Hyrum Morris Buhanan

Leaves of Life: Recollections of H. Morris Buhanan
As penned by Nancy Buhanan Bauer

1911 – 1921: Childhood Recollections

Before my birth, my parents and my sister EllaV (“Elva”) lived in a small farm in Fremont, Wane County, Utah. My parents had a little farmhouse. They were poor people, so it was not a pretentious home, but it was a good enough home. It was a lumber place. Father later sold out to one of his brothers, Martin. (We called him Mart. …Mart ended up having a BIG family and he added a room or two onto the house to have enough bedrooms for his growing family. His son Auto was my age and Matt was Elva’s age…then he had some younger, too; Leland and the two girls, Elzada and Lila.) It was during that period of their lives when my Father was called on a short term mission to Denver Colorado- my mother did maid work, gardening and laundry for other people to support herself and their little daughter while he was away on that mission. He was released and came home, and in due time I was born.

As near as I can tell the story, A doctor and a nurse were there; they were a little concerned because I did not urinate when they felt I was supposed to, so the Dr. held me upside down by my feet, slapped my backside and made me cry…then they laid me down and I complied – urinating all over myself and the Doctor’s hands- so they cleaned me up …and I have always thought that he ought not to have spanked me that way.

My family’s financial situation, when I was born, was such that we had to move to Torrey. My brother Wane was born while we lived in Torrey. My mother’s health was very poor at that time, and the doctor said she needed to move to a lower climate. After that, they moved to Fruita, because it had the lower climate mother needed.

I was often afraid that my mother would die, because her health was so poor. I loved her so much and was so dependent on her that every time she’d get sick I’d really have a rough time of it. She would put her arms around me and comfort me by telling me that when she was a young girl, she got so sick once that she seemed to leave her body and was up in the corner of the room looking down on her body, which was still lying on the bed. She said that a glorious, radiant man in a beautiful white robe came to her and held her in his arms and told her not to be afraid. He told her she would live to have a husband and raise a family and that she would be almost 93 years old before she died. She would tell me that, and repeat to me, “So don’t worry Morris, I will be just fine. I will live to be almost 93 years old.” Oddly enough, as the years passed she DID die, just three days before she would have turned 93 years old.

In Fruita we had two fruit orchards (apples, peaches, plums, apricots, pears, two types of walnuts-black and English-, almonds) and a lovely farm where we raised alfalfa, melons, corn, carrots, squash and other food crops. We used a good team of horses to help plant and plow, -and for cultivating, Dad had a cultivator. In the fall season of every year, he gathered a wagonload of our melons and brought them home, then invited the entire town to come and eat wonderful fresh picked melons with us. We always had seed spitting and melon eating contests…and, even though mother was small, she could eat more melons than any other woman in town, especially of watermelons! Everyone had such a glorious time! This was a thing that Dad and Mother did for the town EVERY fall season, and we always looked forward to it as much as the other folks in town did.

After living there in Fruita on our lovely farm and surrounded by orchards, we moved to Blue Valley, in Wane County. Blue Valley was near Hanksville and Notum, Utah.

My father kept sixty hives of bees there at that place and it was necessary to occasionally extract the honey from those hives. In order to do so, we had to take a hot knife and lop off the tops of the honey cells. This was done with what we called “the capping knife.” We had to keep the capping knife in hot water over a fire to keep it warm, so that the beeswax would not stick to it and create a problem.

We were extracting honey from the hives of bees one day when I was four years old and father had started for the house with a five-gallon can of honey. Mother had taken off her bee bonnet, which was made partly of a long cloth veil, and laid it in a convenient place so that she could prepare a lunch for Daddy. Well, being a curious four year old, I got mother’s bee bonnet, put it on, and then leaned over the fire to look at and take the capping knife out of the hot water and put it back in. While I was doing that, the bee bonnet caught on fire. Terrified, engulfed in flames and in considerable pain, I started to scream and run for the house for Daddy or Mother to take the bee bonnet off, since I was being engulfed in hot flames and breathing the hot gasses from the burning cloth.

I was just falling from exhaustion (or perhaps from smoke inhalation?) when Daddy jerked the bee bonnet off, taking with it a good deal of the skin from my forehead and all over my scalp –most of my scalp, at least- but I was very, VERRRRRY badly burned all over. I’d fought those flames until my hands were badly burned down to the bones in places, I’d breathed those hot fumes until my throat and mouth were badly burned…I couldn’t swallow a thing except a little cool watermelon juice for a matter of six weeks. At that time, Bishop Meeks from Loa came down to our place to visit with Daddy just a little bit because Daddy was the Presiding Elder in that section of the country.

They talked just briefly and then Bishop Meeks said, “Well, Brother Behunin, you have him in your arms now, but I fear you won’t keep him there.” And Daddy said, “If you’ll help me administer to him, I‘ll keep him! I’m SURE I’ll keep him.”

Well, Bishop Meeks happened to have some consecrated oil and they administered to me. The relief was so intense, so pronounced and so sudden from most of the pain of being badly burned- that I said, “Daddy, I think I’m dying, now.” Everyone cried, then. It had been a probable outcome that they were all too aware of, and when I said that, they were certain that I really was. But, of course, I wasn’t dying; it was just relief from part of the pain! It didn’t take it all down, it didn’t disappear, entirely; I still had a lot of pain. I was so badly burned that it took quite some time for the burns to heal; but it did help, the administration helped tremendously, and I recognized the hand of God in that sacred ordinance.

I feel that the blessing also miraculously prevented as severe of scarring as I should have had. (Note from Morris’ daughter Nancy; “You cannot tell Dad has been scarred at all, unless you are shown his hands and can see that he has not got a thick thumb muscle circling the base of his thumb near his wrist, like people generally have. Though he was also burned on his face, scalp, neck and nearly everywhere else, I cannot tell that anything like this ever happened to him. It was years before all of the scars disappeared from his face and neck, arms and other parts of his body, but you really cannot tell it ever happened, now. He has described to me how he felt impressed by the Lord to rub the scars vigorously with sandpaper to wear them down to looking more like normal skin. Even up into his early High School years, he was still using the sandpaper to scrape off his scars until they nearly bled, hoping that the treatment would work, that they would eventually disappear. They did.”)

I was four years old and recovering from the burns when I fell in love for the first time… She was 19 years old and I was 4 years old… Angeline…Angeline (pronounced, “AN-jell-line,” not “AN-jell- lean”) Oldsburg. She used to come up and read stories to me while I was lying there burned…. I wanted to marry her! I would soon catch up to her, I knew, because I was getting older every year – but she up and married an OLD MAN…22 years old! Broke my heart… Seriously, nobody ever really touched my heart until I met Mary Cox; and then, WHAM!!! I married her three and a half years later!

About that time, my sister Elva used to come in and ask for bread and mother would give her a loaf or a slice of bread. She was taking the bread and disappearing for a long time every morning that way and mother began to wonder what on Earth Elva was doing with all that bread. She would have been much calmer had she never found out, perhaps…!

