Biographies

Mom was born April 10, 1910 in what is now Saltair.  Edrie once mentioned to me that she was born under Halley’s Comet (The comet passed closest to Earth May 1, 1910).  At the time, the appearance of a comet was still regarded with some trepidation by superstitious people.  I don’t think our family was superstitious at all, but there were people who said that babies born under the comet were somehow cursed.   I always thought that was interesting.

Saltair was a small village north of Pleasant Green, which was a little settlement between Magna and Black Rock Beach.  Today most of Pleasant Green lies under the tailings pond of the Kennecott Copper Company and Saltair has been completely demolished for the expansion of the tailings pond. 

My mother’s father was John Phillips Thomas who was always called Jack .  He was of average height but very strongly built and very quick with both his hands and feet.  He was an accomplished prize fighter (bare knuckle style) and a master juggler. 

My mother’s mother was Mary Eliza Coon who was always known as Mamie.  She was one of the middle children in a family of 16 children of James David Coon and his wife Mary Worthington.  Prior to her marriage, Mamie helped run a boarding house operated by her parents in Pleasant Green for the miners and smelter workers who toiled in the Oquirrh Mountains diggings. 

In 1898, Jack Thomas obtained a contract with the Ringling Brothers Circus to perform his juggling act on the circus tour.  Just before leaving on tour, his plans were permanently changed when he was injured in a train accident while working for the salt company which his father, Thomas Coslet Thomas helped found.  Jack lost his right leg and was hospitalized for weeks while the circus moved on without him.  He recovered and learned to walk with an artificial limb.  He gave up his circus dreams, but continued to perform on the vaudeville circuit and fight in local matches.  He accepted a contract with the Salt Company for a lifetime job and in turn agreed not to sue them for the loss of his leg. 

Jack and Mamie married in May of 1899 and moved into a company house in Saltair.  My Aunt Lenora was born in 1901, my aunt Edrie in 1904 and my mother Arvilla in 1910.  Two younger borthers were added to the family later: John in 1913 and Owen in 1916.

Edrie and Lenora participated with their father Jack Thomas on the Vaudeville circuit as jugglers and trumpet-playing musicians.  To my knowledge, my mother never did–she was too young.  By the time she was old enough to learn to juggle and play the trumpet, Vaudeville was on its way out as entertainment in favor of movies. 

The kids used to ride the train from Saltair to the west side of Salt Lake City to attend school.  The Bamberger train ran all the way from the Saltair Pavilion on the Great Salt Lake into the city.  During Mom’s youth in the teens and twenties, Saltair Resort was a major recreation and dance resort.  The kids played there a lot, and were very familiar with Black Rock, Silver Sands Beach, and all the areas along the lakeshore.  Swimming contests were often held at Saltair and Mom’s younger brother John was a frequent participant.

By the time my mom graduated from West High School in 1928, her parents had moved into Salt Lake City.  They lived at 721 South on 5th East in a rented home with an old coal-fired furnace and stove.  I can still remember hauling coal upstairs from the basement coal bin for my grandmother so she could fire the stove up in the morning. 

Even before she graduated from West High, Mom began working at the Paris Company and the Bon Marche Company in Salt Lake City as a part-time model and full-time sales clerk and bookkeeper.  She worked at both companies for several years.  When the depression began in 1929, she retained her job because of her skills and her looks.  I have a number of her modeling pictures.  A few are as late as 1935–the year she married Dad.  I also have a front page picture of her and a male model wearing the new season’s clothes in a 1935 newspaper.   

Mom met my father Calvin Young Wells about 1934.  I do not know exactly how they met.  Dad was divorced from his first wife, Beth Williams Alder, at the time.  When Mom and Dad married in 1935, Dad was unemployed, as were about 20% of the country’s population due tot he effects of the Great Depression.  He also had a very serious drinking problem which Mom knew about.   His addition to alcohol was so severe that Dad’s own mother told my mother not to marry him.  Her own mother gave her similar advice.  Those must have been very hard words for my grandmothers to say.  Nevertheless, my mother loved Dad and married him, despite the contrary counsel she received.   She thought they could work out his problem together, and was confident Dad would overcome his alcohol compulsion. 

Mom and Dad went through many terrible times together, but always managed to remain very close.  Even when angry I never heard either speak ill of the other personally.  Dad’s drinking infuriated Mom and she had many confrontations with him over it, but she always attacked the drinking, not her husband.  I’m sure Mom had other boyfriends before meeting Dad, but after their meeting both really became soul mates.  She saw him as the only man in her life and he viewed her as his one and only. 

My parents bought their first home, a house on Arcadia Lane, in 1941, the year I was born.  At that time, there were only five houses on the street: ours, the Marroms, the Rosses across the street, the Salzetis around the bend, and the Andrews home two lots west of ours.  Our house, which stood on a third of an acre, was a concrete block, two-bedroom rambler without a basement.  My parents also bought the lot west of it, which was another third of an acre, and optioned an additional two and a half acres east of it which was planted in corn.   They paid $4,500.00 dollars with a mortgage at four percent for all of it, which in 1941 was a lot of money for a young family.  I believe their mortgage payment was $42.00 dollars a month.  At that time, someone with a full-time job made about two hundred a month so the figures were not much different in terms of the income percentage typically spent for housing than today. 

In the early days of my childhood, our family kept chickens.  I can remember my dad going out to the chicken coop, picking out a chicken, and lopping off its head.  It was always entertaining to watch the headless chicken frantically run around the yard.  My mom would then pluck the chicken in preparation for dinner.  We didn’t have the chickens very long because my Dad couldn’t spend the time away from his business activities to care for them.  After the war,  ready-to-cook chickens became available at grocery stores at prices lower than the cost of home growing them.  Eventually, our chicken coop disappeared.

We also kept rabbits for a while and we ate some of them.  Unfortunately they became pets, and after a while I didn’t want to eat them because they were too cute.  When my sister Jackie was a toddler, she could easily approach and pet the rabbits when they escaped from their pens, as they often did.  She played with them and they showed no fear of her, but would not let anyone else approach near enough to catch them.  Jackie also didn’t want to eat any of the pet rabbits so my Dad finally gave up on raising them.

Behind our house was a ditch where asparagus grew wild.  My mother would often send me out to gather some for dinner.  It always struck me as strange that we never planted it–we just went out and there it was.  Even more amazing was the fact that, after being cut, the asparagus would grow back in just a few days. I remember thinking at one point, “This is just like eating weeds.”   Eventually I concluded that, even if it was a weed, I liked asparagus, so it was all right to eat. 

We also had a raspberry patch, which was my favorite place. I loved raspberries then and still do.  With Mom, Jim and I had some very good times picking raspberries.  Jim would get angry at me, because I’d pick one; eat two; pick one; eat three, while he and Mom tried to pick enough to make jam or can them.   

In the lot west of our house, we also had a large row of boysenberry bushes.  They were good to eat as well.  Mom and Dad planted a peach tree and an apricot tree in the back yard, which eventually bore a lot of good fruit. 

When I was little, Jim and I would walk down to the bus stop to greet my mother as she came home from work downtown.  The bus stopped at the corner of 45th South and Highland Drive, and we’d walk down the hill there to meet her, and then walk home together. 

Once I rode my tricycle to meet her.  When I got to the top of the hill on 45th above Highland Drive, I started down, and the tricycle began rolling fast.  I thought, “Gee, this is a great ride,” and lifted both my feet off the pedals.  Unfortunately, once I had them off, the pedals rotated so fast that I couldn’t get my feet back on them.  The tricycle raced down the street, and I couldn’t stop it or even slow it down.  My mother got off the bus just in time to see me tearing down the hill, heading straight for the old Salt Lake canal that flowed underneath a bridge on 45th.  She yelled at me, but I didn’t know how to stop the tricycle before it reached the canal.  At the last moment, I turned into a pile of tree limbs stacked next to the sidewalk.  I was thrown off, but I missed going into the canal by two or three feet.  My mother was furious and told me I was never to ride my tricycle down the hill again.  After it was over, I was a little alarmed, but it still seemed like a great ride up until the end.

When World War II started in 1941, Dad was 37 years old, quite a bit above the maximum draft age.  I think they were drafting men at the start of the war up to around age thirty.  As the war went on, the draft age was raised to around forty, but since Dad continued to age, it never quite caught up to him and as a married man with two children, I doubt he would have been drafted in any event. 

All during the war, my father worked as a concrete and steel inspector for the U.S. Army Engineers at the Ogden Arsenal.   As far as I know he didn’t have much knowledge about concrete or steel, but he had a friend (name not recalled) who was an engineering supervisor at the Arsenal.  The friend gave him some books to study and said, “You are now a concrete and steel inspector.”  From then on, that’s what he was.  Because of the need for inspectors, Dad was “frozen” in his job as critical to the war effort.  He couldn’t quit, and the military couldn’t take him for war service.

My mother also worked for the army at the arsenal as a clerk/typist.  Recently, I found her identity badge.  Until I found it, I had not realized she worked there.  I don’t remember having a baby sitter in my early childhood, but I do remember my grandmother and grandfather very well.  I remember staying often at their home and I presume that they were the child care providers for Jim and I during the war years.

During this time, Mom and Dad commuted daily from Salt Lake to Ogden despite strict gasoline rationing.  Because of where they worked, they were able to get the gasoline they needed to make the commute.  Authorities were not encouraging people to move, and you couldn’t buy a house anyway, so rather than move closer, they simply got ration stamps for the gasoline and drove. 

They were also able to get tires, which were rationed.  These tires were made with some of the first artificial rubber because the far eastern rubber plantations were all in the hands of the Japanese.  The army would take the tires off military trucks and jeeps when there was still a small amount of tread left on them.  Dad would bring the old tires home and pass them around the neighborhood.  Some of them probably didn’t fit too well, but since no other tires were available, people used what they could get.  Any tires at all were precious. 

From about 1944 onward, we owned a 1935 Buick, a big, black four-door sedan with a one-piece, straight front windshield and two spare tires set in wells in the front fenders.  It was quite an impressive car.  Because we had an unheated garage, Dad often had trouble starting it in the winter.  The engine would freeze up when the oil got stiff and the six volt batteries of that time were not strong enough to turn the crankshaft over when it was dead cold.  Dad would put a hot-pot, a kerosene burner, under the engine pan to warm the oil up so he could get the car going again. 

When I was about three years old, my parents planted a small, native pine tree in our front yard.  They got it out of the mountains somewhere up in Big Cottonwood Canyon.  I can’t remember what time of the year it was.  They told me that the tree was about three years old, and I was about three years old, so the tree was about my age.  It’s still growing at the house at 1993 Arcadia Lane, and is now a large tree.  The people who live in the house now have cut a virtual tunnel through its lower branches so they can still get their cars through to the garage.  The tree was planted much too close to the driveway for the size it eventually became. 

