The Leavitt Years

I was born on August 12, 1958 somewhere around 3:00 AM. I have three older sisters, one older brother and one younger brother. I was born in the Indian hospital, at least that is what they called it. It sounds a bit like segregation to me but I don't think it was. When the new hospital was built the town gave (or sold) the old hospital to the Blood Reserve and after that I guess it came to be known as the Indian hospital.

When I was born we lived on a small farm five miles west of Cardston (about 2 miles east of Leavitt) where my Dad was a sheep rancher. My earliest memory is about a time when we were at my great grandma Leavitt’s house. I don’t remember great grandma but I do remember that her dog bit Lester’s ear. There was blood everywhere. What an odd memory don’t you think?

I also remember that Uncle Devere and Aunt Margrete used to baby-sit me quite often. I don’t know why they babysat me so much but I do remember that I liked being at their house. It wasn’t until I started my autobiography that I realized that this house is the one where my great grandparents used to live. That would be the house that my grandpa grew up in. How cool to know that now. I always had a bit of a special bond with my Uncle Devere and Aunt Margrete and one of the stories that they loved to tell is how one time when I was around two years old Uncle Devere was tarring his roof. He had gone to run an errand and left the ladder leaning against the house. Aunt Margrete was working in the house and heard me crying. She came out of the house and heard me crying above her. She looked up and saw me standing on the edge of the house and I was holding my hands out. My hands were all covered with tar and when I saw her I said, “dirty”. I had climbed the ladder all on my own and stuck my hands in the tar. I wasn’t worried about the height but I did not like the tar on my hands. That story reminds me a lot of Sarah. One time we were at home and someone knocked on our door and asked if we knew that there was a little girl on our roof. Sarah had climbed out of her bedroom window onto the roof of the house. It kind of gives you a scare.

The house was a split-level house with the kitchen and living room on the ground level and then my bedroom and my parents were up a half level and Greg was below us in the half basement. One day my mom was carrying me down the stairs and she tripped. She instinctively threw her body underneath me so that I landed on top of her but in doing so she broke her thumb. Her thumb gave her problems for the rest of her life and I remember when she eventually had to have the joint in her thumb fused.

This is a picture of my mother holding me when I was around nine months old. I was able to walk when I was eight months old but the doctor told my mom not to let me because I would ruin my legs. She told me that there was no way she could stop me. Do you notice in the picture that the house is torn apart? Dad was always working on the house. He was always remodeling something.

One memory that I do have is of Christmas. I guess the older kids used to like to sneak down the stairs and check out their Christmas gifts on Christmas Eve. To prevent this Mom and Dad would stack up the pots and pans in a tall stack and then tie a string to them. They would run the string across the bottom of the stairs so that if some one came down the stairs they would catch the string and knock over the stack of pots and pans. I don’t remember who tripped the booby trap but I do remember the noise and commotion.

Behind our house was a barn. It was a big old red barn just like the ones you see in storybooks. Lester and I would always climb up in the hayloft and play around. That was a lot of fun. One time our cousins were there and we were up in the hayloft when my cousin pulled out a roll-your-own cigarette made with caragana leaves. He lit up the cigarette and started smoking it. Thinking back I am horrified that he would light a match in a hay loft full of hay. Can you imagine that? We were all idiots but to be fair I was probably only four or five years old. My cousin however was older. So my cousin hands me the cigarette and I blow into it. He looks at me like I’m stupid and says, “you don’t blow in it, you suck it in”. I looked at him like he was stupid and I said, “why would I want to suck in that smoke?” I knew very well that smoke was something you tried NOT to breathe, not something that you would intentionally breathe. How dumb did he think I was?

I think my dad did raise some crops on the farm but his big business was sheep farming. One of my favorite things was to feed the bummer lambs. For those who might not know, a “bummer” lamb was an orphan. If the mother had died then the babies had to be fed with a bottle. We would get big pop bottles (they were made of glass in those days), fill them with milk, put a nipple on the end and then feed the lambs. Boy would they get excited. They would almost rip the bottle out of your hands. Another fun time was shearing time. A bunch of men would show up with electric razers and sheer the wool off the sheep. A big fluffy woolly sheep would walk in one end of the shed and a scrawny naked looking sheep would walk out the other end. The wool was shoved into these big tall bags that hung from the ceiling. To me they seemed like they were twenty feet tall but in reality they were probably only six or eight feet tall. My job was to climb up a ladder and jump into the bag of wool to try and pack it down. That was one of my favorite jobs. I wonder if my overexposure to wool is why I developed an allergy to wool later in my life?

The family farm was on the side of a tall hill. The house was at the foot of the hill and near the top of the hill large sand stone rocks jutted out of the ground. It was tremendous fun climbing those rocks. Hawks used to nest in holes in the face of the cliffs. They seemed very tall to me but I imagine they weren’t all that tall. Half way up the hill an irrigation ditch cut across the farm. Below the ditch near the bottom of the hill was a natural spring. The water was very high in fluorine. It had so much fluorine that Dads teeth were stained quite yellow. They may have been yellow but he never had a cavity in his life until many years after they moved off the farm. I don’t think any of the kids had cavities either until after we moved off the farm. This was in a day when cavities were very common and a person without cavities was quite rare. Most of my kids grew to adulthood without cavities but that was unusual in my time and even more rare in my Dads time. In fact, I remember a story my Dad told when he was having his physical to enter the Army, the doctor was so amazed with Dad’s teeth that he called all the other doctors over to look at them.