Elva had discovered that there was a huge, almost cave-like hole by the bank of the river where the riverbank had started to crumble off. She was not the only one to discover it; hundreds of slithering snakes of a number of varieties had also discovered it and were using it as a place of shade and refuge. Elva was taking the loaf of bread and going out by the bank of the river each morning to crumb the little pieces and those snakes would come up out of a crack where the bank had started to crumble off.

Well, this particular morning mother decided to follow her and see just what Elva was doing every day; why she was always asking for a piece of bread. She did not have all that long to follow her and lie in wait; quite quickly she saw her little daughter a little way off, crumbling bread and scattering the pieces in a darker, more colorful and strange spot of earth than the area around it; and then my mother noticed that it was not really earth, because it was actually moving; there were hundreds of snakes slithering all over Elva and around her. Many were rattlesnakes, coral snakes, sidewinders…and Elva was blissfully unaware of her danger.

Mother called her to come and Elva came obediently; no snakes harmed her small daughter Elva at all…then mother picked up her little daughter and ran for my Dad! Dad, when he learned of the snakes and Elva’s daily adventures with them- called his brothers Will and Ira to come and help him kill the snakes. Most of the snakes were “good” snakes, helpful snakes that kept the rodent population down, but there were so many of the deadly ones that there was good reason to get those poisonous ones out of the picture, as it were.

Of course, the men killed all the deadly ones that they could, but there were so very many of them to try and kill quickly that some of them slithered away safely before they could be killed. Poor Elva, she sobbed over and over, “NO! Don’t kill them! They haven’t hurt anybody, they’re my PETS!!” Elva had a real affinity for critters. She loved them.

We had a problem with some food disappearing from where it had been planted on our property. Dad discovered that the culprits were a bunch of Marmots (We called them “Woodchucks.”) that were living in a rocky ledge against one side of the alfalfa field. They were coming out in the morning and devouring the alfalfa that we had planted for the stock and also devouring other good things that we wanted for ourselves. Their depredations left us precious little for our own use and to feed our stock. Dad determined he needed to rid the place of the hungry varmints so we could get a better hay crop. Dad had set traps for the woodchucks, and he left them prominently out for the unsuspecting marmots to step in and be caught.

One morning Elva found a huge marmot/woodchuck with its hind leg caught in a trap. She adored it as soon as she saw it, picked it up tenderly, crooning to it softly, and carried it, -bouncing and jostling all the long way- back to the house. Dad saw her with that wild and bleeding woodchuck, and could see at a glance that with those long sharp teeth it could bite clear through her little arm.
He let out a yell for her to drop it at once. In her surprise and shock that our quiet and peaceful Dad had yelled at her, she dropped it. The woodchuck immediately attempted to run off as fast as it could with that trap on its hind leg. It had never attempted to hurt her the whole time she was picking it up and carrying it back to the house, despite the fact that it was a wild animal, badly hurt and bleeding. She cried to Dad, “Please don’t hurt him, he’s my pet!”

When I was a REALLY little kid, maybe 6 or 7 years old, most of the men in our community smoked; even our father and his brothers smoked…so my cousins and Wane and I thought we would try it one day, too. It only took one puff for me to know without question that I would never be a smoker! That was SO terrible! (Chuckling) Mother that night said, “Phew!! You smell like smoke!” and Wane said, “It must’ve been that bush we had on fire.” (…Well, we had set one on fire; we’d put some potatoes in a bush and set it on fire and when it quit, we’d eaten the potatoes!) And mother said, “Oh; well …that would do it.” And so we never had to confess –but OHHHHHH, Wane and I learned OUR lesson! It was so awful we never DID try it again!

My father loved animals and they responded wonderfully to him. His teams were the envy of those who were rougher than he was in training them to work. Dad treated his animals with respect and love and they worked harder for Dad than most animals would for their owners. He had never laid a whip to one of his animals, they always responded to his voice because he loved them and they knew it and they loved him back. One day Dad and I were in Capital Gorge, located between Fruita and Caineville. There had been a gully washer of a storm, and the canyon was steep and rocky, with a very tight, narrow space between the rugged cliff walls where we were.

We heard a low rumbling noise and knew that a flood was coming. We also knew there was only one place where we could possibly escape death in that flood. It was a large sand bar that was probably at least a half mile away from us, and certain death was rumbling toward us at frightening speed, bringing with it whole trees and considerable other debris as it roiled and rolled along sweeping up everything in it’s path.

We knew we were still some distance from the point of safety. Dad realized that if he did not put his horses at a dead run we had not a prayer of a chance of reaching safety at all. So for the first time in his life, he whipped his horses, frightening them into frenzy so that they would run at their top speed. We reached the safe point only seconds before the wall of death reached and swept by us.

It was a HUGE flood! That water towered at least 20 feet deep when it came after us. Nothing in its path could withstand it, and if we had not reached that big sandbar safely, we would have been swept along and lost our lives as surely as we were alive right then. If not for the speed that those horses were moving and my father’s quick thinking in whipping them to that wild run, we would not have lived to tell the tale.

Dad, once we were truly safe, immediately leapt out of the buggy and ran heartbroken and shaking to his quivering horses heads to croon and apologize to them; stroking them and loving them and praising them lavishly. He told them how sorry he was he‘d had to whip them and how brave and swift they were. He told them in a loving voice how they had saved our lives, and how much he appreciated them for their efforts. It was not until at least an hour later that the flood waters went down enough that we were able to get from there to Fruita.

We had a truly BOUNTEOUS crop of food that year; our land produced a stupendous crop of everything we raised -almost more than we knew what to do with. We dried a great deal, bottled a lot, did all we knew to make good use of it and not waste any. It is a blessing that we had such a bumper crop, because we had a bad flood hit the property the next year, just about harvest time, and we lost absolutely everything in that flood.

It was a good thing our cabin was on a little knoll, or it would have been inundated by the flood. It did kill all of the bees in those sixty hives, and we lost the honey we would have been able to get from them that year. Mother went out over the sand to get a watermelon that was lodged where the cane was growing. It was so good! We all raved about how sweet and good it was. Everyone loved it so much, in fact, that my cousins (Uncle Will’s two eldest daughters, May and June) wanted to get more melons that we could enjoy. They got caught in the muddy quicksand up to their armpits and my Uncle Ira and Dad and Uncle Will had to go and dig them out to save them. They had all come to visit us when that flood occurred, so they were there afterward and that is how they got trapped in the quicksand.
We had a sale of the land arranged, and we were excited about it because the offer was for $55,000.00 and our land was worth every cent of that! After that flood, though, the land was worthless. It was buried under nearly six feet of sand and a hopeless loss, so we packed up and moved, and the land remained unsold.

(still unsold to this day…I wonder if we ought to check into what happens to property unused for so many years….!)

Well, …then we moved again to Fruita and stayed for two years or so… EllaV and I took the sheep and milk cows out to graze and brought them in again at night. We were youngsters, but we still had to take on heavy responsibilities. The family could not get by any other way, back in those days. I was just about six years old then when another flood incident happened.