On my fifth birthday, Mom had a party for me.  I remember almost nothing about the party except that the neighborhood girl I had a big crush on, Christie Ross, was there.  We held the party outside, and shortly after we cut the birthday cake, a breeze came up.  It quickly turned into a whirlwind which picked up the table and whisked it away like something out of The Wizard of Oz.  The table went spinning off into the sky and landed in the top of a group of locust trees at the back of our field.  We were never able to get it down, and for years that card table sat in the tree reminding me of my fifth birthday party, or at least the most memorable part of it. 

Bob Sutherland was a good friend of Jim and mine.  Bob’s father had an apple orchard along 45th South, and we used to play cops and robbers, and cowboys and Indians in the orchard.  I remember many a good time playing there.

In the orchard was an old apple cider press, made almost entirely of blocks of wood.  The press was very powerful, and extremely fascinating to watch.  We would get paper cups out, and Bob’s father would squeeze the apples into apple juice.  We had some very good drinks from that apple press.  I don’t remember if Bob’s father cut the worms out or not–I’d like to think that he did.

Tom Andrews, the neighbor two lots west of us, owned a big dog–a Labrador named Napoleon.  We called him Nap for short.   Nap was a very long-suffering dog and used to let me ride him like a horse.  Jim never was able to ride on him, because he was too heavy.

 One of the grimmest times I recall started one afternoon when we heard a bang like a car back-firing.  Nap began to howl, and I thought he’d been hit by a car.  Jim and I went dashing over, and eventually found Nap sitting on the front step of the house, howling.  We knocked on the door, and when nobody answered, decided that something was wrong, so we went and got Dad.  He came over and knocked on the door, and when he couldn’t raise anybody, he went inside.  Being the kids that we were, we followed Dad inside, holding onto Nap.  We wandered through the house, and it seemed like nobody was home.  Finally we came to the bathroom door, which was closed.  My father opened the door maybe half a foot, and from my height I looked at the floor.  All over the floor were little white rocks like gravel.  I thought it was really strange.  My father immediately closed the door, and told Jim and me to take Nap and go home. 

Later that night I saw Dad sitting at the kitchen table drinking straight bourbon.  His face was red and his hands shook. That was the first time I ever recall seeing my father drink.  I connected those two events because they took place on the same day, but I never understood at the time what had upset Dad enough for him to start drinking.  Years later my mother told me that after Tom’s wife left him, he had gone into the bathroom, put a shotgun under his chin, and blown his brains out.  My father had found him sitting dead in the bathtub when he opened the bathroom door.  The white rocks I saw on the bathroom floor were plaster pieces from where the shotgun blast had gone into the ceiling.  You can imagine what that room must have looked like?!

My mother and father founded the Triple A Direct Mail Service about 1946.  Its work was to prepare and mail advertisements to homes across the state.  Client companies paid for this service and the firm eventually printed as well as mailed many of the circulars they ordered.  Some of the earliest memories I have are of our living room being filled with boxes of envelopes and stuffing materials like fliers. 

My mother typed envelopes and labels on a manual typewriter using carbon paper and five sheets of gummed labels to get up to five copies of a label at a time.  She typed literally thousands of envelopes on that old, manual typewriter at speeds that were remarkable then and incredible now.  I know Mom’s manual typing speed exceeded 75 words per minute and I actually watched her do 120 on an IBM Selectric in the early 1960’s.

Dad was very good at sealing envelopes.  This was before the days of postage meters and automatic sealers, so every envelope was sealed by hand.  Dad could seal envelopes about ten at a time with a sponge.  He wouldn’t let us kids try it, because if you used too much water, you’d ruin the envelopes.

Sometimes, we kids would help stuff the envelopes and get things ready to go to the post office.  A lot of mail went out of that house.

    In 1947 Mom and Dad organized the business into a corporation, and rented an office downtown in the Union Pacific Building at 10 West South Temple.  Today the building has been demolished and the Gateway Towers West stands in its place directly across the street from Temple Square on South Temple.  Our office was on the seventh floor and, as I remember it, had just one room.  It was very crowded, but it was a formal business office with a downtown address that greatly helped the business to gain new clients.

We didn’t have the office in the Union Pacific Building too long, but the thing I remember best about it was the freight elevator with the open iron-grate folding doors on it so you could watch the floors go by.  Jim and I would pester our parents to let us ride the elevator so we could shear sticks on it.  They didn’t know what we were doing, of course.  They thought we just wanted to ride the elevator.  They were reluctant to let us do even that, but we succeeded in talking them into it several times.  Jim and I loved to get sticks out of the alley next to the building.  We would place them on the elevator floor projecting out into the shaft and then stand on them so that, as a concrete floor went by it would shear off the stick.  We’d continue pushing the stick out a little further so the next floor would shear off another piece.  There was probably quite a pile of kindling at the bottom of that elevator shaft.  More than once, I stood on a stick that was strong enough to bear my weight without breaking.  The force of the stick snapping when it hit the concrete of the next floor, would literally throw me in the air.  Surprisingly, we weren’t injured or missing any fingers after these sessions.

Sometime in 1949 or 1950,  Mom and Dad moved Triple A Direct Mail downstairs into a little building in the alley that ran between the Union Pacific building and the Union Pacific Annex and extended south through the block exiting on First South. 

The new building was still small for a growing business, but five times as big as the office we had in the Union Pacific building.  The alley itself was actually a business address–13 West South Temple, and I practically grew up in our new business office and the other buildings that lined it.  Our building shared the alley with the Deseret News presses which were directly across from us.  I often watched the high speed presses through the windows that faced the alley.

The Deseret News building fronted on Richards Street, which was a little further to the west, but the back of the building where the presses were was serviced from the alley.  All the truckloads of paper, barrels of ink, and other supplies that were brought in to print the newspapers came down the alley, and the finished, printed papers were taken out for distribution through the alley.

Also in the same alley was Utah Printing.  Its offices fronted on South Temple, but the presses were all in the back where we could watch them through the windows along the alley. 

When it rained, the alley smelled like rotting, wet paper boxes, a horse-glue type of smell.  The various businesses would put empty boxes out into the alley, the newspaper’s trucks would run over them, and the boxes would get wet and disintegrate into a mush that was sometimes a couple of inches deep.  That was the source of the smell.  To this day, every time I smell wet cardboard, I’m reminded of that alley. 

My mother was afraid of the alley itself–it did have winos temporarily resident in it occasionally.  Panhandlers would often give adults a tough time, but because they didn’t think kids had any money, they usually left us alone.  My mother would never permit us to go down that alley at night.  She herself would never go down it at night unless my dad was with her, and that made for some interesting times, because it meant that nobody could work after dark if my dad was drinking.  She was absolutely afraid of being caught down that alley; probably with good reason even then. 

Just down the alley from our little building was the old Constitution Building.  It stood on Main Street where City Creek Center is under construction today.  In those days, the bottom floor of the Constitution Building was the only one occupied.  The four floors above the first had  long ago been abandoned and were inhabited by tramps, rats and kids who liked to play there.             Jim and I would climb up on the garbage cans of the restaurant next door; from which we could get on to the roof of our place; from there we could get to the roof of the restaurant; and then into the Constitution building through one of the windows which had been broken out.  Inside we’d find rats, old furniture, rotting floors, tramps, wine bottles, liquor bottles, and debris of all kinds.  If there was a slum in Salt Lake, it was the upper floors of the Constitution Building.  We met a few interesting people in there too, fortunately nearly all of them too drunk or disabled to do us any serious harm.

As children we played on the streets of Salt Lake a lot.  We knew almost every alley in the city.  We would roam the city streets, go into the press room of the Deseret News and over to the Tribune presses on Regent Street where the newsboys hung out, play on Temple Square and in Memory Grove for hours, and go into the capitol to explore all through the building.

All during this time, my father had bouts of drinking that lasted from a few days to as long as several months.  Once he started drinking, he would continue to the point that he was not able to work or do much of anything else.  He would remain that way until he became so sick that he absolutely could not drink anymore.  He’d be sick for a couple of weeks and finally he’d recover, get back on his feet, and go back to work.  For several months he’d be quite sober, and then the cycle would begin again. 

The Triple A Mail Service allowed us to have an income even when he was unavailable.  I think my mother saw it as a very good business for that reason.  It was hard work and required a lot of effort, but she could run it alone when my Dad wasn’t there. 

Dad was the salesperson for the business and an extremely good salesman–few like him that I’ve ever met.  He could really sell!  When he was not able to sell, Mom would do the work and keep the place going until he got back on his feet, and then he’d be off to sell new business again.  That was how the business worked during all the early years. 

During this time, one of the Taft girls babysat Jim and I.  She had a horse that she would bring over and tie to our mailbox. One day, we persuaded her to take us for rides on her horse, and that was the first time I was ever on a horse.  I was scared to death at first, but eventually she got me up and riding on it.  We used to listen to Tom Mix and the Lone Ranger, particularly the Lone Ranger, and of course he was on a horse.  Riding on her horse gave me the feeling of being a two-gun guy. 

Sometime during this period Jim and I were told by our dad to weed the ditch along the edge of the street in front of our house.  We thought that it was much too difficult to weed by hand, so we decided to burn the weeds off instead.  Jim poured a little gasoline where we wanted to burn and I dropped a match.  We didn’t realize the flame would follow the gasoline much faster than we could run.  The flame ran right up into the spout of the can which Jim promptly dropped.  Fortunately, it was a metal can that didn’t break or explode, because it was almost full.  The gasoline poured out of the can into the ditch, and we couldn’t put the roaring fire out.  We poured water on it, but the water went under the gasoline, which floated on top and burned all the better.  Eventually the water ran down the ditch, carrying the flaming gasoline as it went.  All we could do was let it burn.  It certainly weeded the ditch–burned it right down to the ground, along with some of the lawn where we had spilled gasoline.  That didn’t turn out nearly as well as we thought!

I remember the winter of 1948 and 49 very clearly as the worst winter in the history of the valley.  The snow was so deep that I could not see over it after the walk was shoveled–it must have been 42 or 43 inches high.  We made tunnels in the snow by digging in from the sidewalk.   The tunnels were deep enough that they had a snow packed roof over them enabling us to play inside.

In January and February hundreds of deer came down and stripped every shrub in our yard clean.  They also stripped the bark off all our trees.  We thought the trees would die, but they managed to survive.   The snow was so deep that the deer began to starve because they couldn’t get to anything edible near the ground.  Because we were in a rural area, the deer often came around during the winter, but never in such numbers as that winter.  I can remember seeing literally hundreds of deer in the field next to our house.  My mother wouldn’t let us go outside because she thought they might attack us, and perhaps they might have.  I can’t imagine a deer attacking anybody, but there was very little to eat, and they were very hungry.

In the 1950’s when the Cold War heated up and the Korean War was on, everybody wanted to have a bomb shelter.  My parents decided to dig a root cellar that could double as a bomb shelter.  They had a backhoe come in and dig a big hole eight feet deep, twelve feet wide, and sixteen feet long, in our backyard behind the garage.  Mom and Dad planned to put concrete walls and a floor in, and roof it over,  but all they did the first year was get the hold dug. 