Along the west side of the house was a long tall caragana hedge. Maybe it was the same caragana that produced the cigarette that was smoked in the hayloft. Lester and I would spend hours catching bee's that were collecting pollen off the flowers. We would catch them in quart canning jars and we'd have dozens of bottle's all lined up on the kitchen counter. I suspect that mom let them all go after we'd gone to bed for the night. We would also walk along the ditch and collect these pretty yellow flowers for Mom and give them to her. I think they were called "buffalo bills" or something like that. It wasn't until years later that I learned that she was allergic to them. The things a mother does for her children.

My uncle Lamont and Aunt Tillie, lived across the highway from us. They had a son my age named David Leavitt. It was a big deal when we got to walk across the highway to go play with David. I don’t remember that we played with each other a lot but it was a special time when we could. I don’t remember when David’s oldest brother, Roger, went on his mission but I do remember when he got home. I thought he was so old and mature and I was quite impressed.

In front of the house we had a small lawn. On the south edge of the lawn was a huge cottonwood tree. My brothers and sisters used to climb the tree all the time but I was too small to reach the first branch and it was so frustrating for me to watch them climb the tree while I couldn’t. Once, one of my siblings boosted me up to that first branch and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I loved to climb it but I only remember that I was able to climb it once. Between the tree and the highway Mom had a huge garden. I used to dread having to weed the garden but being as young as I was I’ll bet my older siblings worked in there much more than I did.

Another frustration of mine was that Greg and Renee Cahoon used to do all kinds of fun mechanical projects that I really wanted to join in on but I was a little ahead of my time. The one project I remember was they built a go-cart. I remember that it had a fairly large motor on it but I don’t know what kind it was. It was too small to be from a car but it was too big to be a lawnmower motor. It was probably from a piece of farm machinery. They used to run that old go-cart up and down the old highway which somewhat paralleled the new highway. I always wanted to build a go-cart but we never had the right stuff and I sure couldn’t ever afford to buy what I needed.

I do have to tell a Greg story that I don't actually remember but I wish that I did. I think Greg told me this story. Some where along the line Greg figured out that making nitroglycerin is really quite easy. You mix the few simple chemicals together and you have it but the final step is to boil off the water. This also drives the reaction. The tough part is that the reaction is exothermic which means that once you start heating it will get even hotter all on it's own and you have to cool it down to keep it from exploding. The problem is that you do have to let it get a little bit hot to drive off the water and to complete the reaction. The experts would take a beaker of the solution and carefully measure the temperature while they move the beaker back and forth from an ice bath to a heater. Greg had mixed everything up but he was too scared to actually react the chemicals by heating it up. That only proves that he was a smart boy. One day Mom was in his room and she saw this bottle labeled "nitroglycerin". It scared her so much that she threw it out. Remember, this was in the day that they had burning barrels. Can you guess what happened? Not only did our burning barrel disappear but I think it left a substantial hole in the ground. Luckily, no one was around when the burning barrel blew up.

It seems like the whole time we lived in Leavitt Dad was always remodeling the house. I remember one time a tractor was out in front of the house and I think they were working on the kitchen windows or something. I also remember that suddenly some liquid squirted all over the place from the front of the tractor. At first I thought someone did it on purpose because the workers all got wet. It seem quite miraculous to me and I had no idea what had happened. The workers were very worried so I eventually realized that this wasn't supposed to happen. It must have either been a blown hydraulic hose or a blown radiator hose. What ever it was, it was quite exciting.

When I turned six my comfortable life on the farm drew to an end. I was looking forward to going to school but that excitement lasted about one week. I hated school and to be honest I have hated school every day since then. I've tried to analyze what it is that I hate about school and my first response was, I hate homework. That is certainly true for University but in grade school I never did any homework. I'm serious, if you don't count grade eleven English with Mr Brady I don't think I did more than five hours of homework in the entire twelve years I went to school. Mr Brady was from England and it was a matter of principle with him that everyone had to do homework. I loved ALL of my science classes so I think in grade school I was just totally bored with the subjects. I didn't like social studies, English, math, reading, phys ed. None of it. I loved science but I didn't get that until sixth grade, and I also loved a hunter training course that I got to take in sixth grade.

In my first grade though, my misery was compounded by taking the bus. My siblings abandoned me, Lester wasn't there so I was all alone stuck on the front row. The older kids teased me mercilessly. One time I remember that I turned around and punched the guy behind me right in the face. I really don't remember the details and I don't think I intended to hit him in the face but I did and it felt real good. That actually shut him up for a while. Another time there was this real cute girl who sat beside me and she was much older than me. She must have been at least a forth or fifth grader. I remember one day they kept teasing me, telling me that I should kiss her. I really don't know why people allow themselves to be pressured into doing something that they know will only make the situation worse. I guess it is that desire to alleviate the immediate discomfort even though you know worse things are to follow. There is a real art to torture and these guys had it down. After much pressure I finally did lean over and kiss her on the cheek. The teasing was much worse after that. The funny thing is that she didn't seem to mind. I wonder who she was?

In addition to the farm Dad also managed the bulk Esso Oil dealership in Cardston. What a fun place that was. It was at the end of the tracks and large trains used to pull up to his dealership and pump these huge tanks full of gasoline. As the business grew it became too much work for Dad to run both the farm and the dealership. He finally sold the farm to another cousin of mine (was it Marvin?) and we moved into town. That was in the middle of first grade and I was never so happy to stop riding the bus of torture. It was also the beginning of a new life for me.