Our lovely farm in the Sand Creek/Fruita area was flooded and our crops ruined. One of our mares got trapped in quicksand in Sand Creek and her little filly was left with no mother to take care of her. My father knew that the filly was doomed to die, and though his heart was heavy, he was convinced he would have to shoot it. We kids pleaded with him not to do it, so he said if we could bottle feed it and manage to keep it alive and raise it, we could keep it as a pet. That is how she got her name. We called her Pet. We raised her on the bottle. One day Pet threw me off into a wet patch of cattails with awful black mud everywhere…I was covered in awful, smelly black slime…Pet threw me off and then walked off a little ways from me and looked back at me…laughing at me, I guess! And after me feeding her from a bottle every day, too! (Sheepish grin)

My grandfather Elijah Cutlar Behunin and Ephraim Mulford had built a one room building to be used as a church, amusement hall and also a schoolhouse there in Fruita. It is still standing and is a treasured part of the Capital Reef National Monument. We used that little one room building while I was living there.

We had to move to Torrey again at that point, because mother was expecting another baby boy; Roe, and she needed to be near a doctor.
(I would have been six years of age and started school there.)

I already knew how to read and spell, count and add and even subtract before I started school. I had watched Elva enough that I knew what she had learned, too. Teacher did not know what to do with me. She put me in the second grade once she realized how much I had already learned. Mrs. Chaffen was her name. That first day of school was pretty painful for me…I went with the kindergarten children and the teacher showed us the first four letters of the alphabet and asked me to come up and point to the letter D. I knew as well as she did what the letter D was. I had been reading lots of books by then. I told her I didn’t want to…! She then commanded me; “Morris, come and point to the letter D!”

And I said “NO!” She said, “Morris, come up and point to the letter D!” and I said, “No! I won’t DO IT! She sent me home.

My dad wanted me to tell him why I had been sent home from school…so I told him. He took down his razor strap and slapped it onto the table with a resounding slap and announced to me that we were going back to that school and tell that teacher I was sorry. Well, I knew right then whose side HE was on! He went with me and told the teacher that I could already read any book in her school and that I could already add and subtract…she said, “Prove it to me.”

So I DID. I read the hardest books she had in her room. I showed her I could add and subtract well; and then it was time for school to let out, and I got to escape then. After that we grew to like each other; I guess I just needed to know who was the boss. I did both the first and second grades in that school that year; and in the spring, she promoted me to the third grade.

We moved to Fruita, where I did the third grade. Fruita was smaller than Torrey. There were about eight families living there. While we were in Fruita, we had a teacher who had the stinkiest feet in all the world… There may be those who would scoff at such a bald statement, but I assure you, dear reader, that I have understated the case. This teacher had feet, which smelled so bad you could smell them all over the room! My sister Elva just hated him. He would put his feet on her desk during class and rest them and that made it even worse; she could hardly breathe, let alone concentrate on her schoolwork, with his feet on her desk assaulting her nose.

You could smell his stinky feet right through his shoes, though he even brought two or three pairs of socks to school each day and changed them several times. It did not do a bit of good as far as the putrid smell went. Elva hated him putting his feet on her desk all the time when he would address the class -and she got to hating HIM for it. She hated him so bad, in fact, that she locked him in the schoolhouse after school one day. (see next page…)

He stayed there locked in and unable to get out for some time, and when he finally did get out of there he was in a hurry to see our parents about it and tell them what she had done to him! People often asked her if she had gotten into trouble for it…DID she get into trouble for it, you wonder? OH YES. She got into trouble for it, all right! My parents were upstanding folks who did not believe that children ought to get away with disrespecting their teachers. We were all good kids, really, but I confess…I have always suspected that it was worth it all to Elva!

Third grade was so easy for me that most of the time I was doing the fourth and fifth grade work, because I could do that when we had all of the grades together in the same room. I was never late and never was absent, either, in the third grade. I have just loved school so much my whole life! Every day was a whole new adventure! So much to learn and so much to experience!

My math assignment one night in that third grade class was to learn the three times tables before school started the next morning. I had such fun that I learned all of them -up to and including the 13 times tables! That night I learned them all, then I went to school the next morning full of excitement about the fun I’d had the night before, learning them. I could hardly wait to tell my teacher I had learned them all the way through the 13 times tables! The teacher called me up and asked me if I had learned the 3 times tables as he had instructed me to do, and I replied yes, so he had me recite them for him. Then I asked him if he would like me to do the others, too, he said, “Can you do them?” I replied that I could and did them all for him. When I had done reciting the 4s, 5s, 6s, 7s, 8s, 9s, 10s,11s, 12s, I also did the 13 times tables for him…and he frankly told me that he could not have done the 13s because he did not know them.

My Grandfather, Elijah Cutlar Behunin, was a man I did not know very well until my family moved to Torrey. Then I got very well acquainted with him, as I turned the bellows for him in his blacksmith shop by the hour to help him. I just loved working to help him, because he was so kind! He was so cheerful, so loving…a warm hearted little man who made the chore of working for him a pure joy, as he was such good company and made work seem so fun…he would tell me jokes and we would laugh while we worked there together hour after hour. My arms got so tired pumping that bellows for the forge fire I sometimes wondered if I could keep going, but I somehow did. Sometimes while I worked to help my grandfather he would tell me stories about his earlier life and adventures.

Grandfather Behunin and my father went down through Capital Gorge to a place near Notum and built a little lean-to shelter up against a big sand rock. They went there to see what the territory was like, because Elijah had been called on a medical mission to the Indians and Settlers in the area, and that would mean they would have to bring their family there to live. It was quite cold weather when they went there, so those critters that normally slept through the winters had long since gone into hibernation.

Grandfather and Dad built the shelter and cooked their supper against the big sand rock, put their beds on stilts so they would not be on the sand, and went to bed. During the night, they heard funny sounds in the little room. They lighted a lamp and discovered that the floor was entirely covered with rattlesnakes! The snakes had been hibernating behind the big rock and when the heat warmed up the cabin, those snakes had awakened just as they would in the springtime and were slithering all over the floor. Dad and Grandfather spent all the rest of that night killing rattlesnakes. Then, the next morning, they started a NEW cabin!

While grandfather moved the family to the Sand Creek area, they stopped for lunch and Butch Cassidy and some of his men rode up to their campsite. Grandfather –following western hospitality – invited them to get off of their horses and eat dinner with them. Butch rode up to the fire and looked down. All they had to eat for the entire large family was bread and gravy. “Is that all you have to eat for all those children?!” Butch said. Grandfather said, “Well, yes, that’s all we can offer, but my wife is a wonderful cook and it sure tastes good!” and again he invited them to share the food with them. Butch turned to his men and instructed them, “Unload that half a beef!” They all had a steak cooked over the campfire with their biscuits and gravy, and all ate until they could eat no more. After the meal, Butch and his men saddled up, ready to move on. As they were saddled up and started off, my grandfather called to him, “Wait, Butch! You have forgotten your meat!” and Butch waved back and, grinning, replied, “You just keep that meat, your kids need something to eat and (with a huge grin and a wink) I know where there’s lots more beef!”

Grandfather Behunin was a man who was enterprising and adventurous. Almost every summer he would go for a week’s prospecting trip. He never did get rich off of his prospecting trips, but it was a fun vacation for him! He used to prospect for silver, gold, uranium, platinum, etc. There is a photo of him (now located and placed above) with his pickaxe and his mule; all loaded up to go prospecting. I am so pleased it is still in existence.

