My
name is Hal. I was born on January 26th 1929, the second child of Jay
and Willa Bresock. I was born in Kaysville, Utah on a cold, snowy, winter
day. We were visiting my mom's brother, Uncle Henry, in Kaysville,
Utah. We were snowed in and there I was born. My grandfather, George
Washington Kidd was the first to hold me, so I was told.
My
mother was from Tennessee, my father, from West Virginia. Neither had
much formal education. My father was mechanically inclined and was the
head mechanic for Yuba Tractor Company from 1910 - 1917. While he was
out on assignment, working the big dry farms in Idaho, he met my
mother. My mother and her family had joined the church in Tennessee and
moved to Idaho. They got married and were sealed in the Salt Lake
Temple and moved to Layton, UT in the mid-twenties.
I
was born in 1929 during The Great Depression. My dad had cleared a
parcel of land of about 40 acres and built a nice home, with a nice
little fruit farm that was just beginning to bear. He had hoped to make
a living and raise his family there, but things turned out differently
in this mortal world. He owed three hundred dollars on his farm, but in
the middle of the depression, with no money and no hope of getting any,
not even enough to pay the interest, he lost the farm. We had to move
to Kaysville, where mother had an unmarried brother, Uncle Walter. We
lived with him for a good number of years.
I
don't remember ever going to church, except one time. A neighbor lady
took me to Primary and when Primary was out, I started for home and got
lost. It seemed like I would never get home again. It was not a good
experience for me. I do remember getting baptized, but in my Aaronic
Priesthood years never got invited to go to church, although they would
come to our house to get fast offerings.
In
1941 World War II started. My father had been trying to make a living
by peddling vegetables. This meant going to Arizona in an old truck,
getting a few crates of oranges or grapefruit and peddling them up into
Idaho and Wyoming. When World War II broke out in 1941 he got a job
with his trucks (he traded in his old Model A Truck on a new Ford Truck,
then added one more later) He hauled cement to build the runways for
Hillfield Airforce Base. He got .06 cents for each sack of cement
hauled. I remember that he could haul 160 sacks in one load and he made
sometimes three trips a day if he put in 15 - 16 hours. He wouldn't
put his money in the bank so he saved it in the house and at the end of
the war he had saved approximately $5,000. He sold his trucks and
decided he was going to move to Oregon.
Mom
had a niece that lived in Oregon and so she wasn't too opposed to the
idea. I was 17 and had already decided that I was going to sea. My
brother Nes (I always called him Nes and other people called him Jack)
had already been to sea during wartime years and made reasonably good
money.
Not
having a work ethic myself, to speak of, only having worked in an onion
field for .20 cents an hour and more or less a failure in school, I
dropped out and my friend David Phelps and I went to San Francisco. We
went to a two-week school before we could get our seaman's document to
work as an apprentice on any ship. My mother saved all the letters I
wrote home during this time. She was a great lady. I loved her so much
and have always felt a closeness to her. Here is one such letter
written home during this time, written February 1, 1946:
Dear Family,
I'm
going to start school today. I'm writing you this letter to tell you
that I went up to the Alaska Steamship Company yesterday and asked when
the William T. Charmen was due in and he said about the 15th of February
(that's the ship Nes was on). I will be through schooling about the 9th
so I guess I won't get to see him because if I wait until the last
possible moment I might not be able to get a ship right there. Then I
would have to stay a little while and would not have enough funds. But
we'll write about the 8th and tell you how things stand. When we got
here we had $105 now we have $75. It costs about $30 a week to live.
Love, Hal
That
was the first letter I ever wrote when I left home. I was just
seventeen. Well, I got on a ship, the name of it being the Arthur L.
Perry, and we sailed from San Francisco to Seattle. It was about a
three-day trip and I was on the ship probably about three weeks.
After
that trip, I went home and helped Mom and Dad move to a place called
Shady Cove, Oregon. There my father built a house and worked with a man
named Fred Mitchell (my mother's niece's husband) and Nes was there
with me. We worked on that house all summer long. We dug a well and tore
down an old barn for lumber that he could use for the framework of the
house. When it was finished, it was a relatively nice house for the
time. It had three bedrooms, one bathroom, large dining room, and a big
kitchen. It cost him around $5,000 for it. After it was pretty well
finished, I went back to sea in March of 1947 on a ship named the
Douglas Victory. I went on an inner-coastal trip, came back, and went on
another ship in April of 1947, which went to Shanghai, China and
Taiwan. It was quite an adventure for a young man of seventeen to go to
all those foreign countries. I saved my money and sent some home to help
my mom and dad from time to time. In September, 1947 I got on a ship
going to the Persian Gulf. We were loaded with pipe and all kinds of
equipment for the oil fields. That was when they were first developing
the oil fields of the Middle East. In that part of the world they
wouldn't even let us go ashore because they were afraid that some
drunken sailor might cause trouble. So I was on that ship about four
months and never did get to set foot ashore. You could just see the
shoreline. I came back in February 1948 and Nes had come home at that
time, deciding not to continue sailing. Dad was working in the woods
trying to make a living and he was in his late fifties. Nes had bought a
chain-saw with the intent to become a woodsman. It was good money. A
good set of Fallers and Buckers (the person who cuts the tree into
links) could make $20 a day and that was a good day's wage in the
1940's.
