The First Nineteen Years

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.

Prior And During The Korean War

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.

Marriage And Family

I came home in 1954 a different person with different goals. I planned on going to school and trying to better my education, which I did. I went to Weber State in Ogden, Utah. I lived there with David's mom, a great lady, just like a second mother to me. I went to Weber College in Ogden and attended winter semester. I was determined that I was going to become a mechanical engineer. I studied hard, but had to take Algebra and I didn't have any basic knowledge of Algebra. It was really frustrating to me, and I worked so hard. I got a C in the class. I talked to the instructor and he said, "I know how hard you've worked in the class and I'm sure whatever you do, you'll be successful, but I don't think this is the right major for you." It was not a good experience for me. I spent all winter there and my funds were running out and my savings getting low. So, I went back to Gazelle, CA. Mom and Dad were still there and they were going through hard times, barely making a living. 

Nes had come out of the army and he'd had a mental breakdown. He was in a psychiatric ward in Roseburg, OR. Mom was taking it very hard. As I look back, I wonder if there was ever a woman that had more sorrow than my mother. 

It was then I decided I'd go back to sea. That was where I could make the best money the quickest. I still had good seniority because of my service in the Army. I got on a ship called SS Mormacland. At that time you could stay on a ship a whole year before you had to get off for your vacation. So I spent a whole year on that ship. It went up and down the west coast of the Americas, Canada, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, through the Panama Canal, down past Rio, Beuenos Aires, around the horn, up past Chile, Peru, Equador and back up to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. I made three trips on that ship. I worked a lot and saved quite a bit of money. When I got off that ship I went up to see Mom and Dad. Mom's health was starting to fail. She had high blood pressure. She had to take medication for it. I decided to take what money I'd saved and buy a house in Stockton. Colleen, my sister, lived there at the time so she looked around and got a house in Stockton, CA. I had it fully furnished with new carpets, living room sets, bedroom sets, refrigerator, and washing machine. Everything you needed, and I paid for it. In December of 1957 they moved to Stockton. My dad didn't want to move down into town because he was more of a mountain man. But with the circumstances of Mom's health, he had to come. I remember moving into the house in the middle of the night. We just kinda slipped in and unloaded what little bit they had. I remember taking Mom into the bathroom...tiled flooring. She just couldn't believe that she was going to live there. Well, she did and she lived there for over 25 years, until the age of 93. My dad also lived until the age of 93, passing away three years before my mother. My brother, Nes, also left at that time too, by his own hand.  There is not a woman that had more faith, patience, and long-suffering than my mother, bless her heart.

Dad became active in the church while I was in the army. I remember writing a letter home asking him to take Mom to church. He wrote back and said he didn't have any clothes to be taking anybody to church. I remember sending him some money and he did buy himself a suit and they started going to church while they were living in the mountains up in Northern California. It was 40 miles to church one way. They'd go to church in the morning and they'd spend the whole day at church. It was a little branch at the time and I think it still is. They were a pretty close bunch. Dad was active in the church from then on until his hearing failed. He didn't attend after that. He served well and was a High Priest Group Leader for a time.

I worked seven months out of the year at sea. One was required to work seven months in order for it to qualify for a year's worth of retirement.  

In 1958 I sailed on the SS Mariposa. It ran San Francisco, Los Angeles, Tahiti, New Zealand, Sydney, Austrailia, Samoa, Honolulu, and back to San Francisco. I got to church when I could but I spent a lot of time at sea. At that time the missionaries took this ship when they got their call to the islands or Sydney, Austrailia. On that ship they had church services, since usually there were half a dozen missionaries going to different areas in that part of the world. It was on this ship during one of the services that I met my wife, Lorna. After she returned home in 1958, we continued to correspond through mail and eventually after much persuasion (it took a lot) we were married in July of 1960. 

I decided to quit going to sea after I was married. I took a job with Mar-Val Food Stores and we set up housekeeping in Stockton. I had ownership in a two-story apartment and we moved into the upper unit while I worked for Mar-Val. I worked for about six months. It was very plain to see that I wasn't going to excel in this trade. I noticed that they were promoting people over me. It was difficult for me to be around people. I guess I'm just not a people person. Anyway, I packed it in after I worked there for a year and decided it wasn't for me. We decided it was best for Lorna to go back to Craig where her widowed mother was a teacher. She was expecting Helen at the time.

I went back to sea and worked pretty steady during '62 and '63. I put my seven months on the ships and spent the other five months at home. We usually spent our summers in Montana on my brother-in-law's cattle ranch, helping him as needed. 

One summer we lived in Petaluma, and were in the janitorial business with David Phelps, my friend from childhood. It was a good experience...never made any money on it, but David and I got to know each other a lot better.  

Lorna went back to Colorado, expecting our second daughter, Ruth, at the time. I continued going to sea and in the summer, we'd go up to Montana to help her brother on his ranch and the hay. I'd go to sea in the winter, but usually came home at Christmas time. That continued until 1971. I had my 20 years in the Merchant Marines and I retired June 1, 1972. That was the end of my sea-going career. 

The sea was good to me. It provided shelter for my mom and dad. It provided a wife for me. It provided enough assets that we've been able to have a home, send our children on missions, and provide the with the educations they've desired until they've gotten married and lived on their own.

The home that we purchased in 1966 was the home where we raised our 4 children. All of them have turned out to be good citizens and a great comfort to me.