My grandfather Elijah Cutlar and his wife planted lots of sapling fruit trees every spring until the year he died. He liked to think of somebody else harvesting because he had thought to plant a tree. He planted them all along the streets of Torrey, too. He planted trees all OVER Torrey! When he was in his 80s, he and my Grandmother, Tabitha Jane, went together on a tour of the National Parks in Utah, Arizona and Nevada. They drove a little Model T Ford and just –left! He was killed in a car crash while trying to get his son in law, whom he knew had appendicitis and needed surgery right away, to a doctor in a town nearby. Both men were killed in the crash.

While he was yet living and I was just a boy, though, I still remember that one day we were working there in his Blacksmith shop, and a man named Mr. Heath came in with his 12 year old son, whose arm was badly broken. I ought to explain again that my grandfather was called on a medical mission and given the gift of healing. He was called to that mission and he was never released from it during his life on this Earth. The whites and the Indians often came to him for help in times of medical crisis. Well, Grandfather left the forge immediately and washed his hands carefully before he even examined the boy’s arm. First he cleansed the break carefully and disinfected it with some sort of thing…possibly “White Mule,” an old whiskey that was kept in his medical supplies for disinfecting wounds. He would pull gently on that arm and feel the arm to see if the bones were set into place properly yet, then pull gently again to see if the bone fragments were in place. The boy sat there tense and still, very pale and with beads of sweat that broke out on his forehead during the process, because the pain was pretty bad; Grandfather noticed the beads of sweat on the boy’s face and said, “Does it hurt?” and the boy looked at him and said very stoically, “Oh…it hurts a little.” “Well, you’re a brave boy, son, I am proud of you,” my grandfather said.

Grandfather finished up taking care of that break as carefully as he could and did not charge them for his service, not a cent. He just sent them on their way with instructions on how to care for the injury until the bones had knit properly and it was completely healed. I admired my Grandfather Behunin very much as I watched all of this happening. He was so skillful, so gentle and kindly as he helped that boy…and so generous with his time and talent, sending them off without charging them a penny for his services. I thought that he was a wonderful grandfather, and I was proud to be his grandson!

Grandfather Behunin and his wife Tabitha Jane Earl Behunin were married for over 67 years that I know of. They were the oldest living married couple in Wayne County, in a newspaper article about them. Still just as happily wedded on their anniversary 65 years later as they were when they were first married, they always said that life was one long honeymoon for them. He was the last surviving Indian War veteran living in Wayne County, Utah who was still able to draw his pension. He served in the Black Hawk War in 1867 under Captain James T. S. Allred’s company. He crossed the plains by ox team in 1851, rather than with the first company that arrived there in 1848, because his father, Isaac Behunin, and the family stayed in Council Bluffs raising crops and feeding the destitute companies of “Mormon” Pioneers that stopped there for help before moving on to Salt Lake City, Utah. He and my grandmother were both hardworking, God fearing people who lived by faith and charity and who planted young fruit tree saplings every year, even in their 80’s. When asked, after planting 50 young fruit tree saplings one spring when he was well into his 80s, what good those trees would be to them, he and grandmother replied, “These trees may help some one else to live; somebody planted trees for us, now we will plant trees for some one else. We hope they shall reap the benefit from the trees long after we are gone.”

By way of contrast, I also had another grandfather who lived in Fruita while we were living there. My mother’s father was Calvin David Pendleton. While my Grandfather Behunin was a delightful man with a warm and generous disposition, a man whose love of people made him go out of his way to serve them and be kindly, my Grandfather Pendleton was a selfish, harsh and cold man. He was frequently abusive, unkind and downright cruel. He was a man who treated my lovely sweet grandmother like she was not even as valuable as a stray dog. He was appallingly abusive to my mother and her family and made life thoroughly unpleasant for them.

My mother told me, for instance, that one week when she was younger there was a little town dance coming, and she and her siblings wished to go to it with the other young people in the town. Her mother recognized that the children worked hard nearly all of the time, and that they needed a nice respite. She was pleased to think of her little family in good wholesome company at the little town celebration and wanted her children to be able to go to it. My grandfather told their daughters and sons that they could go to the town dance if they did all of their chores. The young people were so much looking forward to the dance that they did all of their normal chores, and also a number of extra chores for others in the family, –including his, I suppose.

The night of the dance finally arrived, and the young people could hardly wait to get ready and go to it. At last they were all ready to leave, excitedly chattering about the dance and the wonderful evening to come…but when Grandfather Pendleton came in and saw them he announced that they were not going to be allowed to go to it. Grandmother said, “But dear, you promised them that if they did their chores they could go to the dance, and they took you at your word. They have done all of their own chores and also a number of extra chores. When you have given them your promise, dear, I think you ought to let them go.”

Suddenly he exploded in rage and kicked his wife so hard in the hip that she fell right down to the floor and across the room. She could hardly move for a long time, and limped for weeks after it.

My mother said she had seen a huge foot shaped bruise on her mother’s hip that had been left there as a mute testament to his brutality.

The young people did not go to the dance; instead his violent actions once again gave them a fearful feeling, as they would watch their sweet, ladylike mother limping around trying to carry on with her chores and caring for her family.

His abuse in the family was such that my mother could not even speak of him as an adult nor hear anyone else speak of him without becoming so upset and agitated that family members feared she would have a stroke or a heart attack from the upset that just thinking about him caused her. NOBODY brought up the subject of her father in her presence.

I know she wanted to do all she could to help her beloved mother who was living in such unpleasant circumstances -and for that reason alone, I suspect, I remember being sent as children go to his home to work for him during those early years of her marriage.

Elva, Wane and I went very early in the morning one late summer day to help him by picking apricots in his orchard and crating them up for him. We arrived so early he had not had breakfast yet and opted to stay in the house and have a grand good meal before going out to work, but we got to work right away while he ate it. I worked fast and carefully right through the hot morning without even a break and had packed several crates by the time Grandfather Pendleton finished up his breakfast and strolled out to check on us.

By this time it was terribly hot, the sun was unforgiving and I was awfully thirsty, but I kept picking and crating that fruit for him. He would not even give me a drink of water as I worked in the heat of the day, each hour dragging on getting more and more intense with heat. Lunch came and went but while Grandfather Pendleton sated himself with a wonderful lunch and a welcome rest, he did not give me even a drop of his water or a morsel of food. He had plenty of food AND water, and he could easily have shared a little water, at least, with his grandchildren -especially as he was getting free labor all that day and night; but he never parted with a tiny drop of water nor food.

I did not complain, I just kept right on working. The day dragged on interminably, and it just got hotter and hotter. I was growing faint from the heat and the exhaustion -and thirst and hunger- as the afternoon stretched out and grew older and older. I was so hot and tired and so thirsty and hungry that I felt I would actually keel right over into a faint; so I picked a very small apricot to eat, hoping it would help me keep going so I would not fall from the tree in a faint. Grandfather Pendleton saw me do it. He snatched the apricot from me and snarled, “If you’re going to steal apricots, eat one off of the ground, with the rest of the pigs.” That hurt me! I had worked all morning and all afternoon and even into evening without a rest, with no water, with no lunch…with no relief whatsoever from the intense heat. I had given him all the work my little heart could give, and I had never asked a thing from him! After all that, to be classified as just another one of the pigs by my grandfather, after such a valiant labor in his behalf, HURT me terribly. It hurt me for decades and decades after that, it had cut so deeply to hear my own grandfather call me that.

