Southern Alberta – Youth and Early Married Life by Leola Redford Zemp

As shared by her daughter Donna Rigby

I can well understand why we are encouraged to write our life story while we are young. After so many years pass, it is impossible to remember everything or dates, so I’ll just have to do the best I can, possibly back-tracking at times. For some reason I feel an urgency to get it written down.

It was a warm sunny day in April when I made my advent into the world. I assume it was warm and sunny, being so near Easter and all. The exact date, since dates are so important (depending on who they’re with), was 19 April 1922. My patriarchal blessing tells me I was born of goodly parents, and I have to agree, since I knew them quite intimately for a number of years. My parents and one brother, Sidney, lived on a farm. I’m sure at that time there just wasn’t anywhere else to live, except a farm. And besides living on a farm was synonymous with hard hard work, with very little time for play or sleep.

I never knew any life as a child, except on the farm. Not a big farm, nor a prosperous one. One of those that took all your energy and more and gave very little in return. Very little of the material things, that is.  And material things were very important to a child growing up anywhere. I can, however, thank my life on the farm, to a great extent, for my healthy body and reasonably healthy mind.

However, I find it hard to have patience with someone who loudly and long sings the praises of farm life. I can’t help wondering how much time they spent on one. It did not provide me with any respect for hard work. It taught me how to work and that work is a necessary part of life, if you want to eat and have clothes to wear and shelter over your head. But work itself never ceased to be a drudge, in my mind. I never avoided it, but I never became a bosom friend to it either.

So, I took my turn milking the cows (twice a day), weeding and hoeing the garden, picking potato bugs off the vines, planting potatoes, digging potatoes, sacking them for storage, stooking[setting a number of sheaves upright with their heads together to dry] the grain, gathering the eggs, separating the milk, cooking for crews of men, doing the dishes, ironing the clothes, washing the clothes, hauling the water to wash the clothes, bringing in the coal and wood, baking the bread, churning the butter, swilling the pigs, currying the horses, and on and on and on into infinity—and sleeping and waking to start it all over again.

There was no time to be a child and study nature or just do what a child needs to do as part of growing up. There was no time to smell the new-mown hay. The object was to get the hay into the stack before the rain destroyed it, not to smell it. By then it was no longer new mown, and the fragrant smell was gone.

When I was small, we used to go over to Lee’s Creek in the summer to pick service berries (Saskatoons) and in the fall to pick chokecherries. These grew wild in great abundance, and we bottled the service berries for fresh fruit and made jelly from the choke cherries. My parents and one of my aunts and some of my cousins would go together in our wagon. We took ten-gallon milk cans to bring the berries home in. I remember on one of these trips we were on our way home. I was sitting on one of the milk cans, and when the wagon went over a rock, the can tipped, and I fell out. My aunt grabbed my foot and held onto it until my dad could bring the wagon to a stop, or I would have been run over by the rear wheel, and the weight would have crushed my body. I wasn’t impressed at that time that it was my Heavenly father who saved my life, but now, as I have come to realize the presence of His hand in all things in our lives, this fact is very evident to me.

Still, when we went berry picking there was no time to listen to the song of a lark, or exclaim over the beautiful flowers, or watch the butterflies. There were ten-gallon cans to be filled before the day was over, and there was the trip back home so we could begin to clean the berries and prepare them for bottling, so they could be stored against the cold winter months ahead.

These months were indeed cold, and they were long. Although, it was never too cold to go to school, most of the time on foot.

It seemed that summer only came on Tuesday, and if we were lucky, we were able to witness the event between chores and bedtime.

These are the eyes through which I view farm life. The eyes of a child. Since growing up, I have tried to remember some times when it was all the fun described in the books, but I have to conclude that the only people who were meant to enjoy farm life, are those who never had to depend on one for a living. To those who lived in the city, a farm was a place to go to learn about the animals and discover which sound belongs to which name.