Unfortunately this huge hole was almost directly under our swing set.  Dad took the swings down so that we wouldn’t use them, but that Fall, Paul Eddie and his brother Don and I decided that we wanted to use the swings again.  Because Paul and Don were both older than me, and I was too small to lift either of them, we decided that I would climb into an old barrel that my Dad used as an incinerator, They would tie a rope around the barrel, throw it over the top of the swing post, and pull me up to the top so I could attach the swing chain.  Mind you, the tops of the swing posts were about twelve feet high. 

Paul and Don put the rope over their shoulders and between the two of them they hauled me and the barrel up to the top.  Unfortunately, when the barrel got to the cross beam, the knot in the rope that was around it hit the top of the beam and could go no further.  Paul and Don thought the rope was just stuck, so they gave it a good jerk to free it.  The rope broke and I fell from the top of the cross-beam to the bottom of the cellar inside this barrel full of ashes!  I hit the side of the root cellar going down and landed in the bottom upside-down inside the drum, which had about four inches of ashes in it.

 I crawled out black from head to foot with my mouth so full of ashes that I couldn’t speak.  I must have looked like I’d been immersed in soot.  My mother heard Don and Paul yell, but she couldn’t see what was happening because the garage obscured her view from the house.  She came to the edge of the hole just in time to see me crawl out of the barrel covered with ashes–not hurt but looking like I’d been burned and unable to say anything to her.  She thought I had been gravely injured and started yelling and screaming.  She  couldn’t get down into the cellar to get me out, and I couldn’t climb out because the sides vertical and the hole too deep.  I put my fingers in my mouth and dug the ashes out spitting and choking as I did so.  I finally got my mouth emptied enough and wet again so I could speak and say, “I’m all right.  I’m not hurt,” and that calmed her down a little bit.    I don’t remember how I finally got out of the hole, but after that then the swings disappeared forever.  We never were able to find them, let alone get them put up again. 

In 1952–the year of the first big flood in Salt Lake City, the root cellar, which was still unfinished, filled entirely with water–eight feet deep from an overflowing irrigation ditch.  After a while, the sides began to cave in, and my parents worried that the neighborhood kids or the dog would drown in it, or the garage would fall into it.  Eventually they had it pumped out and the hole filled.  They never did get their root cellar; the bomb scare died down, and having a bomb shelter just didn’t seem a practical thing to do. 

After I was about eight years old, instead of having a babysitter for us, my parents instructed us that when we got out of school, we were come down to the office.  I was at Holladay Elementary School and Jim was too at that time, although shortly afterward he went on to Olympus Junior and I eventually followed.  For ten cents each we could ride the bus when we got out of school and go downtown.  We arrived each day about three or three-thirty and then stayed and worked with our parents until they came home at night.  That became our typical routine. 

I can remember one night when I was seven or eight years old sitting on the steps of the Salt Lake post office waiting for the mail to be put in our post office box at midnight.  It was  winter because it was very cold.  The steps were too cold to sit on, but I did anyway and Jim with me.  Right after midnight the mail was delivered to the boxes and we were waiting there so that after midnight we could go into the post office and get the mail out of the box before my father could get there.  If there was any money in the mail delivery, he would take it and use it for drink, so we had to be there ahead of him to get the cash for business and family needs.  I guess my mother knew that there was some money coming that night and she wanted to be sure she got it. 

I can remember saying to her, “Why are we doing this?  Why don’t you just divorce him and let’s get out of here!”  That was probably a stunning thing for an eight-year-old or a nine-year-old to say, but I remember very clearly that she replied, “No, I’m not going to leave him.  He’s going to get better–you’ll see.  We’re going to make it as a family.”    And even at that extremity when I thought we were pretty broke and miserable, she would not leave him.  I don’t think she ever considered it and she was right–things got better.  But we all paid a pretty high price before they did. 

As time passed, Dad’s drinking improved–that is the amount of it grew less and his condition improved and eventually he did quit drinking, but by that time his health had been badly affected by it.  He had an absolutely cast iron constitution, but nobody can drink as heavily as he did and not have it affect them.  I can remember that in his early 40’s, when I was a small child, he lost all of his teeth to gum disease and deterioration of the inside of his mouth brought upon at least in part by his drinking and being deathly ill when he didn’t eat for weeks at a time. From then on my dad wore dentures. 

My mother also wore dentures, but not until later in her life.  It was considered an acceptable, even stylish thing to have all your teeth removed and wear dentures in their time.  Now of course, we recognize that keeping your teeth is of prime importance and dentistry has made great advances to help people keep their teeth.  But in those days, if there was damage to the teeth, they simply took them out. 

My dad also had terrible nose bleeds–alcohol has the effect of causing the veins to become distended and it does that not only on the outside skin, but on the inside membranes as well.  Dad developed these distended veins on the inside of his nose.  A vein would burst and begin to bleed and he would lose several pints of blood before the bleeding could be stopped.  I can remember him leaning over the bathroom basin, which was covered with blood, with his nose not dripping but streaming into it.  The doctor was usually called to stop the bleeding and Dad would be weak as water.  Several times the doctor could only cure the problem by packing his nose with something that would cause enough pressure to squeeze off the bleeding.  If that failed, the doctor would cauterize the vein with a hot iron inside his nose.  He went through those procedures four or five times as I remember.  They were very painful. 

On one occasion while drinking, Dad fell and broke his nose.  On two or three occasions, he came home after being robbed and beaten by someone who saw that he was too drunk to defend himself.  These were among the health problems brought on as a result of his drinking, but through all of them my mother never accepted his drinking and never seemed to feel that she had any reason to leave him.  I marvel at her determination, especially in view of how marriage is viewed today. 

Eventually the Triple A Direct Mail prospered.  As I look back on it, the growth of the business was direct proportion to the decline in Dad’s drinking.  As he was able to devote more attention to sales and less to recovering from alcohol abuse, our family fortunes rose dramatically.

Dad went into the real estate business in 1953.  My mother and Jim, and I remained with Triple A to operate it and give the family a stable income while he got started in real estate.  He did both jobs for a while–sold advertising contracts for Triple A and also sold real estate.  As he became more prosperous in real estate, he founded his own firm–Investors Realty and my mother joined him working in that business.  They sold the Triple A Direct Mail about the time I left on my mission in 1960.  It was then a thriving business.  The people who bought it sold it again about ten years later and in 1990 it was incorporated as a division of Matrix Marketing.  By that time it was the largest independent direct mail service in the state. 

Mom worked with dad in the real estate business until about 1968 when Dad retired after being diagnosed with cancer.  They dissolved the real estate company, and she went to work for the Ajax Press Company as the personal executive secretary of its president, Nicholas Strike.   She stayed in that position until she retired not long before Dad died in 1973.  Nick tried to persuade her to stay on; in fact he offered her a large salary increase if she would consent to stay, but she decided she wanted to spend more time with Dad and so refused his generous offer.

Mom was the first president of the Zonta International Club of Salt Lake City.  She founded this women’s business club chapter in Salt Lake and became the first president.  She remained active in the group until her retirement.

During the later years of he life, Mom was very active in the Relief Society and became very strong in the Church.  She did  genealogical research with Lenore and several other members of the family.  She archived much of the Thomas and Coon family genealogy.  

Mom and Dad finally went to the temple together in 1964, the same year that Pat and I got married.  We didn’t know it then, but he already had the cancer that eventually killed him.   He had surgery for an enlarged prostate and hemorrhoids which are other health problems worsened by alcohol abuse. 

Dad later told me that he was so dazed when he went through the temple that he could hardly remember what was going on, even though he’d been through the temple previously 30 years before.  Although Mom became active in the Church, Dad never really did.  He supported the church financially and he supported Jim and I on our missions, but his personal participation remained limited.  I don’t believe he had much knowledge of Gospel principles, even though he was a lifelong member of the Church and came from deeply religious parents. 

He saw the General Authorities of the Church as kids he grew up with and he could never accept the idea that they could have serious faults and overcome them to become General Authorities.  He knew several of their serious faults because they were the same ones he had and he had difficulty realizing that his friends and relatives had changed and grown as he had.

To him, they remained delinquent kids and he could not feature them as being inspired of the Lord

By the time Dad died in October of 1972, Mom was already showing signs of memory loss and other symptoms of mental loss.  After his death, which she never recovered from, her condition worsened rapidly and by the following year she was unable to continue living alone in the family home on Carter Circle.  I asked a business associate of mine, who was a single woman, to move in and stay with Mom to help her with household tasks.  She did so for several months, but Mom’s condition continued to deteriorate and in late 1973 we placed her in the Highland Care Center where she resided until her death in 1976.

My father Calvin Young Wells was a gentle man, rarely given to anger, even when provoked, and always liberally tolerant of others’ views and weaknesses.  He was born April 5, 1904, and was thus too young to serve in the Great War, which ended when he was 14.  He seemed tall to me as a child, though he was only an inch less than six feet, and always thin.  He weighed 165 pounds the first time I saw him put a penny in one of the weighing machines that used to be common in stores, and I never remember him a pound heavier (although at times much lighter) until the day he died.

Of my Father’s early life I know only what he and other members of the family have told me and a few snippets of information gleaned from letters which he wrote.  He was the 6^th and middle child of his parents, Melvin Dickinson Wells and Ann Elizabeth Young Wells.  His older siblings, in the order of their birth, are Miriam (Mibs), Louisa, Melvin D. Jr., Joseph Bicknell (Bick), and Rebecca, who died shortly after her birth.  His younger siblings are Phyllis, George, Janice, Edmond, and Anne (Bus).  My Father was nicknamed Jim and most of his family called him that.  I don’t know the origin of the name.

Dad was a teenager during the depression which followed World War I.  He graduated from L.D.S. High School and attended the University of Utah for a time, but did not graduate, primarily because he could not afford to remain in college long enough to complete his degree.  He worked in a grocery store as a young man and took much of his wages in food which he gave to his mother for the family’s use.  He also worked as an assistant in a pharmacy during the postwar years after 1920.  He filled prescription and compounded cosmetics which were mixed on site at many drug stores.  He told us that after Prohibition became law, pharmacies could still obtain some alcohol legally for use in making medicines and cosmetics.  His instructions as an assistant were to never waste alcohol in cosmetics.  It was always reserved for medicinal use by customers.

During the 1920’s, Dad worked for a time in New York City.  Times were difficult and jobs scarce.  His sister Louisa had married George A. Luke and they were also living in New York City.  Dad worked for George Luke in his newly established dry-cleaning business for a time.  He also held some other jobs in New York, but I have few details about them.  He once spoke of driving a construction truck for a time and described a harrowing escape from death when his truck collided with another vehicle on an “East Side Expressway”.  The other vehicle crashed through a guard rail and plunged into the East River while Dad’s truck smashed into the wall on the opposite side of the roadway.  He was not seriously hurt, but could do nothing to help the other driver whose vehicle sank from sight as Dad watched from above. 