My poor sister Elva DID pick one up off of the ground, but he yanked it from her and accused her of stealing from him, shouting a really harsh lecture at her, calling her a common thief. She ran to the buggy crying and would not leave it for the rest of the time we were there. I vowed, that day, that it was to be the last time I worked to help Grandfather Pendleton…and it was, because I never would do it again.

Once when I was trying to hurry off to school, Grandfather Pendleton wanted me to play a song on my harmonica. I was concerned about getting to school on time, and I sure did not want to take time to play a song just then, because I was so anxious not to be late for school; but my grandfather had said I was to play for him, so I had to do it, and I did it. I played the song for him and started to run for school so I would not be late. He would not let me go, though. He lectured me sternly and then said that I had not played the whole song. I replied that I had, indeed, played it all, and he repeated that I had not played it all, because there were three verses to the song, not just one. I said that the other two verses were just exactly the same notes as the first verse, but he would not let me leave until I had played all of the verses for him. I hurriedly played the last verses of the song and then had to run hard all the way to school, but of course by then I was late and had to pay the consequences for it.

He only wrote to my mother once, and that happened many years after she had long since been married. By that time he was ill and old and he thought it would be nice to go to his grave knowing that she had forgiven him. She could not do it. She wrote back and told him that she did NOT forgive him for the vicious abuse he had always heaped upon her and her beloved family members and that she never wanted to hear from him again. She had tried, for many years, to be civil to him, and even after her marriage and escape from under his cruel tyranny she had tried to keep the peace. She could not keep it up, though, after her mother died and she saw firsthand how little he cared about her mother even as she lay dying. My grandmother Pendleton had been such a saint. I loved her so very, VERY much! In all my life I never met a more ladylike, kind, sweet, lady than she was. She was the most loving, most compassionate, wonderfully good woman. She deserved far more gentleness, kindness and happiness in this life than she ever did receive at her husband’s hand.

It was many years later that I realized that my own indignant feelings toward him, because of his harshness, were hurting ME…those negative feelings harbored by his meanness and injustices were like a rotten thing inside of me that tainted my love of life. Recognizing that my resentments were harming only myself, and that it was the Savior’s counsel to forgive, I took myself sternly to task and worked at it until I found that I genuinely forgave him his harsh brutality and just accepted that it was his harsh nature that made him that way. It was his harsh way of living, his peculiar scrooge-like personality that was an inherent part of him; it was his whole way of living life that was at fault; not a personal vendetta against me or my mother or grandmother and family…and just accepting that helped me. I forgave him for every mean act and word, and I have felt so much better since! I am so grateful that I did! I find that forgiveness is a great blessing for the forgiver, perhaps even more than for the forgiven; and I recommend it to anyone who has been harmed by another person in any way.

When I was nine years old, I was baptized by my father and confirmed by Jorgen Jorgenson. I had requested that I not be baptized or confirmed by my Grandfather Pendleton. I didn’t want him to be part of such a special, sacred moment in my life. I felt my baptism was a precious event. It was sacred and special to me, because I would make a sacred covenant with the Lord to take His name upon me and keep His commandments. I wanted Him to be with me always…and I wanted to have righteous men perform such a special ordinance for me. I felt that my father and Jorgen Jorgenson were ideal for that, because they were both such wonderful, good men.

My cousin Thomas Marley Behunin was baptized and confirmed on the same day that I was. He was baptized by my father and confirmed by his own father, William C. Behunin. I hoped it was as special for him as it was for me, because it was VERY special for me! (COLD…terribly cold…I was baptized by my good father in the Fremont River in Fruita, Utah. It was a warm season, but notwithstanding that, the water that was in that river was bitter cold.)

One evening when my Grandfather Pendleton was visiting, Father and Grandfather Pendleton were talking and Grandfather was puffing off what a grand knack he had, growing fine crops of food, etc. He told the story of a large red sow that got away from him and could not be found all summer long, and how at summer’s end; he had discovered it had lived in a squash in the upper field on his property. He claimed that the sow had lived in that big squash all summer long and had had a litter of pigs living in it as well. My father just sat there and looked at him, measuringly. Then my father told him he had just recently sent off for a big boiler, 16 feet long, 8 feet wide and 4 feet deep…Grandfather said, “Hite, that is ridiculous! What on EARTH are you going to do with a boiler like THAT?!” …My father looked at him with a deadpan face and said, “I’m going to cook your squash.” Grandfather ducked his head and stomped off into another room.

My chores at home in Fruita were much the same as usual, …I took care of the cows and the sheep, feeding and herding them, having them there for milking (I did not do much milking at that point in my life, but Elva and I herded them when we did not have school to go to) Another flood occurred there in Fruita. THIS flood was 14 feet deep, so it was not as deep as the one at Blue Valley was. We brought our irrigation water from Sand Creek across the wash in a flume that had to be suspended across the wash about 14 feet above it. Elva and I were at Sand Creek herding the sheep and cattle and heard a storm brewing, so we RAN toward home as fast as we could run, setting the dog to herd the sheep to make the sheep go faster toward home.

We had to be fast getting out of that dangerous area, because flash floods were a constant danger and if you did not make a run for it before you saw the water, you would not live to tell about it. We crossed the last curve of Sand Creek and had just gotten up on the high area of the side where home and safety were, just as the flood swept the bend and took out the flume, which –as I mentioned earlier- was suspended up fourteen feet high from the bed of Sand Creek. The dog had the animals running for all they were worth, too, and they all made it back to the safety area alright, as well.
I raised a little lamb as a pet from the bottle when I was about seven years old and I lavished every care on it, loving it dearly from its birth in about April to one day in the fall, when a herd of sheep, owned by a Mr. Meeks, passed by the lamb’s pen. My lamb scooted through the pen fence somehow and went off with Mr. Meeks’ herd of sheep. I called and called and hoped it would hear my voice and return home to me, but it did not come. I happened to mention it to Dad when I saw him in conversation with Mr. Meeks. Mr. Meeks asked Dad, “Huh. What do YOU think of that story?” My father looked at him and said, “Morris has never told me a lie.” Mr. Meeks paid for the lamb. I lost my lamb, but I was blessed, all the same, because it was such a wonderful thrill to me to hear my father tell that man that he had that much trust in me and knew I had never lied to him! Oh, that was a precious moment for me!

It was there at Fruita that we dug a cellar and brought flat pieces of Sandstone from the Sand Creek area to make the sides and floor of the little room we called the cellar. Those sand rocks contained precious dinosaur fossils of a dinosaur which had long been extinct. A geologist, Dean Brimhall, who was a foremost geologist - was mighty pleased to see them! I had also found 12 fossilized black pinecones, about 2” by 1 ¼” wide, which we sent to the Bureau of Natural History. (I kept three for keepsakes, but they have long since been lost to me by now.) My father was looking for a uranium deposit, and that area contained quantities of uranium. It was a nice surprise for all of us that he also came across the huge fossilized tree that had those cones near it.