Before you get the idea that I was hatched from an egg, or grew on a tree, I had better tell you, ‘Yes, I had a mother.” Sadly it took until I was a grandmother myself, before I came to realize that my mother was also a very special person, and still is at 84. Her life was not an easy one, either. All those chores I mentioned, she performed also. She wasn’t one to sit around and say, “You do this,” and “You do that.” There was always enough for everyone to do. In addition, she tended not only to her family but also to her neighbors in need. I remember that sometimes I had to go to the neighbor’s house to see her because she was sitting with someone who was sick or dying. She always had time to help a neighbor.

I couldn’t figure out why my brother never had to do dishes or make beds, or wash the clothes, or any of those inside chores that were always considered women’s work. It did seem so unfair. Fortunately, I left the farm at an early enough age to learn there were some pleasures to be had from life.

When I got married and had a family of my own, I found myself wishing that we lived on a farm so I could find work enough to keep my kids busy. They seemed to have altogether too much time for just playing. But, they are all grown up and there isn’t any one of the eight who doesn’t know how to work. And, if you asked them, I’m sure they would tell you what a life of drudgery they had when they were growing up. They would tell you that there just wasn’t time for enjoying nature: listen to a bird sing or a cricket chirp. So it seems there isn’t much difference between the young people of my generation and the ones today.

The problems are different, the pace is faster, and there are still the same frustrations to face. There is still beauty around us and people still don’t think they have enough time to enjoy it. There is still work to do and not enough time to do it all. But I have jumped way ahead of my story.

I guess about the first great event in my life occurred when I was about five years old. My mother came home from the hospital with a brand new baby. Another brother. This momentous day was near the middle of October, and in that part of the country winter comes early. In fact, as I look back, it seems to me it was nearly always winter in my young life. This particular night mom told Sidney and me if we would hurry and bring in the cows for milking we could watch her bathe the baby. Those cows probably didn’t give much milk that night because everyone knows if you run a milk cow or get her otherwise excited, she will “hold-up” her milk. Anyway we got a grandstand seat for the performance of the baby’s bath.

The winter nights were very cold. Every morning we would wake up with frost on the covers under our noses where we had breathed on them all night. There was always a bucket of water on the stand beside the wash basin and we always had to break the ice on top. Sometimes we had to put it on the stove and melt it because it would be frozen solid all the way through. Each night before going to bed, Dad would bank the fire in the kitchen stove. Then in the morning, he would get up and stir it with the poker and it would start to burn. Getting a flame going was very important because otherwise it would just smoke and the fumes from the smoke were a dangerous, sulphurous gas, which could cause an explosion similar to lighting a match near gasoline fumes. After the fire would get going good, Dad would shut down the damper in the chimney so the heat would come out into the house and not out the chimney.

One morning, Dad got up as usual and started the fire burning, then left to get water from the spring. He had been gone only a few minutes when there was a terrible explosion, and the house was engulfed in flames. Mom grabbed the baby with the blankets he was covered with, and we all ran out into the snow, and watched our house burn to the ground. Nothing was saved except the blankets around the baby and the clothes we happened to have on. It was a new house, not yet finished, built from logs hauled out of the timber.

Dad had been offered a job running a farm in Beazer, with living quarters. He had decided to turn it down because he couldn’t look after the home place, too. Needless to say, his mind was changed, and we moved onto the old Bradshaw place in Beazer. Max Bradshaw was about the only farmer who could afford to hire someone to run his farm.

We stayed in Beazer about a year, then Dad got an offer to run a farm back in Leavitt, with a huge two-story brick house on it. It belonged to the Smith Brothers. We had part of this house for living quarters. We were living here when I started school. It was a two-mile walk to and from school. My first grade teacher was Mr. Hicken. He boarded with a family that lived about a quarter of a mile from us. It seemed like about half the school lived in our direction. Some further, and some closer. The Walburgers always rode horses to school when the weather was nice, but in winter they always drove a team of horses hitched to a sled. Usually, if we got on the road before they went by, they gave us a ride. Otherwise, we had to walk even in the cold winter.