I
came back from the Persian Gulf and Nes had a new saw that cost him
$500, a lot of money in those days. He and this guy he met in a bar one
night, went into the woods and worked just one day. When they went home
that night, they left the saw sitting on a stump. When they went back
the next morning the group of guys working right next to them had felled
a tree and it landed right on the saw and smashed it right into the
stump. It was flattened and nothing was left of it. Nes was feeling
pretty bad. The guy he worked with walked away, apparently he had
persuaded Nes to buy the saw and he was going to pay him half when they
earned enough money.
By
chance, our neighbor was a guy in his late fifties, who had worked in
the lumber business felling trees. He was getting too old to work in the
woods in that line of work, lugging those big ol' saws around. In those
days it took two men to carry one. So he sold us his saw and we paid
$400 for it. Nes and I went on working right where he and the other guy
left off. Through trial and error we learned how to fell timber and cut
it up. It got so we made some pretty good money. We had a little old
Chevy car that we hauled our tent around in. We camped right out in
those Oregon woods on the job. We worked for three or four months and
then we decided we wanted to go where the big timber was. If course the
timber was plenty big in Oregon, we cut down fir trees approximately 4
or 5 feet thick, but we wanted to get over into the Redwoods. So we
headed for the coast and we went to this lumber camp and tried to get a
job. The foreman said, "well we could use a couple of guys to clean up
after our head fellers. Why don't we go out here and see what you can
do.? So we went out and there was a huge old redwood, about 6 feet
thick. He said, "Fall this tree right here and lay it right down the
center of that roadway over there." So we fired up the saw and cut it
down and boy it fell just exactly where he said. He told us, "Well, you
got a job." Everyone stayed in the bunkhouse. So Nes and I worked for
two or three months in the Redwoods.
It
started to get cold in November and I decided I should go back to sea
and save up some money because we seemed to spend all the money we made
in the woods, but we had fun doing it! I had a lot of fun working with
Nes that year. We were pretty close.
I
went back to sea and I don't remember where Nes went. I'm sure he went
back to sea, but we didn't go on the same ship. I got on a ship going to
Japan and the Philippines. I worked pretty steady in those years from
1949-1950 (just prior to the Korean War years). I spent my time off in
the mountains--fishing, and looking for gold. My dad and mom, in the
meantime, had moved to Gazelle, CA and sold the house they had in
Oregon. My dad spent most of his savings looking for gold in northern
California. In fact, he went bankrupt there, and wound up working on a
cattle ranch. He and Mom got the house and their milk free and they ran
about 300 head of cattle there in the summertime. He would irrigate and
take care of the cows. He was able to eek out a living there, but that
was all. There was no running water or electricity. Mom had to wash
everything by hand, which included carrying the water to the house. It
was a hard life.
In
1950 the Korean War started. They classified me as 2A, which was
occupational deferment, because of my occupation, which included
carrying war materials to Korea. I continued to get that deferment until
1952. In 1952, I was drafted into the army. I did my basic training in
El Paso, TX. Eight weeks basic infantry training. That's where I wound
up in the artillery. I guess I had something going for me, because they
sent me to school to learn about radios and stuff like that. I was in a
headquarters unit, so I wasn't involved in any strict disciplinary
units. Somehow it worked out where there were three or four of us that
went to Austria and everyone else went to Korea.
Three
of those that I went to Austria with were returned missionaries and
they found out that I was a Mormon, some way or another...I don't know
how. I was really impressed with the example they set for me. I used to
tell them "...you don't smoke, you don't drink, but you're always busy."
I watched them while I was in basic training and it seemed like they
were always going somewhere and doing something. I never went anywhere
much, only down to the Post Xchange to drink a few beers. I asked one of
them once, "Don't you ever have a beer once in awhile to lift your
spirits up?" He said, "No, I've always remembered one thing, 'If you
never try it you'll never miss it.' I think I've had just as much fun as
anybody." For some reason that really impressed me. From that time
forward, as we were on the ship going to Italy, on our way to Austria, I
remember all of us reading the Book of Mormon together at different
times.
When
I got to Austria, I had saved quite a bit of money for those days. I
decided while I was in the army I was going to travel all around
Europe...get me a car and use up my leave time and see all there was to
see over there. This was 1952 and World War II had only been over for
seven years, so many of the buildings were still bombed out. There was a
lot of desolation, a country on the rebound. They had a serviceman's
branch there and Colonel Goatz was the branch president. I remember
there were maybe a dozen active LDS Saints there. They had a little
place up above a bar for their meetings on Sundays. They were extremely
poor. They didn't have sufficient clothing and they couldn't get much
work because they were Mormon. You had to be Catholic to get a job there
(Salzburg) in those days. I had really grown quite a bit in the church
in a short time. I remember they had just these wooden benches with
boards laid across the base part. I remember shifting my weight and one
of the boards really pinched me. Boy, it really hurt! I just about
yelled out! It was a hard time for the Saints. We wrote home to our
respective families and asked for clothing for the brethre there. A
building plan was organized so that the Saints would have a better place
to meet. In those days, if the Saints would come up with 20% of the
total cost of the building, the church would put up the other 80%. The
servicemen's group went all out to get that 20% to build a small chapel.
I was there probably 18 months and I remember I put all the money that I
originally had intended to buy a car with, a little over $400, into
that building fund. I was there 18 months. By the time I had left
Salzburg, we had just about $5,000 and that was just enough to get a
church started. After I came home, I heard that they had bought a
building lot shortly after I left. It was around the late eighties when
my daughter, Ruth, served in the German Austria Mission. She served in
Salzburg for a short period of time. She related to me that in Salzburg
there was now a stake. I was very pleased to hear how the church had
grown there in that land.