We had a big prize bull there in Fruita, a huge Hereford. One day Dad heard mother screaming for help outside where the largest pasture was and, running to help her, he saw she was pinned right against the pasture fence by that big bull. The crazed bull had one horn on either side of her and was trying to gore her. My poor mother was unable to do more than stand there terrified and screaming for help, beating against that bull’s enormous face trying to get him to back up, but he was ferociously determined to attack and would not be moved by her.

Dad ran up and used a club on that bull’s side a few times until at last it backed up and turned its head to face him for another attack -against my father this time; then Father beat it with the club on the head while Mother ran free and got out of the pasture safely. Only when he knew that she was definitely safe, could he calm down. When he was not fighting to save Mother’s life, he began to see that he could not trust the bull anymore, so Dad left the treacherous bull and came back with his 32 Special Winchester rifle, shot the bull in the head and used the horse team to drag the bull’s carcass to the mountain, where he left it to be meat for the coyotes. He was so angry at that bull for attacking our mother that he did not want anything more to do with it and refused even to touch the meat.

We had a wonderful, intelligent and loyal dog we named Tip. He was part Russian Wolfhound. We could ride him as children! He was a hardworking, dependable dog that we kept outside all of the time. He loved my mother in particular and was very protective of her. He was a working dog, by that I mean that he would herd the cattle and sheep and help us kids that way. Elva and I and sometimes Wane used him a lot to help us with the stock to get them where we needed them.

Tip was protective of us and of our stock as well. One day we had to go to Torrey to buy another bull to replace the one that had attacked Mother. We also were buying some 14 head of heifers. We were on our way back from Torrey about 15 miles away from our home in Fruita, and, because it was dark and we were exhausted and still had to drive the team home, Father said, “Take ‘em home, Tip, take ‘em home!” …And that dog actually took them all home in the dark by himself!

We left Tip to bring the cattle home for us and just drove the team home without the cattle. He brought every single one of them home despite the darkness and had them at the corral for us with his customary efficiency; the gate was still needing to be opened, but he had them all safely there at the corral waiting for us when we drove up, and he drove them right in for us when we opened up the gate. Dad gave him an extra fine supper and patted him on the head and said, “Well done, Tip, Well DONE!”

Elva and I were herding cattle and sheep up in what they called Sand Creek, a tributary of the Dirty Devil River. In order to get irrigation water we had started a ditch up above the Sand Creek, but in order to take it across Sand Creek, we had to take it across the river in a flume suspended about 14 feet above the water level of the creek. A lot of the area that drained into Sand Creek was of solid rock; a heavy storm came up and we knew that the water would run off the rocky area and cause a flash flood, so we started for home as fast as we could go. We set the dog on the sheep and cattle to make them run as fast as they could back home, so they could avoid the flood, too. Just before the flood went around the bend where the flume was, we got the cattle across the bend and up the south bank of the stream. When the flood swept around the bend, we had the stock safely with us. It took out the flume above the streambed. If we had not been as fast as we were and made it just in the nick of time, we would have been swept away. That water was well over 14 feet high, because it took out the flume that was suspended that high!

We moved back to Torrey where I entered the fourth grade and did fifth and sixth grades as well. Fourth grade was too easy for me and the teacher put me into the fifth grade -which was also easy for me, so I made it through two grades again in one year. I used to do ALL the math problems in the books, whether they were assigned or not. The teacher I had in those grades was such a sweet efficient teacher that she became the supervisor of ALL the elementary schools in Wane County.
My cousins and Wane and I built a little hut under a Cedar tree and had lots of fun playing there, sometimes when we did not have chores to do. It provided lots of fun for most of the boys around, actually. Boys were welcome to come there, but at that tender age in our lives, GIRLS were Not Welcome!

I raised rabbits to help make ends meet and provide meat for our family when I was this age. I had about 50 rabbits. I got quite fond of some of them. There was one little doe rabbit I especially liked which was quite courageous and actually ran out and fought off a hawk that had been preying on the other little rabbits.

That hawk had picked off quite a number of the rabbits and was soon in the habit of coming to catch them for it’s meals. She ran out there when she saw it diving for another rabbit to snatch and she actually beat it! It was lying lifeless in the 11’ X 11’ wire enclosure where the rabbits could get out into the sun. When I went out to check on the rabbits, I could see that the hawk and the rabbit “had it out” right out there in the open, and the hawk was killed but the little doe was victorious…but so badly injured that she could not survive, either. I could not put her out of her misery; I was too fond of her. My father had to take care of that for her. I have still always had a fondness for her since then. It wrung such pity and admiration from my heart to think of that dear little rabbit dashing out there willing to take on its mortal enemy and give its own life to save its companions that I have never forgotten it, not in all the ensuing years since.

My mother was an excellent cook; she was just a wonderful, wonderful cook! Our favorite place to hang out was our home because mother always had homemade bread or cookies there and she would share with all and sundry. The kids usually liked to come to our house for that –One fellow said her bread was so wonderful he’d rather have that than a cookie! Eventually she earned a living working in school lunchrooms in Cedar City as a cook at the North and the East Elementary schools. Her food was legendary and so was her clean organized kitchen, which I understand she ruled with an iron hand, so that none of the utensils got lost or found their various ways into the homes of any teachers or staff members -as had been the case in years past. Once she came, she had them sign for what utensils they wished to borrow and she had them return the items to her personally so she knew all was returned properly.

We had neighbors whose last name was Holt. They were such nice people! They were good people, and LaVee Holt was their daughter and was a favorite friend of mine in school. Golda Pectol was also a student in my room at school and Golda and LaVee Holt were favorite friends of mine when I was in the 5th and 6th grades. They were both relatives of Jack Holt, a movie star. Mr. Holt’s brother was Jack Holt. Since I was interested in the movies featuring Jack Holt, he let me ride his pet horse several times when he would come to visit them. It was then that I had a little flame burning in my heart for LaVee Holt…she was a pretty and sweet brunette, …very pretty… LaVee was a jolly, cheerful girl and Golda, a blonde, was also a sweet, cheerful girl. Both of them were really GOOD girls… ’Course I got teased a lot. Actually, those two girls, in particular, teased me a lot at one time! Ohhhhh, it was terrible…there was a song called “Margie” that was in vogue at that time…they would substitute the name Morris for the name Margie and sing, “I’ve got a home and ring -and everything- for Morris!” and I’d blush scarlet, and then they’d laugh!! I was probably in 3rd grade, in Fruita, when that started; but I also got teased that way in 4th and 5th grades in Torrey. The boys never teased me much, then, because I could run so much faster than they could that I could always catch them if they had tried…but GIRLS…Ohhh, I wouldn’t have touched a GIRL! Hot coals I would touch before I‘d have touched a GIRL!

I LOVED SCHOOL!! I loved every thing about getting to go to school. It was all so interesting- each day was almost a whole new adventure! Something new to learn each new day! Even if I felt too ill to go and didn’t feel up to it I would go anyway, because I didn’t want to miss anything! I was not one of the boys who played Hooky and went off fishing and such; I couldn’t bear to miss a single day.

