When and where were you born? Describe your home, your neighborhood and the town you grew up in.
I was born in Burley, Idaho on December 7th, 1963, while my family was living in Heyburn, Idaho. We moved from there when I was very young, so I have no memory of life there. We moved to Shoshone, Idaho. I have some memories of that home and town, but they are very faint. When I was 4, we moved to Jerome, Idaho, to a 17-acre farm so that my dad could do what he loved most—farm. He was a Civil Engineer and worked fulltime as such, but had the farm as a sort of hobby—a very all-consuming hobby! Our house was a somewhat typical farmhouse. When we moved in, there were 3 bedrooms, a kitchen, a dining room, a front room (like a living room, really), and one bathroom. The basement was unfinished. My parents got one of the bedrooms, and the girls got one bedroom while the boys got the other. There were 3 boys and 3 girls. And yes, we really survived—all 8 of us—with only one bathroom. Eventually my dad finished part of the basement as a very large bedroom which my brothers all shared. The rest of the basement consisted of an area for the washer and dryer, a large fruit room, as we called it, for storing all the home-canned bottles my mom put up every year (somewhere around 1500/year!), more shelves for dry-food storage, an old coal-burning furnace, and a coal room full of coal. The coal room used to give me nightmares, because it was so dark and black. Eventually my parents had a heat pump installed, and the coal room disappeared so that the fruit room could expand.
We had a very large garden every year, which all of us were expected to help plant and maintain. We grew/raised everything we needed to sustain our family and were indeed very self-reliant. We hardly had a need to go to town for things, as my mother sewed most of our clothes—especially when I was young—and we raised cows for meat. Also, we had a milking cow so we always had fresh mild—which I hated because of the bits of cream that would slide down your throat when you drank it. For a time we also had chickens, but eventually we just bought our eggs from a neighbor. It was a wonderful rural environment that I loved. Our closest neighbors were about ¼ of a mile in one direction, and ½ of a mile in the other direction. Our farm bordered desert land, so we were fairly remote. We had a HUGE yard—at least an acre—all planted in grass, which I got to mow. Our house was situated on a small hill. There were three very large willow trees in our yard which we put to good use, climbing, building treehouses in, and tying rope swings to. We also had a canal running through our property which we would swim in on hot summer days. We were free to roam as we chose. Our parents never had to worry about “bad” stuff happening to us. And so we spent much of our growing up outdoors, digging holes for “forts”, making mud villages, playing “Jam” (it’s called “Sardines” now), Kick the Can, Hide and Seek, and a myriad of other outdoor games and activities. We would either walk or ride bikes to play with our neighbor friends, which we had at both ends of the dead-end gravel road we lived on. Often in the wintertime we would find ourselves snowed in—literally—as the snow would fall heavily and the wind would create large drifts that made our gravel road impassable at times.
I attended school in the town of Jerome, which had a population of about 5,000 (I’m guessing) at the time. I went all through my school years in Jerome, 1st through 12th grade with the same kids. The town itself had one stoplight, at the intersection of Main and Lincoln. There was a drugstore on the corner there that had a soda fountain, and another drugstore that was well-stocked with candy that we would stop and buy on our way to Primary on Tuesdays or Wednesdays after school. There was a movie theater, a few banks, a few grocery stores—one of which five of my family members (me included) worked at at some point—and various other businesses.
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