The winter we lived on the old Smith place my mother got pneumonia and one day all the relatives were gathered there; she was so bad. We called Dr. Malloy to come out from Cardston. It was very late at night. He did what he could for her, and told us she couldn’t come through it. After he left, we all knelt around her bed and someone anointed her head with oil, then we all joined hands, and Dad placed his hands on her head and blessed her. Next day she was so much better, and this was my first experience with the healing power of the Priesthood.

As my younger brother [Glyn] grew, he had a terrible phobia for horses. If there was a horse around, he got on it and he invariably fell off. But he would get right back on again. I don’t know how much these falls had to do with it, but he began to have epileptic seizures. By this time, we had moved back to our own farm, having built a two-room shack.

I remember one night, it was very cold, and Mom and Dad had gone out to do some chores. Glyn had gone with them. Sidney and I were in the house alone and suddenly we heard these weird noises outside the door. We looked out and there was Glyn lying on the doorstep in one of his seizures. We knew we had to force something in his mouth to hold his tongue down or he might swallow it and choke on it. So while screaming for Mom and Dad to come, we got him in the house and began working on him.

The procedure was to put something cold on his head and immerse his feet in hot water. After working with him for what seemed like eternity, but could only have been a few minutes, we finally got him to come around. A short time after this, Dad made an appointment with President E. J. Wood to have Glyn blessed because the doctor said there was no cure, and he would have them (the seizures) all his life.

When Dad got to the temple with Glyn, President Wood was busy, and they asked if one of the other officials could give him a blessing, but Dad said, “No.” He would rather wait. Anyone who never knew President Wood missed a great experience. He was truly God-like, a very saintly man. It seems to me, he was always the same age with white hair and a beautiful countenance. He gave Glyn a blessing that day (Glyn was five years old, as I recall), and he never had an epileptic seizure again! Not even a small one.

Well, life went on, the Depression hit, and the government gave assistance to almost every family in our town. Except mine. My Dad was a big man. Big in stature, but also big in character. He was very strong, but a quiet man. One of his favorite sayings was: “It’s poor goods that has to be advertised.” And he never bragged. He never told us he loved us, but we knew he did.

My dad was also a proud man and wouldn’t accept anything handed out by the government. He would go out hunting for food; sometimes it was a rabbit he brought home. Once in a while a deer or elk. There were even times the cupboard was barer than Mother Hubbard’s.

Most people look back on their school years as good times. I can’t remember a single good thing about school.  We were always the poorer family in the town, and youngsters in school can very, very cruel. I stuck it out through grade eleven, which was the highest grade taught in Leavitt. I graduated with high marks. Then I moved to Cardston to stay with Grandma and Grandpa Redford and attend grade twelve.

I think I went to school about a week, then got myself a job as a waitress in a café. Later I got a chance to go to Raymond and work on the Meeks Ranch on Milk River Ridge. It was a long way from town, and I stayed there month after month, cooking for as many as twenty men during round-up and branding time. During winter, I would work on the other Meeks Ranch nearer town. The wife of this Meeks brother was named Leola, too. They called her Ollie, and so they started calling me Pete, to distinguish us one from the other.

I had an uncle who was about my age, who I guess was the only person I could really call a friend. He was my mother’s brother and we called him Chick, short for Charles. Grandma Redford used to worry that we would get serious and marry, but we were just good friends.

Then the war broke out (WWII), and Chick enlisted in the RCAF as a gunner. I’ll never forget when the news came—Gunner Charles Broadbent Haslam missing in action. It was his first mission over Germany. By this time I was in Calgary going to secretarial college I have Chick to thank for this because it was money he sent home that paid for my tuition, and I worked to pay for my expenses.

Just about the time the war broke out, Sidney [Redford] had an acute attack of appendicitis. After the operation, he got yellow jaundice and after several days of suffering, he died. I was in the room at the time, and I still can’t describe my feelings. After so many of years of torment while going to school, you learn to hide your emotions. It becomes somewhat impossible to show either joy (because it certainly won’t last) or sorrow (because who is there to care anyway). You just accept and go on.