We got dirty fast, working hard and living on ranches and farms, and we used an old #3 washtub, we would get the water warm on the stove and sometimes we would take turns as kids using the same water. We had privacy by hanging up a sheet across the room, the tub was usually in one of the bedrooms and not closest to the warm stove in the kitchen, so it could get cool when we bathed, but we had more privacy that way.

One time my brother Wane and I (we’d been so sheltered from bad words etc. at home) had been at school and heard the bigger boys swearing. We wanted to be rough, tough, BIG BOYS and be part of the IN crowd, so this one day (when we were 7 and 5 years old respectively) we went out behind the haystack and we were “Practicing” using these new words we had learned- Well, DAD came up behind us and said, “Oh, that’s too Bad. Your mouths must taste AWFULLY bad after using those words. We’d better go inside and wash them out.” Mother made her own homemade lye soap- and WE had the CLEANEST mouths in TOWN! She scrubbed them REALLY good. …But, oh my…we surely learned our lesson! We never cussed after that. Dad usually was the one who would punish us if we ever did anything that merited it. I can only remember him spanking me once. The absolutely WORST punishment was when he’d look me in the eye and shake his head and say, “Well, That’s too bad…I’m certainly sorry to hear that.” I’d just fold up and Cringe in shame!

We did not have a great deal of play time, there was always too much to do in the way of work; we had LOTS of chores and they took a very long time to complete and we were exhausted when they were finally finished each day. Our free time did not exist…but…of an evening after the chores were mostly done, we’d read stories (we loved the Zane Grey westerns, ghost stories and Christmas stories) or study, play games I still love to go to bed with a good romantic western in my heart…. makes me feel good before going to sleep to have romance in my heart. I go to bed relaxed and have warm happy thoughts, that way!

My sixth grade teacher was Ellis Robinson. I liked him. He had sixth through eighth grades in his room. There was Joe Hickman, Merrill Morrell, and a fellow named Dwendolyn Teeples, Clarence Mott, Levi Bullard, Wilmer Behunin, my cousin and my dear friend, Hugh Peeden…Elva Noyes, Golda Pectol, LaVee Holt, Nila Behunin, Effie Lee, Mary Thompson and my sister Elva…they were all in my class with Ellis Robinson, because he taught several grades at once. There were others, as well. We had moved back to Torrey and while I was in his room, Elva Noyes was visiting with our family one night, and mother wanted me to walk home with her; she was my age, but she was much more precocious than I was. (When she was 15 years old, she was already married and living with a worthless character in Clear Creek Canyon) On the way home, she said to me, “Morris, let’s elope! We could have a LOT of fun!”

Halloween when I was a kid was not like it is these days.
It was a little more lawless, because it was a time for pulling pranks like tipping toilets and privies, for mischief making. I did not go along with those things, I knew it was wrong, and that it caused problems for whomever the pranks were pulled on, and so when the fellows wanted to do that, I went along home. One Halloween I was pretty sick and stayed home altogether; the fellows I was friendly with decided as their prank that year they would dismantle the bridge that spanned the canal that brought water to town. Tragically, that night a dear older woman who was known for her acts of kindness and charity was helping a sick family. After doing what she could for them, she left them and began her walk home. She was coming home alone in the dark that night –there was no moon, and she could not see well in the dark, so she did not see that the bridge was out. She fell to her death because those boys had pulled that stunt for a Halloween prank, and I have been grateful ever since that I did not happen to be with them that night. I am so thankful that I do not have that dear soul’s death on my conscience; I felt so heartsick about that tragedy.

It was in Torrey that I saw my very first picture show. It was a western featuring Jack Holt -and I loved it, because I personally knew the movie star! In order to have money enough to go see that movie I took cows to the pasture and went to get them for an old bachelor named Joe Forsyth. The movie cost about a nickel or a dime, I think. Wane and I both got to go see it.

It was while I was in the sixth grade that my cousins and I played in the Torrey Jazz Band. I played the percussion, clappers, drums etc…. One night our band took a short break, and I went out in front and sat on the schoolhouse steps to get a breath of fresh air and rest my hands for a bit. I saw Aunt Julia coming up the steps from having gone home to check on the children. I saw that the town’s old bachelor, Joe Forsyth, saw her too; he called to her, “Well, Julia, do you still like chicken?” she said, “You bet I do!” and he quipped, “Have a wing!” and offered her his arm as escort! They went into the dance with her still holding his arm and me following them inside. I thought that was so witty and cute!

During the summer after the sixth grade we had a bounteous crop of fruit. We dried a lot of fruit. We had 44 candy buckets (14” X 14” X 14” sized) full of dried fruit when we moved from there to Richfield. It was that year before we moved to Richfield (recall that I was actually about the age of a third or a fourth grader because I had been double promoted twice) that my Grandmother Pendleton took sick. My Grandfather and Grandmother had moved from Fruita to Payson (and then he went back to Fruita to take care of his business or holdings there. Grandmother did not go with him, she remained in Payson taking care of things there…) and that is when my Grandmother took sick.

Grandfather was not taking good care of Grandmother and that was another reason why my mother went to take over her care. My Grandmother and Grandfather Pendleton were living in Payson and my mother, realizing that this illness could lead to her mother’s death, went at once and spent a couple of months to take care of her. Grandmother passed away despite the tender care Mother was giving her. Father left us at home to go to Payson and help them prepare for a funeral and take care of the things that would need to be done.

Dad left me in charge of irrigating the fields, weeding them, herding the livestock and feeding the animals, milking the cows, just all of the outside work that needed to be taken care of. Elva was placed in charge of all the work that was to be done inside the house. We two kept the place going smoothly for mother and father while they were gone that eight or ten weeks.

When mother and father came driving the buggy back home at long last, I was out in the field and saw them coming and made a joyous dash back to the house to welcome my parents back home and hug them. In the pal mal run to hug them, I caught my head on a barbed wire fence with VERY long barbs in it. It tore much of my scalp right off my head, and by the time I reached the house, I was bleeding profusely and feeling weak from loss of blood. My mother screamed and went white and my father put kerosene on my head over the bleeding area. It smelled terrible! –But it did stop the bleeding. I still carry the scar of that to this day.

After Grandmother’s death, my father had gotten a job near Richfield herding sheep. Our family decided to move again so he could be closer to his work and the family could see him more often, so we packed up our belongings and father created a tent on top of a large wagon, put the other children and my mother in it and drove it while I rode on horseback and drove the three milk cows, their calves, etc. I nearly froze to death during that hard ride to a new home. There was a lethal blizzard that hit as we left. The cattle were fractious and acted difficult. They were facing a bad storm and they were anxious and not easy to drive! I was the only one who was out in the storm directly; the others had the shelter of the wagon.

We were headed toward Sigurd and then on into the Richfield area. The storm we faced was so bad and it was so terribly cold that I very nearly froze to death riding out there in it that way for so long on that horse. I was very thankful when we finally arrived at Sigurd and could put the cows in a corral with proper feed. I was so glad to at last be able to go into a house where it was warm and snug, and I could thaw from the terrible cold I had been riding in for so long. I do not remember whose house it was we stayed in, but I remember how very thankful I was when we got there, and I could finally get warm.