I have a letter from Dad written to his father from New York in 1925, in which he speaks of returning to Salt Lake City and his hope of fulfilling an L.D.S. mission.  He was then saving money for his return trip and the mission and felt that he would have enough to go within six months if he could maintain the same rate of saving for that long.  Apparently he couldn’t and was not able to go on a mission, although he did return to Salt Lake City in about 1926.

I believe Dad met his first wife, Elizabeth (Beth) Williams, while both were students at the University of Utah about 1928.  They were married in 1929 and had a son, John Calvin Wells in 1930.  This marriage ended in divorce in 1932 when John was about two years old.  The parting was acrimonious and Beth moved to Idaho where she later married Dr. Edward Parkinson. 

For reasons best known to her, Beth and her new husband went before a court in Idaho and declared my father to be dead, although of course, they knew he wasn’t.  This declaration made under oath was accepted by the court and it permitted Dr. Parkinson to adopt John Calvin without the consent of his natural, but supposedly deceased parent, who would never have agreed to relinquish parental rights.  John’s name was also changed to John Edward Parkinson and all contact with my Father was cut off.  Dad didn’t know about the name change and so had no means of locating the Parkinson family or his son John from that point on.  This loss troubled him deeply, but he never spoke of it to us.  Jim, my older brother, and I vaguely knew that we had another brother, but we knew nothing about him, never met him as a child, and had no idea where he was.  Neither did Dad.

Following his divorce, Dad worked for several firms as a salesman, including the Fuller Paint Co.  He traveled extensively in Utah and Idaho for this company, and was fairly successful despite the depressed economy of the late 1920’s and early 1930’s.  I believe he also opened his own paint store and ran it for a time with one or two of his sisters.  I don’t know how successful it was at the beginning, but as the Depression deepened in 1931 and 1932, it eventually failed.  Although Prohibition was in effect all during this period, Dad continued to use alcohol extensively to the detriment to his health and his career.

Dad met my Mother, Arvilla Thomas, in 1934.  She was the youngest daughter of John and Mamie Thomas, and had two older sisters, LeNora and Edrie, and two younger brothers, John Coslet and Owen Daniel.  She was born in August of 1910 when Halley’s comet was in the sky, a birth sign that was widely believed to be unlucky at the time.  My Mother, however, never considered the stars to have any influence in her life.  She was an intensely practical and capable women. 

She was also beautiful and following her graduation from West High School in 1928, she obtained work as a fashion model and a bookkeeper with first the Bon Marche and later the Paris Co., two of Salt Lake City’s more elegant department stores.

Mom and Dad were married in April 1935 in Salt Lake City.  Both her parents and his advised Mom against their marriage because both felt they would have extreme difficulties due to Dad’s drinking problem and the continuing economic slump.  Mom and Dad, however, were head over heels in love and went ahead with the ceremony despite the warnings.  Dad was unemployed when they married and actually had to borrow enough money from his new wife for a train ticket to Washington, D.C. where he hoped to get a job through his political connections to the Democratic Administration of F.D.R. 

I have a letter written by Dad to Mom’s parents from Washington in 1935 in which he expresses his love for her and assures them that he will provide well for her and treat her well.  In all their succeeding years together, Mom and Dad’s love for one another never wavered.  They had many conflicts that I think would have broken most couples apart, but they remained close to one another despite all trials.  I never heard Mom speak of any other man in her life before meeting Dad.  He was her one and only in every sense of the word.  She always supported and relied on him and he did the same for her to the best of his ability.  I never heard my Father speak ill of my Mother on any occasion.  I think he recognized in her a strength of character that would help him overcome his problems and realize his potential, as eventually he did.

In Dad’s job hunting effort he was successful and soon returned to Salt lake with a position in one of the Government’s alphabet soup agencies.  I don’t know which one, nor how long he stayed in the job, but it provided sufficient financial security that Dad and Mom could begin their family.  Their first child, James Thomas Wells was born March 24, 1939.  I was born a little more than two years later September 22, 1941. 

This was the same year that Dad and Mom bought their first home together.  They purchased a two-bedroom home on a one-third acre lot, an adjoining one-third acre vacant lot, and an option on an additional 2-acre plot adjoining on the other side of the home lot, all for $4,500 dollars.  The mortgage, which I saw years later when they sold the home, was a 30-year loan (one of the longer term mortgages newly authorized by the government at the suggestion of Marriner Eccles, a prominent Utah banker, who was F.D.R.’s choice as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board).  The interest rate was 4% and the payment $42 per month.  This was at a time when my father was probably earning about $180 a month, so the house payment represented about 25% of his income, nearly the same as the typical house payment for the average homeowner today.

The home was located at 1993 Arcadia Lane in Holladay which was then considered far out in the country southeast of Salt Lake City.  The area had been settled in 1849, only a year after the pioneers arrived in the Salt lake Valley, but it was still sparsely populated in 1941 and as much a farming as a residential community.  There were only four homes on Arcadia Lane besides ours and the rest of Holladay was similarly composed of mostly open fields with a few houses scattered among them.  It was a great place to raise a family and I’m sure that was the main reason for Mom and Dad moving to the area.  Jim and I had many happy days at the house on Arcadia Lane.

My earliest personal memories of Dad are of the last year or so of the Second World War which began for America three months after I was born, in December 1941.  He worked for the Army as a civilian employee beginning, I believe, in early 1942.  He was classified as a concrete and steel construction inspector, although he had no formal training as an engineer.  He obtained the position through the influence of a friend who, despite his lack of formal training, recognized his potential math and technical ability, gave him several books to read on civil engineering, and told him to report in a few days to begin work.  His job was inspecting concrete forms and steel infrastructures to be certain they met specifications.  These were construction projects at the Ogden Arsenal and Hill Air Force Base, both of which were built from scratch during the war.

His work was considered essential to the war effort and so he was frozen in the job and could not quit until the war ended or he was no longer needed.  He was also exempt from the draft although, as a married man with two children, the actual call-up never reached his age bracket (he was 37 at the time of Pearl Harbor, 41 when the Japanese surrendered in August of 1945).

As a small child I never understood what work he did, but I saw him leave daily driving an old 1935 Buick that I loved the look of, even when I was far too young to really appreciate cars.  It was a huge four-door sedan, oxidized midnight blue, with twin spare tires mounted in wells on both front fenders.  Its engine leaked oil and froze up regularly in the winter.  Dad had to keep a kerosene lantern burning all night beneath the oil pan, even when the car was in the garage, so that it would start on winter mornings.  Despite its mechanical shortcomings, common enough to most cars of that time, it looked like the cars in movies and I liked to ride in it wherever he would take me, although I was much prone to car sickness when riding in the back seat.

Dad drove to Ogden daily, an 80-plus-mile round trip from our home in Holladay.  Gasoline and tires were rationed, but he was allowed to obtain extra of both on the base (I think without charge) in order to maintain his job.  He also brought home tires discarded from military vehicles at the Arsenal and gave them to our neighbors.  Several times I saw him arrive home with the trunk bulging with dirty old tires which I thought useless, but which still had a few hundred miles left in them and were precious to those who couldn’t buy new ones at any price.  Dad also occasionally siphoned off some gas for a neighbor in need, knowing he could get more at the Arsenal.

Dad loved good food and, like my mother, was an excellent cook, a fact I little appreciated until later in life when I was often required to eat food prepared by those who weren’t.  No meal was complete that didn’t include meat and potatoes.  The preferred meat was beef served rare, so rare that my friends often had trouble eating when invited to dinner at our house.  On a couple of occasions when I was a teenager, Dad actually served up steaks nicely browned on the outside, but still frozen too hard to cut in the middle.

Meat, eggs, butter, and sugar were all rationed during the war and I can remember going to the grocery store with my parents and being allowed to tear out of my book the ration stamps which had to accompany each purchase of these items. 

Butter, I think, was limited to a quarter pound a month if the stores had it, which they often didn’t.  In its absence we ate oleomargarine which was supposed to look and taste like butter, but didn’t.  The law prohibited coloring it yellow (it was lard white and tasted similar) until after it was purchased by the consumer, so it was sold in cellophane packages with the coloring in a soft pill in the center.  After purchase, the buyer could squeeze the package to distribute the color evenly.  I liked doing this task, but often broke the package which wasn’t nearly as tough as modern plastic wraps, and wound up mixing the margarine in a bowl with a spoon.  The coloring didn’t help the taste at all, however, and Dad always hated margarine.  After the war, we never had anything but butter on our table, calories and cholesterol notwithstanding.

Dad also had a tremendous sweet tooth and greatly enjoyed chocolate candy.  In later years, he did a lot of printing and advertising for the Sweet Candy Company and took a portion of his payment for it in candy.  Most Christmas seasons in the late ‘40’s and ‘50’s we would have 40 to 50 pounds of chocolates in the house.  About half of it my Father would give away as Christmas gifts.  The rest was for the family, including always a large five-pound box opened on Christmas morning and usually consumed by day’s end.  All his children liked chocolate as well as he did.

A year or so after the war ended, Dad left his Army job and with my mother founded the AAA Direct Mail Service.  This business was one of the first direct mail advertising firms in Salt Lake.  It was started out of our home on Arcadia Lane as a proprietorship in 1946, then formally incorporated in 1947 by my parents and a few family members, including my Aunt Edrie, Mom’s sister.  Mom had worked as a secretary during the war and had excellent office and bookkeeping skills.  She handled the books and managed the office while Dad found customers, sold them advertising and printing, and helped to produce and mail the materials. 

While the business was getting started, everyone in the family helped do the work.  I can remember my Grandfather Thomas, my Grandmother, Edrie, Jim, and I all stuffing and sealing envelopes while Mom typed labels and Dad affixed them to the envelopes and added postage.   We used stamps in the beginning, but soon acquired a postage meter which was vastly more efficient. 

Dad sold a few big jobs in the early years.  On at least two occasions our entire living room was filled to the ceiling with boxes of envelopes and the materials that went into them.  All the mail preparation was done by hand — there were no machines then.  It was unskilled labor which anyone could learn to do, and some could do very well.  We kids were actually good at stuffing envelopes, though Dad usually kept us away from the sealing sponge or the stamps, for fear of major damages.  There were also no copy machines so Mom would type labels by hand, five sets of carbons to every sheet on a manual typewriter.  She could type text accurately at more than 80 words a minute (mistakes were time consuming — five erasures by hand).  She would produce a full sheet of 30 labels in less than two minutes and regularly typed them faster than three people working as a team could stuff, seal, label, and stamp the finished pieces.

