon Walker, Matthew Taylor, Jackson Walker, Nick Taylor, and Matthew Pennock with “Tongan” Grandpa, 2007.

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with men in Pakistan who are Muslim. I met a man from Pakistan while flying to see Jackson compete in the National Junior Decathlon. Since then I have shared my testimony of the divinity of Jesus Christ and living Prophets with them. I pray that someday they will be blessed to learn more.

I have met some pretty famous people. I received the autograph of Robert F. Kennedy, Democratic Presidential candidate, after listening to him speak in San Francisco. Even as a staunch Republican I was impressed with what he said. A few months later he was shot. As a young boy I received the autograph of Jack Dempsey, Mormon boxer, when he refereed a professional wrestling or boxing match in Idaho Falls. I also listened in person to Richard Nixon when he spoke at BYU (at that time he was the vice-president). I also listened to George and Barbara Bush when they came to Idaho Falls. I have had personal interviews, regarding selection of a stake president, with Apostles James E. Faust and L. Tom Perry. Once before a stake conference I was in a prayer circle at the Idaho Falls temple where Apostle Howard W. Hunter offered a prayer in behalf of people who were ill. I mentioned my niece Susan Marriott and nephew Timothy Lindsay who both had cancer. Elder Hunter mentioned his ailing wife.

The U.S. presidents I admire most are Harry Truman (Democrat) and Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. Even though we do not have favorite prophets, I greatly admire Spencer W. Kimball with all of his health issues and his revelation on blacks receiving the priesthood. I was so grateful and excited when that was announced. Joseph Smith has always been my hero because of his faith and courage. My favorite musical programs were hearing Luciano Pavarotti sing and watching Les Miserable on stage.

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I am very healthy. I ate fish once a day for over thirty years and I think that has a lot to do with it. My brain seems to be in good working order. Every so often Grandma and I will both forget specific names of people, but we are able to describe the person well enough that we don’t have to worry about remembering.

I’m getting a little bit hard of hearing in my right ear; Caroll is too. Sometimes we get irritated with each other because we can’t understand each other. We both try to be patient. Other than that I am in pretty good shape. I have always liked to exercise. Right before I sold the Gangplank I started working out at World’s Gym, and now I’m going to Anytime Fitness. Other than the eighteen months that we were in South Africa, I have gone to the gym two or three times a week for nine years. I like to lift weights. It’s not that I have huge muscles. . . I have a granddaughter who married a guy with huge muscles, but I won’t mention any names. I’m not like him, darn it, but at least I’m able to stay flexible. I’m not a super great athlete, but my sons are. My brain and my arms aren’t connected, so I’m just not as coordinated as they are. But I love to follow athletics. I understand and know what happens, probably because I have read the sports page nearly every day of my life since I was twelve years old. I am a staunch fan of the Chicago White Sox even though I have never seen them play baseball. I think my love for them started in the 1950’s when the New York Yankees beat the White Sox for the pennant every year. I started rooting for the underdog. My favorite moment in professional sports is when Bobbie Thompson from the New York Giants hit a home run—”the shot heard around the world”—and they beat the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1951-playoff series.

I love landscaping and yard work. It isn’t something I want to do fulltime—it’s a hobby. We have a beautiful backyard with 78

a waterfall on our hand fashioned mountain (It’s actually made from the fill dirt from our basement). We have a pond where lily pads and gold fish bring a lot of satisfaction.

I wrote poetry for a long time. It was a completely different thing for me to do. I haven’t written anything since Caroll and I left to go to South Africa. All of my poetry writing would make its very own story. I once wrote a poem for a young man named Greg Olsen, who died of cancer after returning from his mission.

The poem was called “October Snow,” and I was able to share it with him before he died. I put it in a book, and then my son Greg surprised me by writing music for it. The song was sung at Greg Olsen’s funeral. If I never wrote another thing in my life, that experience would have been worth it. I also wrote a couple of poems about sports. One of them is based on Dustin making his first field goal in a game the day before the NBA all-star game.

“My Three Sons,” all #41. From left: Gary, Greg, and Eric.

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“October Snow,” written for Greg Olsen, who died of cancer at age 24, 1987.

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I mailed it to Michael Jordan and got it back with his autograph.

Gary got Ricky Henderson, Ken Caminiti, and Tony McGuire to sign the other poem while attending spring training. It involved the playoff game between the San Diego Padres and the St. Louis Cardinals, which Gary, Landon, and I attended. All three of those baseball players could be hall-of-famers. Having all three of those autographs on a single sheet of paper probably makes me a really wealthy person on eBay, but I’ll never sell them. I gave that one to Landon. Dustin has the one autographed by Michael Jordan Another time I wrote an article that was printed in the Ensign.

It was one of the highlights of my writing career. It’s nice to have your mother think you are a good writer, but it’s really nice if the Ensign objectively says, “This is a good article.” It filled six pages, which is unusual. They say that unless you are a general authority, or are under consignment to write, getting a large article published is very rare. It was based on research I had done on Edmund Ellsworth being the leader of the first handcart company.

He later married Elizabeth Young, Article published in the Ensign, July 2000. oldest daughter 81

of Brigham Young, who is Caroll’s ancestor. At a Kinghorn and Ellsworth reunion, we presented “The Crossing,” which featured music composed by Greg and singing by Lory as Elizabeth. I had the opportunity to share their story at DUP meetings and church firesides.

In 1997 Caroll and I walked sixty-four miles across Wyoming in the sesquicentennial celebration of the pioneers. We pushed handcarts with Gary, Kimberly, Eric, Karen and their families.