November 26, 1980:I just finished making an oatmeal cake for the Branch Supper on Saturday. With that came back all my hated memories of trying to gag down oatmeal mush as a child. I hated it! Still do. But with memories of oatmeal came memories of my parents. I guess the thing I see most often in my mind is my father getting ready to go to town, and as he left, he never failed to give my mother a hug and a kiss. That’s a good way to remember your parents.

I don’t remember my parents expressing any joy or satisfaction with life. It must have been there, but I don’t remember it. But then, farming is a very hard, demanding way of life with very few visible rewards.

With Christmas season so near, I remember Christmas, as a child. I never looked forward to Christmas for the presents under the tree. Once I got a rag doll. Another time I got a toothbrush with a celluloid elephant or maybe a Cupie doll attached to it. We always got an orange and a little candy.

I always prayed it wouldn’t snow on Christmas Day because if it wasn’t too cold, we would get in the sleigh with hot rocks and hundreds of blankets and got to Granma Haslam’s for dinner. It usually snowed such a blizzard that it would be suicidal to try to go anywhere.

March 20, 1991: I have been pondering my life, or more to the point, the lives of my parents, the great example they have always been for good. I’m afraid I was at a very advanced age before I realized that yes, I was born of goodly parents. A fact told me in my Patriarchal Blessing, under the hands of Patriarch John F. Anderson in March 1942.

My mother had a very difficult time in childbirth, also several bouts with pneumonia. Mind you, this was well before the time of penicillin and other wonder drugs, which are now available to cure infections in the body, even ruptured appendixes. But I digress, as you will see later, when I speak of my father.

I am thinking of one particular time when my mother was fighting pneumonia, and it was a fight. She was so bad that the doctor and nurses had given up all hope of her recovery. The only reason they gave for looking in on her was to see if she was still living. Here was this woman, at death’s door, which was wide open, waiting for her to enter. Picture her weakness, not even able to lift her hand, and the Holy Ghost says to her “Get up and walk.” Well, she knew that the Spirit would not tell her to do something without providing a way to do it. So she got out of bed, holding onto the wall and slowly, painfully made her way around the room and back to the bed. Again, she was told to get up and walk, and so repeated the process. What an example faith! Needless to say, she recovered, and, even now, at the age of 91, she is still walking.

Now, to speak of my father and his faith: At one time, in the middle of winter, a Canadian winter, he was in the mountains working in a lumber camp, when one day he was struck with excruciating pain in his lower abdomen. There was no doctor in camp, and the only way out was on a truck that brought in supplies and took out lumber. So he spent all day and night unable to do anything except lay there and suffer. The only medicine available was a cup of tea, which the cook brought to him. Being a faithful observer of the Word of Wisdom, after the cook left the tea, Dad poured it between the floorboards of the cabin he was occupying. As he lay there suffering and praying for relief, he noticed someone in the room. He thought it was me, but soon discovered it was my sister, who had died in childbirth. She asked him if he wanted to come with her. He replied, “No.” He had a family who needed him to support them. She left and so did most of the pain. The next day the truck brought in supplies and left with a load. Since there were already three in the cab, Dad had to ride on top of the lumber in the cold and storm. On arriving in Cardston, he went to the hospital and on examination, it was discovered that his appendix had ruptured, spreading poison throughout his body. But by the time he got to the doctor, the poison had been eliminated and the appendix dried up.

A few months later my brother died of a ruptured appendix. This was a great sorrow to Dad who thought if he had gone with my sister, then my brother’s life might have been spared. This weighed on his mind for a long period of time. Finally, one night he had a dream in which Sidney, my brother, came to him and talked to him for a few minutes. Then Sidney said he had to leave. He had a work to do; a short distance away was a great multitude of people by a lakeshore, waiting for Sidney to teach them the Gospel.