By about 1948 the new business had prospered enough that Dad moved it into a two-room office suite in the old Union Pacific building that stood on the southwest corner of Main and South Temple Streets until it was replaced by the Gateway Tower West building in the 1990’s.  With a downtown location, the business grew even faster.  Dad was the best salesman I’ve ever known.  He knew everyone in Salt Lake, it seemed, and called on friends and strangers alike for direct mail business.  He always walked at breakneck speed (for a small boy accompanying him), but often took fifteen or twenty minutes to cover a block because he would stop and talk with at least five people in every one.  I would often ask him who the people he spoke to were (he usually didn’t introduce them to me, only mentioned that I was his younger son) and he would respond that one was a friend, another a relative (he had dozens of cousins), and a third an old school chum.  He seemed to remember the name of every person he’d ever met, and to know their family history and business background as well.  In retrospect, I don’t wonder that he could sell to anyone.  They were all acquaintances and soon friends, even if he had known them only a day.

One problem that I think was made worse by having a downtown business location was Dad’s continuing use of alcohol.  His temptation was certainly increased by some of his business friends who were heavy drinkers themselves and encouraged Dad to join them, an invitation he frequently found hard to refuse. 

Jim and I liked the office in the Union Pacific building which was on the seventh floor.  We often came to work after school and almost every day in the summer.  We would climb up and down all seven flights of stairs and ride the elevator whenever possible.  The passenger elevator in the front of the building had an operator who limited our trips, but the freight elevator in the back of the building was self-operated.  All our freight (envelopes, mailers, etc.)  had to be brought up on this elevator which had open-slatted sides and accordion-fold steel doors.  Nothing was more entertaining than to put sticks out through the slats and stand on them until they were sheared off by the floor above as the elevator rose.  A couple of times I was lifted into the air and thrown off because I wasn’t heavy enough to hold down a thick stick when it hit the obstruction.  We couldn’t play the stick game with Dad or Mom on the elevator, but we were always willing to go down and pick up anything that needed to be brought up, and Dad eventually became accustomed to giving us his key to operate the elevator.  I don’t think he ever knew how many times we went up and down to get a single box up to the office.  If he did, he didn’t say anything about it.

By 1949 the business was doing well enough that Mom decided she could work in it part time and have another child — the girl she’d always wanted.  My sister Jackie was born March 30,  1950.  There was no way to determine a child’s sex back then, but Mom was certain and told us throughout her pregnancy that she would have a girl.  Long before Jackie was born, her name had been picked out and appropriate clothes purchased.  If she had turned out to be another brother, I don’t know what my parents would have done.  Jackie soon became the light of Dad’s life as well.  He was always very close to her and she to him from her infancy on.

Mom stayed home while Jackie was very small, working part time on the books and office tasks as she was able.  Dad continued to run the business from downtown with Mom helping him evenings and weekends when she could.  By the time Jackie was about a year old, however, she was going into the city to work again almost daily.  These were perilous times for our family business because Dad often still had periods when he was drinking heavily and at those times he neglected the business and spent its money unwisely.

The Union Pacific Building office finally became too small for the business and its elevator-only access too difficult for hauling tons of mail up and down.  Consequently, Dad and Mom moved to a new ground floor location in a small building which they leased in its entirety at 14 West South Temple Street.  The building was actually located in the narrow one-way street called the Deseret News Alley.  The newspaper’s presses were located on the opposite side from our building and trucks delivering paper to them rolled daily through the alley.  Several other businesses accessed the alley which ran, with several right angle bends, completely through the block from South Temple to First South and had an extension to the west which exited onto Richards Street.  Nearly all the stores and restaurants on the west side of Main Street had rear entrances on this alley. 

Our new office was larger and more convenient, although it had no parking nearby.  We had to deliver work materials by parking temporarily in the alley, as did all the other businesses that used the street.  Some days the road would be blocked for hours as large trucks unloaded and business managers complained about the lack of movement, but generally people were considerate of one another and everyone managed to conduct their business with a minimum of conflict.

The alley was a fascinating place for me.  It had a distinctive smell that I’ll always remember which was produced by the glue from wet cardboard boxes in the trash containers.  It was occasionally home to hobos who would break into the abandoned upper floors of the old Constitution Building a few doors down from our place and live there until rousted out by the police.  It was also dark and spooky at night and my Mother would not walk in it alone after sundown.  It had many interesting places to visit including the newspaper presses; Wastch Meats, a large butcher shop; Russell’s Café and several other restaurants; Utah Printing Co.; a furniture store; several clothing shops; and a drugstore.  Jim and I visited them all and got to know the people in each of them.  When Jim was old enough to drive, he liked nothing better than racing through the alley at breakneck speed.  I followed his example when I got my license and I can clearly remember sliding around sharp corners at 40 miles an hour, missing the sidewalls by inches and literally bouncing into the air over the irregular pavement on the straight stretches.

After Mom returned to work following Jackie’s birth, Jim and I would ride the bus downtown every day after school and work with our parents until they finished for the day.  We also played a lot on the city streets.  I came to know every business, building, side street, and alley in the downtown area during those years.  Our playgrounds in the early 1950’s were Temple Square, Memory Grove and the Capitol grounds.  We visited them constantly and practically memorized every display and monument they contained.  To this day I could draw a plan of all three areas with every significant feature noted and I still recall the names on several of the grave markers at the Memorial Chapel in Memory Grove.

Dad liked to have his breakfast at Russell’s (later Duncan’s) Café which was next door to our building.  He would wait until the restaurant opened at ten, then go over for a slice of Boston cream pie and Boston coffee (half cream, half coffee).  Mom would sometimes go with him, but always ate much lighter.  She had to watch her weight, but that was a worry that Dad never had.  He ate cream pie for breakfast; a big blue plate special for lunch; beef, potatoes and gravy, and ice cream for dinner; and all the doughnuts, chocolates, and eclairs that came his way in between meals and he never gained a pound from any of it.

When Jackie began going to work with Mom at about age two, she would often go to the restaurant with Dad or Mom.  After a while she also became a well-known regular to all the waitresses, cooks, and the owner.  Dad set up an open account for her and she would often wander over to the restaurant in the afternoon and have a snack or just pass the time playing with Russell’s staff during the slow, between-meals times.  Though she inherited Mom’s good looks, Jackie has Dad’s high metabolism and hasn’t had to be much concerned about her weight.

Our business stayed in the alley until 1958 and the downtown location continued to be a big factor for Dad in developing and keeping new business.  He knew the city intimately and visited every business where he thought a sale could be made.  Selling was his strength and as Jim and I grew older, we began to do more of the production work with Mom and some other employees of the firm.  By the time Jim and I were in high school, we had been working in the business for several years and many of our school friends had obtained their first part-time jobs working for my Father and Mother.

Christmas Day 1952 was an especially bright holiday for our family.  It was the first Christmas in my memory that Dad had been completely sober when the holiday arrived.  The Christmas holidays were the worst of times for him to resist drinking because so much alcohol flowed in celebration of the season.  Friends and business associates would give it to him; parties would serve it, and after one or two drinks he would be off on another binge.  This year he managed to avoid drinking through the holidays and on New Year’s Day he and my mother and Jackie (then 2½ years old) went for a short drive to visit relatives.  Jim and I stayed home, but why I can’t recall.  I think it was because they were planning to visit Mel and we didn’t care for Aunt Mildred’s company.  It was a cloudy day and the streets were snow packed (they were plowed, but not salted in those years).  As they approached the intersection of 4500 South and 1300 East, going west on 4500 South, a drunk driver by the name of Beckstead ran the stop sign on 1300 East and hit them broadside on the right side at about 40 miles per hour.  It was an incredible irony that my Father should be hit by a drunk driver during his first sober holiday season in over 20 years.

They were driving our 1949 Chrysler Traveler, a heavy 4-door sedan, which probably saved their lives as it absorbed much of the impact of the collision.  The car was thrown sideways and Dad was hurled out of the driver’s side door as it burst open.  He flew about 50 feet and was badly cut on his head, either as he left the car or on striking the ground. 

Jackie was standing up in the center of the front seat.  There were no seat belts or padded dashes in that car.  She smashed her face into the rear view mirror, severely cutting her mouth, and then followed my Father out the door.  She landed on top of him, which probably prevented worse injury to her.

Mom also tried to exit the car, but was impaled on the steering-mounted gear shift lever which broke her ribs front and back as she struck it.  She also shattered her right knee against the heater control knobs on the lower part of the dashboard.

All three were hospitalized for some time.  Jackie had some plastic surgery to repair her mouth and suffered little scarring from the injury, but later developed epilepsy as a result of an undetected head injury in this accident.  She stayed with relatives for a while, while Jim and I managed at home with just an occasional checkup visit from family until Dad came home.  He began drinking soon after his release and was unable to do much for several weeks due to his injuries and the alcohol.  He finally got on his feet again in about March of 1953.

Mom spent months in the hospital while her ribs mended and her knee was surgically repaired.  The best her doctors could do was to remove the broken bone pieces (including all of her kneecap) and pin the knee together with a pair of brass pins set at right angles through the bones.  The ligaments were reattached to these and after months of therapy she was able to walk again.  The heads of the pins made visible lumps on her leg which she had for the rest of her life. 

Her leg would not bend more than about a 45-degree angle despite all her efforts to flex the knee.  She hung weights on her foot, tried to kneel, and walked regularly, but couldn’t run.  Nothing helped the knee to bend further.  In the spring of 1954, I believe, Jim and I were working in the back yard with Mom when she slipped on the wet grass as a result of her clumsy knee.  She fell backwards on that knee doubling it completely under her as she went down.  I could actually hear the muscles pop and tear.  She cried out at what must have been terrible pain, but the fall became a blessing because afterward the knee would bend normally.  She accomplished accidentally in one agonizing second what 15 months of work had not done and from then onward was able to walk normally. She still feared to run lest she fall on the weakened knee again, but I think she could have, had the occasion required.

After his recovery from the drinking bout in early 1953, Dad determined to go into the real estate business which he believed held a more prosperous future than the direct mail business.  He obtained his real estate sales license and began working as a salesman for Parley White Investments.  He bought a second car (we still had the repaired Chrysler) and began selling homes and commercial property.

Dad was still an excellent salesman and Parley White was a great friend to him.  He helped him learn the intricacies of real estate dealing, land survey, appraisals, title searches (from abstracts, mostly without title insurance in those days) and prepared him to become a broker.  He also knew Dad’s weakness for alcohol and did his best to keep him away from temptations, including the other salesman who drank and the business occasions where alcohol was served. 

Dad prospered so well in real estate that by 1955 we had moved to our new home at 4216 Carter Circle.  In the fall of that year Dad purchased a 1955 Chrysler New Yorker, the first hew car he had owned in more than 20 years.  He was sober again that Christmas season and his drinking bouts became gradually fewer and shorter from then on.  By 1958, when Jim departed on his mission, Dad had passed an entire year without drinking and I began to feel that he had quit for good.

When I was about twelve or thirteen years old, Dad taught me to run one of the offset printing presses at the business.  I had learned to run the postage meter, folder, and other small machines long before, but Dad waited until he thought I was a bit more responsible before allowing me on the press.  My older brother Jim never had any interest in printing and so I was the one who took over that job from my Father.  I quickly learned the essentials of it and from that time on, ran all the printing jobs required for the business.  As I gained experience and studied more about printing, I eventually became more expert than Dad.  I later worked my way through college as a pressman and stripper for other local printing companies, but my start in the trade was from my Father.