We had personal contact with President Thomas S. Monson. It was difficult for me to make the trek (especially the last few miles where I walked with Karli). During the Sacrament Meeting we attended on the trek, I reflected on our ancestors and their sacrifice and then I thought about how the Savior had suffered the composite of all we and they had experienced. I shed tears of joy and gratitude for His Atonement.

Gary, Newell, and Eric; Sesquicentennial Pioneer Celebration, 1997.

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We moved into our current home on Richards Avenue in 1975, when Greg was a senior in high school. This place has kind of become our pride and joy. Back when we were having financial problems, they told us we could keep our home if we declared bankruptcy and paid our bill, fifty cents on the dollar. I didn’t feel comfortable living in a nice home while doing that, so I didn’t. All I wanted to do was keep our home. I didn’t care if we lost everything else—I’m just not a cabin kind of guy.

I’m not an extremely talented person. Probably my humility. . . no, probably my writing is it. I’m not a great singer, but I love to sing in the ward choir. I also love to listen to music—I love opera, plays, and anything classical. I probably get in to it more than Caroll does, even though she plays it frequently. I’m not a good artist either. Eric always says, “Just look at it and draw.” I look at something and draw, but my picture doesn’t look anything like it. I’m a good reader, but I don’t read very much except for the scriptures. I love the scriptures. The Book of Mormon changed my whole life. It is the greatest thing that ever happened in my life. I wouldn’t have married Caroll in the temple had I not read it.

Everything good that has happened in my life is as a result of my reading The Book of Mormon when I was fifteen.

I kind of like fifteen-year-olds. That’s one reason that I substitute teach seminary. I have really enjoyed doing it. After I sold the Gangplank, Gary suggested that I teach. I didn’t even know how you went about doing it, but I started before our mission and I still do it now. I have taught all of my grandkids in Idaho Falls, from Tara on down. This year I will get to teach McKayla.

A young woman in Shelley wrote: “Thank you so much for the AMAZING lesson you taught us today. I learned so much from all your stories you shared. I love the quote you said, ‘A lot that 83

happens in our life is based on faith.’ I am so glad you said those words; they really made me think. Thanks! I don’t know you, but by your lesson I know you are an AMAZING guy. You are by far one of my favorite Seminary teachers.”

One of my favorite church callings was serving as the teacher’s quorum advisor, which I did for over seven years after I was released as bishop. We had a large quorum. One Sunday we took a picture of twenty-three of the twenty-four quorum members who attended quorum meeting. Of the sixty-eight teachers in our quorum through the years, forty-four served missions. Most young men came from good homes, which accounted for their goodness. I am not very adventurous, but with the varsity scouts, I rappelled and went scuba diving in the swimming pool for my one and only time . . .and survived. On scouting trips with my

Grandma and Grandpa with all of the grandkids at family reunion, 2001.

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three sons, I kayaked the Salmon River, climbed Table Rock, and biked through Yellowstone Park—great adventures!

I’m really just a happy, optimistic person. I’m married to a beautiful wife. President Hinckley’s father said that if you truly love someone, they will never look old to you. They will look much to you like the day that you married them. You won’t notice their wrinkles, their white hair, or their canes. I believe that. I love Caroll very deeply, and she looks very young to me. She is very attractive, and also very intelligent and creative. We married as teenagers, but fifty-five years later we are well on our way to a billion. We enjoy attending concerts and plays, and love watching movies and ballgames together. This is especially because we get to cuddle and hold hands. We end each day by kneeling in prayer, which we have done nearly every night as counseled by the temple president when we got married. Caroll is the reason we have such beautiful and talented children and grandchildren. She is an excellent pianist, church leader and teacher. I pray we will Taken at family reunion in Nauvoo, IL, 1992. be together forever.

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My goal in life is to live until I die. My dad died at the age of seventy-four and he was buried on his birthday. On December 12, I have my seventy-fourth birthday. Karen said, “If I was you, I would stay in bed on my birthday.” I don’t have any plans of dying. I haven’t had any premonitions either. A lot of people will go and visit all of their kids before they die, so Caroll and I told each other that if one of us has a premonition, we will tell the other so we can prepare for it. On my sixtieth birthday, I did sixty push-ups. Landon who was about seven at the time also did

Five children and their spouses at family reunion in 2001. From left: Eric and Karen, Scott and Lesli, Newell and Caroll, Neil and Jennifer, Greg and Lori, and Gary and Kimberly.

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sixty push-ups and was sore for a few days. When I was seventy I did seventy push-ups, with some resting between sets. Brandon who was about seventeen at the time also did seventy push-ups, without any time out. On 12/12/12, I will have my seventy-fifth birthday and challenge anyone in the family to accompany me in doing seventy-five push-ups. Caroll says it is stupid for me to continue doing this, but I assure her I will only do it every five or ten years. I also assure her that I won’t do anything stupid, but will rest as often as necessary. I am a “napper” and derive great pleasure from taking at least a thirty-minute power nap nearly every day. I contribute my energy level and good physical and mental health to my “giving in” when I feel tired or sleepy.

My kids have sometimes asked me, “How in the world did you ever have the courage to move with five kids from California to Idaho, and open a business that you had never operated before?” I tell them it’s because I’m a born optimist. I never even considered failure. I am probably a little bit too optimistic at times; I should probably be a little bit more realistic about some things, but I’m definitely not pessimistic . . .or a worrier. I just never consider things failing. One of my favorite scriptures is Proverbs 3:5–6: “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.” I know that to be true in my life. I do trust the Lord with all my heart!

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About the Author Tara Walker is currently a student attending Brigham Young University. She is studying English language and editing and is happy to be graduating in December 2012. She currently lives in Provo, Utah. This compilation is her first publication.

Tara with Grandpa at his fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration, 2006.

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