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,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.
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
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.
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