The one machine in the business Dad would not let anyone, including my Mother, operate unless he was present was the paper cutter.  We had a 38-inch Challenger cutter that could cleanly slice a stack of paper a yard wide and four inches thick.  It could take off your hand just as easily and Dad was always fearful that one of us would get hurt, hence his insistence that he be present to cut the paper or supervise while we did it.  Most cutters had safety devices built into them so that the blade couldn’t descend if the operator’s hands weren’t clear, but ours was hand-operated and had no protection for the operator or any bystander who put his fingers in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

Cutter safety restraints were often tied off by printers because they slowed down the work.  I saw an operator lose his hand in just such a bypassed cutter at Utah Printing Co. in our alley about 1956.  His hand was reattached in the first such operation attempted in Utah, but I don’t know if he ever recovered the use of it.  Having seen that accident literally first-hand, I never complained about Dad’s caution around our cutter. I was glad of his backup and we never had any injury on our cutter.

The same couldn’t be said of the printing press, however.  Presses made in the 1940’s and 1950’s had no throw-out safety clutches built into them to disengage the electric motor in case of something jamming the press.  They were gear-driven by powerful motors at drum speeds of 100 revolutions per minute.  All the turning steel rollers had a lot of momentum in addition to the power of the motor.  Dad always ran the press wearing the same clothes that he wore when out selling the jobs, a suit with white shirt and tie.  He would tuck the end of his tie into his shirt between the buttons, roll up his sleeves and set to work.  One day, as he was leaning over the running press to adjust a back slider gauge, his tie slipped out of his shirt and onto the moving print drum.  The rubber blanket wrapping the drum dragged the tie end forward until it ran between the plate and print drums which were pressed together with about 5000 pounds of pressure.

It all happened in less than a second.  There was no time for Dad to do anything.  The roaring press just jerked him forward by his tie until his face hit the print drum.  The force was so strong, I’m amazed to this day that it didn’t break his neck, but somehow it didn’t.  Still more miraculous was the fact that, as he was pulled down, his hands flew wide and the left one, fully extended, struck the power switch on the side of the press and turned it off.  The press stopped with Dad’s face jammed against the drum and his nose an inch from being crushed between the rollers.  He slowly managed to roll the press backward by the hand wheel until his tie, fully printed on both sides with the job he was running, came free.  He wasn’t hurt, but definitely shocked at the narrow margin by which he had escaped serious injury or death.  From then on he always removed his tie before starting to run the press.  We hung the printed tie on the wall behind the press as a safety reminder to us all, and I was always careful from then on never to go near a working machine with anything loose on my person.

In 1957, Dad passed his broker’s license exam, posted the required bond ($5,000, I believe, a large sum in that year and a measure of the success that he’d had as a salesman), and founded Investor’s Realty, Inc. with offices at 1333 East 3300 South, almost next door to Parley White’s firm.  Parley wished him well, attended the office-warming party to start him off, and never seemed to mind the competition or losing Dad as a salesman for his own firm.  He was a first class gentleman as long as I knew him.

Investor’s Realty did well and our family prospered.  Mom, Jim and I continued to operate the AAA Direct Mail Service with some help from Dad when he could spare time from his real estate work.  By 1958 we had moved it to a new and larger location at 1155 South Main Street. We had several employees by this time and were doing more work than ever before.  Dad secured a huge new account with the Gold Strike Stamp Co. which was entering the Utah market and signing up all the stores in the state to give trading stamps as premiums with purchases.  We mailed more than 250,000 catalogs for this company, all stuffed in envelopes and addressed by hand, and weighing more than 25 tons.  That was the maximum dead weight I ever hauled to the post office in the back of our car, but we had many other jobs that ran to several tons each and Dad’s Pontiac often groaned under loads that exceeded the capacity of a pickup truck.

In 1953 Dad found his son John again, or rather John’s wife, Marylynn, found us.  Following her marriage to John, Marylynn had been looking for Dad ever since finding his name on John’s birth certificate at the time he entered medical school.  She began inquiring about him, despite remonstrances from John’s mother and stepfather that she shouldn’t try to find him.  John had been told from early childhood that he should never seek after his father (although the reason wasn’t given), but his wife had no inhibitions about doing so.  She soon located Dad and learned about his printing business.  Without at first disclosing her family connection, she began to have the Christmas letters she and John wrote annually printed by Dad and Mom.  Eventually, she informed them of who John really was and thereafter kept them updated on his progress through medical school and other events.  Dad didn’t disclose this information to Jim or me, however.  We learned about John in a more dramatic fashion.

I was home from school one afternoon in the late spring of 1957 when a young lady knocked at the door.  When I answered, she asked me if I was related to Calvin Wells.  When I said that I was his son, she replied that she was my sister-in-law.  Marylynn was always directly to the point.  I thought at first that Jim had gotten married without telling anyone about it, but then Marylynn informed me that she was John’s wife.  I invited her in and learned that she and John had been married for several years and had three children, all boys, who were then my Father’s only grandchildren.

Marylynn made an appointment to return with John and the children to meet Dad and Mom.  Once Dad was reacquainted with his eldest son, the Parkinson family became an integral part of his life and Mom’s.  John was in his final year of medical school when he and Dad met again after more than 25 years of separation.  Though his name was changed, he was definitely a Wells in looks and manner, and definitely his father’s son in many of his preferences and attitudes. Despite what could have been an awkward relationship after a stormy parting and a long time apart with only silence between them, John and Dad quickly became friends and our whole family found that we enjoyed the Parkinson family’s association very much.  Jim and John found they had much in common and have remained close to one another ever since first meeting, a kind of unique bond since both are eldest sons in the same family. 

Upon graduation from medical school, John joined the Air Force and served at a Travis Air Force Base in northern California.  Our contact with him and his family was from then on more limited, but no less warm and welcome.  Dad loved his grandchildren and was always happy to see them whenever they could visit.  He and Mom visited John and Marylynn at least once in California and photos of the Parkinsons were on display in our home for the rest of Dad’s life.

1959 was the year Jim turned 20 and was of age to go on his mission.  He left for Uruguay in June of that year with Dad and Mom’s wholehearted support.  I determined when he left that I would not follow in his footsteps because I feared that Dad, though he had now ceased drinking entirely for more than two years, might be tempted to start again if the stress of maintaining our family businesses and supporting Jim became too great.  I decided that I would stay at home and help with the workload rather than risk any downturn in our family fortunes by my absence and the additional burden on Dad of supporting two missionaries simultaneously.

My reasons for resisting a mission call proved entirely wrong, however, both for me and for Dad.  He continued to do well in real estate and advertising and even took a more active part in our ward.  He had never been much of a church-goer during all my life, although he encouraged the rest of the family to go regularly, which we all did.  He still couldn’t bring himself to regular Church attendance, but he accepted an assignment as fund-raising chairman for our new chapel-building project and did an excellent job at it.  He was also active in the Boy Scout program and served as a committee chairman and fund raiser for years, beginning when Jim and I entered the Scouting program.  Jim’s mission service helped him see a more spiritual aspect of our family life and he became much stronger in his personal beliefs than I had known him before. 

By New Year’s Day 1960, Dad was encouraging me strongly to also go on a mission.  The minimum age to go had been reduced to 19 which I would reach in September.  Dad assured me he could support two missionaries in the field and everything I saw of our family life convinced me that he would.  I changed my mind and began to prepare for a mission call myself.  One startling incident with my Father nearly dissuaded me again, but in the end, it strengthened my conviction that all would be well if I went.

Dad still maintained a desk at AAA Direct Mail although he worked mainly at Investor’s Realty.  One afternoon when I came to work after school as I did each day, I found him in his office finishing some paper work and on his desk a Christmas-boxed bottle of whiskey.  I was stunned and the sight of it brought back a hundred old and unpleasant memories of the past.  I sat down and talked to him for a few minutes about my future plans.  As always, he had good counsel to give and he made no reference to the bottle on his desk.  I noticed that it was unopened, but it still alarmed me greatly to see it there in plain sight, a too-near temptation that I wasn’t sure in my mind he could again resist.

Finally, I became so agitated that I stood up, picked up the bottle and said to him, “You don’t need this, Dad.  We love you just as you are without it.”  He made no response except to smile faintly at me until I turned and walked out of his office and the building.  I got into my car, put the bottle out of sight under the seat, and said a silent prayer that Dad wouldn’t go and get another one.  Until the end of his life, he never did.

I still have that unopened bottle of whiskey more than forty years later.  Looking back, I think that Dad never intended to drink it.  I doubt that he even bought it.  It was probably a gift and I think his leaving it untouched on his desk was his way of telling all of us in the family, and perhaps himself as well, that he had at last conquered his affinity for alcohol and could leave it alone in all circumstances.

Since I was planning to leave for a mission and Jim was still more than a year from completing his (foreign missions were two and one-half years then), Mom would be left almost alone running AAA Direct Mail.  Dad really wanted her working with him in Investor’s Realty, so they decided to sell the advertising firm and move wholly into real estate sales and development.  The business sold rather quickly to another family who already had a small printing firm of their own.  Mom then became the office manager at Investor’s Realty, got her own real estate license and became Dad’s constant companion in business again as she had been for years before at AAA Direct Mail.

I left on my mission in late 1960.  While I was gone, Dad realized his ambition of acquiring investment properties for his retirement income.  He purchased a ten-unit apartment on “N” street in the Avenues district of Salt Lake, added a couple of small commercial buildings in Sandy and Holladay, then developed the Oquirrh Villa apartment complex on 3500 South in the western part of the Valley.  These apartments were the first large development built west of Redwood Road.  Banks were reluctant to finance properties in such rural, unincorporated areas because there were no zoning laws and utilities were often not securely installed.  Dad persuaded Prudential Federal Savings to underwrite the project and it became the forerunner of hundreds of others built later.

Despite the expense of two missionary sons, Dad’s economic success soared.  When I needed a car for my work (missionaries then had to buy and maintain their own vehicles), he bought one and brought it to me in the field.  As with Jim, Dad was always faithful in writing to me and he and Mom even tried to keep my then fiancee, Eileen, entertained in my absence so that she wouldn’t abandon me while I was gone.  This was a particular sacrifice on their part since neither of them liked Eileen and both hoped we wouldn’t marry.  We didn’t, but Dad and Mom, as they did for so many others, put their own feelings aside for my sake. 

A few weeks after I returned home in 1962, Eileen ended our engagement and a few months later married another man.  I wasn’t happy about that at the time, but Dad counseled me that it was for the best, as I eventually saw that it was.  The next year I met Pat and we were married in June of 1964.  That same month, a few weeks before our marriage, Dad and Mom were sealed to one another in the Salt Lake Temple and all of their children were sealed to them.  That occasion marked Mom’s first temple visit and Dad’s first return, I believe, since 1929.  Dad was still recovering from serious surgery when the day came.  By the time we emerged from the temple, he could barely stand, but he had set a goal to unite our family for eternity and he saw his plan through until it was completed.

