Happy Birthday Day!!!
My Dad and Me at a couple of weeks old….
May 10,1979 13th Ward Fathers and Sons Outing
My family has started a tradition of email memory’s of each other on their Birthday so…Here are a few of my memories of Dad….
· Dad didn’t watch a lot of TV. He would always say “If you have time for TV you have time for chores”. On Saturday’s he would work me to the bone, but I knew that if I could convince him that there was a UofA basketball game on TV in the afternoon he couldn’t resist laying on the floor under the swamp cooler taking a nap. Go Wildcats!!!!!!!!!!
· One of the greatest gifts he gave me was to teach me how to work. To this day I believe I can out work anyone because of the lessons he taught me. I remember starting at a very young age working with Dad. Here are few of the memorable projects.
-The Swimming Pool. (I vividly remember starting the project with shovels in hand until the four Mexicans came up the lane looking for work…they really saved us a summer full of digging. Sometimes I wonder if Dad was really trying to just keep us busy all summer by digging a big hole. No one ever believes me when I tell them about our pool until I show them the pictures. If you remember the first couple of days each summer you would swim barefoot. Then have to swim the next week with socks on because the bottom of the pool was so ruff it would peel the bottom of your foot off. I could talk all day about the pool…….when we got a couple of years older he decided it needed to be deeper, so he stacked two layers of cinder block around the pool to make it two feet deeper.)
-Items used: Sweat, cinder blocks, concrete, shovels, Conklin roofing product to seal the cracks, rebar and baling wire.
- Garage. (I don’t know the story behind why he decided to build it…but I am guessing it had something to do with Grandpa Vance. Dad? Dad built the thing like a fortress(Rebar reinforced Cement Floors, six inch thick cinder block walls ten feet high, steal rafters, bolted down ½ inch plywood, tin roof screwed down. I remember us all having a lot of fun in there(playing in the rafters, riding skateboards and bikes round the inside like a track.) It was big enough to hold a washer/dryer, ten bikes (all with their own peg to hang on), two cars, ten 50 gallon barrels of wheat, tools, welder, and a deep freeze.)
-Items used: Sweat, cinder blocks, concrete, shovels, rebar, welder, steel tubes, plywood, Conklin roofing products, and baling wire.
- Reroofing the house many times. (The time that sticks out to me most is when he decided to use the wood Grandpa Brown and Uncle Mark got from the condemned house’s from the mines in Morenci. Let’s just say it was not the straightest stuff in the world. But, we got it done…)
-Items used: Sweat, old crappy wood formally condemned , and Conklin roofing products.
- Pulling the old Cotton Wood Tree Down. (The tree had a 10 food diameter base, but was hollowed out. Dad was afraid that it would fall down in a storm, so he needed to cut it down. He cut it completely around the base, but it didn’t move a bit. So he borrowed a tractor from Lealand and pulled it over.)
- Items used: Sweat, chainsaw, tractor, and not baling wire this time. He had to get a 200 foot cable to pull it down with.
- The yearly burning of the field. (Bring on the Pomerene Fire Department. We would start in one corner of the field each year with the plan of slowly working are way around the field. It never seemed to work that way. It always ended up with running around with shovels, hoses, and bucks of water with gunnysacks to swat the fire down.)
- Items used: Sweat, shovels, bucks of water, and kid swinging gunnysacks.
- List of some day to day things I did with dad: chop wood, work on cars(where I learned to swear), garden(did my first garden this year-thanks dad), home teaching….
· Dad would get so mad at me during dinner because I wouldn’t eat my squash that he would take me outside and say “start running”. I had to run around the house while he kicked me in the butt. The girls would beg me to just eat it.
· Dad got a kick out of me getting bucked off the colts, when he was breaking them.
· Dad always made us Breakfast. I still remember the taste of the orange, gratefruit, and tangerine juice cocktail…pucker up!
· One last funny story. One time on one of our many tips to the desert to throw something away. The station wagon broke down. Dad barrow one of Lealands tractors to pull it home. Dad drove the tractor and I drove the car. Mind you I was only 12 at the time. I acted like I knew what I was doing, but my heart was pounding. The car didn’t have power steering and the breaks weren’t working very well. I kept running into the back of the tractor and Dad kept giving me dirty looks…Sorry I was 12!
-This made me remember Dad teaching us how to drive. Kill me now…Little did he know we had all been taking the cars out joyriding for years around Lealands farm….
I could go on forever about Dad. Dad you are the best Dad any kid could have asked for. I appreciate all the lesson you taught me, and how hard you worked for all of us. As I get older I understand you more and more…there was a method to the madness. Seven living kids all active and married in the temple, you and mom have built quite a legacy.
Your smartest, best looking, hardest working kid(as you always call me)!
-Ben
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