My Father died on October 13, 1972 after a long battle with cancer.  He fought the disease for more than five years, but like many members of his family, could not defeat it in the end.  Mom, who loved him without reservation and endured so much with him in 37 years of marriage, never fully recovered from his death.  The light went out of her life when he died and many times in the following months I was pained to see her in tears grieving for him.  She was already in frail health when he died and being without him greatly hastened her decline.  In less than four years, she too died and her body was laid to rest beside his.

By the time he passed on, all of Dad’s children were married for time and eternity and he had more than a dozen grandchildren.  John and Marylynn have a total of nine children.  Jim married Luana Sharp in 1967 and the first three of their eventual seven children were already born by the time Dad died.  Pat and I also had three by then; only Stephanie did not get to see her grandfather in this life.  Jackie and Richard Thomas married in 1970 and Austin, the first of their five children was born in July of 1972, a few months before Dad’s death.

As I write this in February of the year 2000, All Dad’s children remain close to one another, as he would have wanted our family to be.  John’s wife Marylynn died in 1995 after nearly 40 years together with him.  Two of his children are deceased also, but all the others except one have been happily married and all those married but Callie (who married only a few months ago) have added from two to four children to Dad’s line of descendants.  Four of Jim and Luana’s children are married and the fifth will be in April.  So far he and Luana have four grandchildren with more expected this year.  All of mine and Pat’s children are also married and each has a child.  One of Jackie and Richard’s children is married and they hope for grandchildren soon.

One of the pictures I have of Dad shows him at about two years of age wearing a dress, as all young children did in that time.  Despite the attire, he was a handsome child.  My daughter Monique’s son Calvin is named for his great-grandfather.  As I watch him stand and attempt his first steps, I can’t help but think that my Father and Mother must be pleased with their posterity.  Being modest and self-effacing as both of them always were, I’m sure they would say that they had little to do with how we all turned out, but the truth is a very different story. 

I think it was Voltaire who said that “what you are thunders so loudly in my ears that I cannot hear what you say.”  So it was with me and my parents.  Being independent-minded and often full of rebellion or worse, I frequently didn’t listen to what they said, but there was no mistaking the integrity of their lives.  They lived through tumultuous times in history, endured many hardships and not a few crises in their own lives, and they toiled long and hard for small reward through much of their careers.  Through it all they still kept faith with the principles of their lives.  They were honest and honorable, trusting and trustworthy, gracious and generous, kind and gentle, and the finest teachers by example and practice that ever I knew.  If I have any of these qualities, it is from my Father and my Mother that I obtained them.

Seymour Bicknell Young was born in October 1837 in Kirtland, Ohio, the second son of Joseph Young and Jane Adeline Bicknell.  His father, Joseph Young, was the elder brother of Brigham Young and his mother was a member of the Bicknell family, who first arrived in Massachusetts in 1635.

When Seymour only a year old, his family left Kirtland along with two hundred others in June 1838. The group spent a few months in Illinois and left in September with a company of nine wagons for Far West, Missouri. After crossing the Mississippi River and traveling a few weeks, they stopped at a farmhouse to buy milk and were told by the woman there that they would surely be killed by mobs if they went on.  She begged them to go back, but in spite of this warning, they traveled on very slowly for a few days, not meeting any opposition.

One morning late in October, they were halted by a party of about forty armed men on horses who threatened them with death if they went further west.  When Joseph asked why, he was told that, because they were Mormons, any of them who would not renounce their religion must leave the state of Missouri within ten days.  The Missourians also took all the group’s arms and ammunition, The leader promised to do all he could to help the Saints if they stayed there and then the armed men rode away.

That night in camp council many saints wanted to push on in spite of their forced agreement to stay.  A Mr. Merrick insisted that the company continue on and, despite Joseph Young’s warning that to do so would defy the demands of the mob and that they would surely suffer because of it, Mr. Merrick left for Far West that night.  When he returned two nights later, he directed the saints to go east at once to Haun’s Mill.  Joseph Young’s family and the other saints arrived at Haun’s Mill October 28 and found a number of friends already gathered there.

Seymour Young was very sick, so Jane Adeline, his mother, was given the only cabin room available.  Monday passed peacefully, but on Tuesday a mob of 240 men on horses rode in and surrounded the settlement. Many of the unarmed saints took shelter in the blacksmith shop and the mob began firing at those inside.  Some others tried to defend their families, but were shot with their own weapons that had earlier been taken from them.

Joseph Young’s family were in the cabin.  Jane felt the attackers would not harm her or the children and begged Joseph to save himself.  He climbed out of the window and escaped into the deep brush behind it. 

According to their own account, the mob fired seven rounds, upwards of 1,600 shots during the attack on Haun’s Mill that lasted between 30 and 60 minutes. After the initial attack, several of those who had been wounded or had surrendered were shot dead.  Seventeen Mormons died in the massacre and fifteen more were wounded, but Jane and her children all survived uninjured.  Joseph was one of the few Mormon men not killed or wounded at Haun’s Mill.

Joseph Young and his family left Missouri with other Saints and settled in Nauvoo, Illinois.  They again fled from mob violence in the spring of 1846 when Seymour was eight.  He later remembered how difficult it was to leave their beautiful home in Nauvoo. The family suffered from cold and hunger, as did others.  Because they had no money for a wagon, team and supplies they had to wait years after leaving Illinois before they were able to cross the plains. In 1846, they re-crossed the Missouri River into Iowa where they remained for almost three years. In the spring of 1848, Seymour was baptized at Carterville, Iowa, by Ezekial Lee and in June 1850 Joseph and his family, now numbering eight children, finally started for the Salt Lake Valley arriving in September.  Seymour drove a team of oxen and walked part of the way. After their arrival he and his father went back to meet the following companies and directed and helped them, walking all the way. He was thirteen years old at the time.  A year later he started school at the newly organized University of Deseret, forerunner of the University of Utah.

In 1854, at the age of seventeen, along with others, Seymour was sent by President Brigham Young to Cache Valley to settle there, under the direction of Elder Bryant Stringham. He helped build some of the first homes there.

At the age of nineteen, Seymour was ordained a seventy and called on a mission to England.   As an experiment in the feasibility of handcart travel, church leaders sent seventy-two missionaries east from Utah. They walked pushing handcarts, three men to each handcart. In his journal, Seymour tells that they would “roll” six miles before breakfast, then camp and eat, “roll” another ten miles, then camp for dinner, then another eight or ten miles before setting up camp for the night.  All the mountain streams had to be crossed by fording. They averaged 25 miles per day and reached the Missouri River in 43 days, having walked one thousand fifty miles.

At Omaha the missionaries abandoned the handcarts and boarded a river boat to St. Louis and up the Ohio River to Pittsburgh; then by train to New York and from there set sail for England. Their sailing ship drifted in a calm for three weeks off the coast of Newfoundland. Seymour wrote that “the food was not fit for hogs,” but that was the only complaint he had about the journey.  He was a missionary in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire until the spring of 1860 when they were called home as the Civil War threatened to engulf America.

In 1862 President Lincoln telegraphed President Young to requested a battalion of Mormon men to enlist as soldiers in the U.S. Army to protect the overland mail and telegraph lines between Salt Lake City on the west and the Missouri River on the east. Seymour served as a corporal in this battalion until March 1863 when all the 105 battalion members were honorably discharged.

He served again in the Utah Territorial Militia in the Blackhawk Indian Wars in 1866.  It was during this conflict that he broke his nose and set it himself. 

In 1864 he met and fell in love with Ann Elizabeth Riter who was then sixteen years old. He waited until she came of age (18) before asking her to marry him and on April 14, 1867, they were married in the Endowment House by President Brigham Young. Seymour was thirty and Ann Elizabeth was nineteen.

Realizing the need for medical men in Utah during the 1860s, President Young advised Seymour to become a doctor. After studying the theory and practice of medicine and surgery for several years under Dr. W. F. Anderson and later with Dr. Benedict, he matriculated in October 1871 at the University Medical College of New York, graduated with honors 3 years later.  He was third in his class of two hundred eight and received a bronze medal for excellence in surgery and general scholarship.  While Seymour was in medical school, he was greatly assisted by his wife Ann, who kept boarders in their home, sewed clothing, and made buckskin gloves to earn the income required to support the family.

Seymour was one of the first Utah men to attend a medical college. He became a practicing physician and surgeon in Salt Lake City and personal physician to his uncle, Brigham Young. When John Taylor became president of the Latter-day Saints Church, he asked Seymour to serve the Saints and Indians residing in and near the little town called Washakie in Box Elder County.  While there, it was a common thing for Seymour to come home and find several Indians with medical needs waiting for him in the yard. 

He was one of the organizers of the Utah Medical Society and also served as its president for some time. He was later appointed superintendent of the Territorial Mental Hospital in Salt Lake, and his practice extended to the entire territory of Utah and surrounding states.

About 1870 the first mental institution, called The Home for the Insane, was erected on a 160-acre parcel of ground with water rights that later became the College of Saint Mary‑of‑the‑Wasatch, a private Catholic women’s college and afterward, St. Mary of the Wasatch High School.  In addition to being home to the college and high school, and later a high school only, it also housed a convent.

The Home for the Insane was erected by Salt Lake City Corporation and operated under the supervision of the City Physician.  It was located on the east bench of Salt Lake City,  at Twenty-fourth East St. and directly on line with Ninth South St. in the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains. The institution was first staffed by the Sisters of the Holy Cross, who operated a hospital in Salt Lake City and also trained women as nurses to work in the hospital and the mental facility.

In 1878 Seymour purchased several acres of land near the asylum and built his family home on it.  He may have chosen this site, in part, because he wanted to be close to the mental institution where much of his work was done.  He also wanted to have the opportunity of working with some of his patients in a home environment, a concept that was unusual at the time, but one that proved more successful than the usual treatment of simply housing the mentally ill with minimum care. 

In the construction of the his home and the laying out of the grounds, Seymour showed insight into methods of caring for the insane and feeble-minded that was far in advance of his day.  Many acres of ground were brought under cultivation until trees, lawns and flowers surrounded the main building. Wheat, vegetables and fruit trees were grown on the surrounding fields and hogs, cows and chickens were also raised with much of the farm work being done by the less seriously disturbed patients as a part of their therapy.

About 1886, Dr. Seymour B. Young was appointed City Physician and the Home for the Insane came directly under his management.  By then, the asylum had greatly expanded and its multiple buildings were large and quite pretentious for a health facility in a city the size of Salt Lake.  The main building was unique and could well have been called the House of Gables and Porches.  Its exterior was of plaster and cement and it was kept immaculately clean.  It was actually known by those in the city below as “The White House on the Hill.”

The only thing that marred the picture of this “Home on the Hill” was the tight board fence surrounding about an half acre of ground. This fence was twelve feet high and the enclosure within gave the inmates a place to recreation and relaxation. There were many locust trees and beds of flowers within the enclosure that were mostly tended by patients.  The enclosure was at the rear of the Young home while the front and sides were enveloped in a mass of locust trees.  Some of those trees are still standing today near the present Mausoleum located a few rods south of the old home.

Although Utah was not yet a state, the asylum served patients who were sick, feeble-minded or insane who came to it from throughout the Territory and also from adjoining states such as Wyoming, Idaho and Nevada who had no equal facilities.  Many criminally insane persons, many simple-minded individuals, and many who were sick with all manner of other afflictions were cared for and often sent back to their homes cured.

About 1888 Dr. Young purchased the entire property and, from that time on, conducted a mental hospital under the name of The Young Asylum for the Insane or Doctor Young’s Asylum.  He personally supervised the asylum until the completion of the Utah State Mental Hospital at Provo in the early 1900s. Dr. Young’s patients were then transferred to the new facility and became charges of the State.  The Young Asylum was closed and Dr. Young retired from active medical practice, although he continued in other duties and his church calling for the remainder of his life.

Under Dr. Young’s ownership, the asylum had a superintendent and a matron who lived and worked at the facility.  Walter Wilcox and his wife, the parents of Doctor C. P. Wilcox; Richard MacAllister and his wife; and P. H. Young and his wife were among those who had direct charge of the institution under the direction of its owner.

The continuous care of over one hundred afflicted people at a time during the 1880s was no small job. The institution had no inside water system and no central heating. Stoves were used of necessity, but these were often dangerous, especially in proximity to sometimes delusional or violent inmates.  The spring which furnished the asylum with water was half a mile away on the mountain slope and only in warm seasons would water flow from it downstream to the home.  For winter use, deep wells were dug, but it was constant work to supply the asylum and home with the necessary drinking water to say nothing of the other functions for which water is required.

Many strange characters were sent to the institution for treatment and while there they continued to follow their respective trades.  Fine pieces of furniture and other useful articles were made by these inmates.  Needle work done by some women workers was extremely fine and could probably not be duplicated today. They created crazy quilts, a few of which are still in existence, that often consisted of more than two thousand pieces of fabric beautifully sewn together in various intricate patterns.

While many apartments were barred and there were a few iron cages, yet in the main most of the inmates had liberal privileges and many worked in the garden among the flowers.  Some convalescents were taken to the home of Dr. Young and given privileges not usually accorded the mentally ill at that time.

One of the most violent men in the institution was placed in charge of the horses and cows at the Young home, but after a short stay he left in the night and was never heard from again.

One simple kindly man worked in the kitchen of the Young home and did yeoman service for months until he was finally sent to his own home, cured.

One of the most intelligent but criminally insane man to be treated at the asylum was Joe Sherman.  He was a notorious figure in the early history of Utah because he was obsessed with a desire to kill Brigham Young.  He was not a Latter-Day Saint nor even a long term resident of Utah, but his mania was still directed toward killing the church leader.  Several times this man was apprehended and disarmed after passing through the big gates of President Young’s home with the intention of harming him.

After being held in the Utah Territorial Prison for years, during which time he killed a guard and injured others, Sherman was taken to the Dr. Young’s Asylum where he was kept under strict guard, but still permitted to work and enjoy outdoor amusement.  He became a fine craftsman and a voracious reader during his time at the asylum, but his mania remained even long after its object had died.  The asylum staff had little success in treating him and could not release him because he was deemed a public menace due to his high intelligence, extreme delusions, and great physical strength.  He remained at the asylum until he was transferred years later to the Utah State Mental Hospital at Provo where he remained until his death.

On one occasion the asylum was set on fire by three women inmates who all were burned to death in the conflagration they started.  Had the staff not been able to contain the blaze to a single room, the asylum buildings would have been destroyed.

Another very likable woman was obsessed with reading the Bible to the exclusion of all other necessary life activities.  She would quote scripture from dawn until far into the night, but had no interest in caring for herself or interacting with anyone. She never failed to recite for the most learned visitor the exact words of any verse they named.  But she also could not be released from the asylum for fear that she would harm herself through neglect.

Although it was necessary to confine some patients to locked rooms, a large percentage of the asylum inmates enjoyed liberal privileges.  As their condition improved, many were transferred to the home of Dr. and Mrs. Young, where they received additional treatment, in which he was greatly aided by his wife and other family members.  Eventually, many of those who passed through the Young home were made well and returned to their families.

Dr. Young’s sympathy for mentally afflicted humanity endeared him to many and he was a well-loved member of the community.  Like many physicians of the time, he thought little about fees.  His great concern was with curing disease and relieving pain and suffering.

The Youngs were the parents of twelve children, two of whom died while infants. One child had scarlet fever before she was two and was left totally deaf. Another daughter received an injury to her hip which left her lame, and a third daughter received brain damage at birth and was afflicted with cerebral palsy. With all their early hardships and later sorrows and trouble, the Youngs faced life with courage and faith and never ceased to fill their lives with service.

Among his other duties, Dr. Young was the official medical examiner of missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and examined thousands of them before they left for missions in the U.S. and abroad.

In October 1882, in response to his inquiry regarding the filling of vacancies in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and other matters, President John Taylor said that he received a revelation which stated in part:

“Thus saith the Lord to the Twelve, and to the Priesthood and people of my Church.

“Let my servants George Teasdale and Heber J. Grant be appointed to fill the vacancies in the Twelve, that you may be fully organized and prepared for the labors devolving upon you¼ You may appoint Seymour B. Young to fill up the vacancy in the presiding quorum of Seventies, if he will conform to my law; for it is not meet that men who will not abide my law shall preside over my priesthood¼”

The law referred to in the revelation was plural marriage, a doctrine that had been openly taught and practiced in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints for many years.  But not by Seymour B. Young, although he was a lifelong church member and priesthood holder. 

Seymour had just celebrated his 45^th birthday, had been happily married for 15 years and already had a large family.  He did not want to take another wife, especially in view of the increasing pressure being exerted on church members to disavow polygamy and the numerous federal laws passed and pending that prohibited it.

But Seymour and his family were devout church members who accepted President Taylor as a prophet and his revelation as a direct instruction from God.  Although the Youngs did not desire to become involved in the legal struggle over polygamy, or disrupt their family by the addition of a new wife, Seymour felt a strong obligation to accept the Lord’s call as a general authority in the church and with it the condition that he marry another wife.

Consequently, some eighteen months after being called as one of the Seven Presidents of Seventy, and doubtless after much agonizing to reconcile his feelings with the requirement and much searching to find a suitably willing and acceptable woman, Seymour B. Young married Abby Corilla Wells, a daughter of Daniel H. Wells and his plural wife Hannah free, on 28 April 1884.

Although, like Seymour, Wells was undoubtedly worried about possible prosecution of his new son‑in‑law under the Edmunds Act, he officiated at Seymour’s marriage to Abby in the Endowment House.  Dr. Young’s first wife, Ann Elizabeth Riter, with whom he already had seven children and was expecting an eighth, gave her reluctant consent even though she was clearly not enamored of plural marriage.

Seymour’s concerns were well‑founded.  By the end of the year Abby Young was expecting her first child.  Although the good news of the pending birth that would ordinarily have been publicly announced was kept secret from all but family members, word of the plural marriage of Dr. Young, who was now a church authority, could not be long suppressed.  It soon became widely known in the community and the federal anti‑polygamy prosecutors began building a case against him.  Dr. Young was obliged to maintain a low public profile to avoid arrest.

By February of the following year, however, warrants for the arrest of many LDS general authorities were issued and they went into hiding to avoid arrest.  Dr. Young did not leave Salt Lake City, but he avoided most public appearances where he might be apprehended by federal marshals.  His work was also impacted because he was one of the most well-known figures in the Territory and it was impossible for him to travel anywhere without being recognized.   Consequently, he kept mostly to his home and the hospital and relied on family members and friends to give him warning of any threat. 

His new wife Abby was now also in danger of prosecution, as was her unborn child. The Edmunds Act stipulated that any person with a living spouse who married again was guilty of polygamy and provided for a prison sentence up to five years and a $500 fine.  It also made cohabitation, living together as husband and wife when not legally married, unlawful and designated that children born of polygamous parents before 1 January 1883 were to be considered legitimate, but those born after that date, as Abby’s would be, were not. To maintain her own safety and, more importantly, to secure a legitimate birth certificate for her child, Abby Wells left the United States and traveled to England. She arrived in Liverpool in early 1885 to reside temporarily with her father had also been obliged to leave Utah to avoid arrest and was then serving as President of the European Mission.

Abby Young traveled under the assumed name Abby Wells Chapin, the maiden name of her father’s mother Catherine Chapin.  Her daughter, Hannah Louisa Young, was born in Liverpool in September 1885 and Abby had no difficulty securing an English birth record for her daughter in her legal name. 

Abby stayed in England until the middle of 1886, then returned with her daughter to Utah.  She again used the name Abby Chapin for travel and her daughter was also listed as A. Chapin, infant, on the manifest.

Dr. Young was still under threat of arrest when Abby arrived back home.  By November of 1886, she was expecting again and was relocated by her husband to a residence in Denver.  She was still using the surname Chapin when her second child, Alice Young, was born in July 1877.  Alice survived only three months and was buried in Colorado. 

Abby continued to live in Denver with Hannah until Wilford Woodruff, the new President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, who succeeded John Taylor following his death in 1888, issued the Manifesto in 1891 which officially ended the practice of polygamy in the church.  Following this event and the subsequent cessation of government efforts to prosecute general authorities under the new Edmunds-Tucker Act, Abby and Hannah were able to return to Salt Lake City.  They did not reside with Dr. Young’s family, however, but stayed with Abby’s mother, Hannah Wells, now a widow of Daniel H. Wells, and some of her other adult children.

Even after the threat to Dr. Young had passed, Abby and Hannah continued to use the surname Chapin for many years after their return to America.  Abby’s 1930 Utah death certificate lists her as Abbie Wells Young aka Abbie Wells Chapin.

In 1893 Dr. Young became the Senior President of the Seventies and held this position until his death. He traveled extensively in this capacity and also as a physician, always helping those who were in need of medical assistance, ministering both spiritually and medically. He served on the LDS General Sunday School Union Board for 46 years. He was seldom ill and lived the Word of Wisdom in its fullness. He walked to his office every morning.

His death occurred December 15. 1924, at the age of eighty‑seven years.  Funeral services were held in the Assembly Hall on Temple Square with President Heber J. Grant. Anthony W. Ivins, George Albert Smith and J. Golden Kimball as speakers. One of them said, “He was the gentlest. cleanest. kindliest of souls it has been my privilege to know. He saw nothing but the good side of life and people.  If he ever bore any ill will to any man, a long intimate acquaintance failed to reveal it.  He was a patriotic devoted citizen. His first allegiance was to God, next to family, and along with these was woven into his life a devotion to his country.”