The next day we drove on to Richfield where we rented a house with a corral and stockyard. It was two blocks north of the Depot. The depot was where the fairgrounds were. I became fascinated with riding the racehorses there at the fairgrounds. Their owners were very happy to have me help train and ride them for the races coming that fall! The horses responded to me, I think they could feel my love for them and gave their all to me without me even having to resort to a whip to spur them on.

I rode and raced three horses I loved and remember in particular; one was a lovely little mare named Red Wing, Gray Sage was a horse a little bigger than she was, but just as honest and hardworking as she was… The other was a big rawboned fellow named Weldon. The owner told me that his horses ran better and faster for me than any other person who ever rode them, even the paid jockey. Red Wing and Gray Sage won their three races and Weldon took second place in his.

Red Wing developed a limp in her right front foot and had been scratched from her race. I was worrying about her foot, wondering what had happened to her…I found, by running my hands along her from her leg to her hoof very carefully, that somebody had put an elastic band tightly around her foot just above the hoof line where it could not be seen under the hair there. The elastic band was tight and it had been making her foot sore, so she had been limping because she thought she had an injury. I took it off and showed it to her owner and told him that I thought he ought to run her in that race he had scratched her from. He took my advice; -and I rode her to a first place victory!

Whenever I would win a race, the men would say to me, “Come on and have a drink! Have a smoke! You EARNED IT!” but I never did. It was repulsive, to me…many boys would have taken up smoking and drinking when invited to in such a way, because the men really made you feel as if you had done a great thing and this reward was the ultimate manly reward…but I never fell for that and succumbed to it, and I have never regretted it. I always felt that was a trap that I could not afford to fall into. I once promised my mother I would never smoke or drink and I kept my promise.

1922 – 1932: SEVENTH GRADE THRU HIGH SCHOOL

I had seventh grade in Richfield. I had four teachers and went from one to another each day. Letha and Lorraine Cartwright, Byron Burmister and Phil Gulbrandson were the teachers. It was in the 7th grade I had a perfect spelling record right up to the last day. It was then I missed the word “animal”…I spelled it “amimal” …I knew how to spell it! The superintendent knew I knew how to spell it, too…he smiled when I spelled it wrong, and I ought to have realized at once that I had spelled it wrongly, but I left it and after he had collected the papers he smiled at me and told me what I had done…I could hardly believe I had even done it! I was embarrassed by that mistake every time I ever thought about it, because I had never misspelled a word before that one. Mr. Burmister taught me how to play football, how to kick, catch and play ball games…I loved learning those things!

I was in a fight that year with a bully; a boy named Billy Board. He was the biggest bully in our entire neighborhood. One day I had had enough; I came up from where he had shoved me onto the ground with both fists flying! I filled the air so full of fists that they were bound to hit something … I blacked both his eyes and made his nose bleed, and I was still pummeling; he couldn't take anymore, he yelped "Don't hit me anymore! Don't hit me anymore!" After that I never had to worry about Billy trying to bully me; as a matter of fact he was my greatest champion! There were very many times that I caught him bullying other kids, though; and when I did, all it took was a word from me telling him to stop that once for him to quit immediately and apologize to them and to me!

I was about 10 when we were living in Richfield; I had to pass a place where there was a pugnacious dog. Most critters of every kind and shape liked me, just as they did my father and my sister Elva. I had enough love for animals, maybe, that they sensed it; and just naturally liked me back. Not this brute. He was a mean dog, a really nasty one.

He had ripped his teeth through the legs and arms of so very many hapless children who had to pass by the place he lived. All of us kids had to pass the same darned place to go to school each day and every time we did, that dog would run out from a hole in the fence and chase us and attack us. He was a vicious thing! I asked the owner time after time to fix the hole in the fence because the dog had savaged so many children every day and still the owner would not fix the hole.

He didn’t care that his dog was running out of the yard, attacking and biting children and causing so much trouble. Finally I had just about had more than I could stand, seeing how that darned dog was savaging any person who had to walk by the property there and one day I told the owner that I had asked him nicely time and time again and I had explained to him why I was asking him to fix that hole in his fence and I would not stand by and allow his dog to attack me or any other child another time; unless he took better care of his dog, kept it fenced in and prevented it some way from constantly biting children, the dog would have a nasty accident one of these days, because we would have to fight back and protect ourselves from harm, if he did not care enough to protect us.

Well, as I said, I had told the owner about the attacks -I think that we all had- and asked for help several times and several other kids had too…I was on my way to school and that dog came after me; I snatched the cap off of my head, the dog leapt to tear off my hand as I was holding my cap, and I kicked him hard in the stomach. He let out a howl, ran back into his own yard and lay down on the ground there. When I came home from school that night, he was still lying there in his yard…for a wonder; he did not come out and chase anyone or bite anyone! He never did bite anyone again. He was dead.

I felt just terrible for the dog, but I felt I had not had much choice. The owner would not protect us and something had to be done about it, because the attacks were such bad ones, and they were getting worse. The other kids were so happy and so very grateful that he was gone…but I always felt sorrowful over the fact that I’d had to do that, despite the fact that he had attacked and bitten me just as often as he did anybody else. I loved animals, and I did not want to cause any animal distress, so that was a hard thing.

It was in Richfield that my name got forcibly changed from Behunin to Buhanan. They said at school that if our name (Behunin) was pronounced as, “Buh Han an,” then we had to spell it that way. They are the ones who forced the spelling change of my last name, Behunin, to the newer spelling that I have gone by for the rest of my lifetime, and that is why my name has been Buhanan, ever since. School systems must have had tremendous power back then, I guess, because I cannot imagine a school being able to enforce such a name change now!

It was in the summer in Richfield. I was just a little fella. There were a group of us playing and swimming in the canal. I got down to where there was a water take-off for a small community in that area called Annabella, Utah. There was quite a big culvert pipe that went down a steep incline, so that the water that left the canal to go to Annabella was very swift.

I got sucked into and caught in that culvert crosswise, somehow. It was about 18 to 20 inches in diameter and I was caught crosswise in it and could not budge. The water was so swift when it left the canal and went through that pipe that I could not free myself from the pressure that the water created. I could not move in any direction. Not up, not down, not back or forth. I could not get out of that pipe that led to Annabel. (We often called Annabella that, just dropped the last two letters and called it Annabel)

I was struggling to release myself from the intense pressure and getting so exhausted from trying, but I just could not do it. That culvert was a scary situation to be in because the water rushed so fast down that incline and I was wedged in tight. The pressure on me was terrific! I could not call for help, because I was under the water and I could not even move to get my face out of it so that I could breathe.

I was sure that I was going to be wedged in there when they found my body at some time. I felt sure I could die in there. I suddenly found myself on the bank of the canal. How I got there, I honestly do not know. I remember struggling for all I was worth and not being able to move, I remember being wedged in tightly and I remember knowing that I was about to die and that my body would be found wedged there sometime in the future, and then just as suddenly as a blink, I found myself on the bank, breathing fresh air instead of water! There was no last successful struggle, no ride through raging waters. In an instant I was not there in the culvert, I was just suddenly well up on the bank. That experience had a profound effect on my life, and I was afraid of being underwater after that.

Father got another job in Beaver after that. We moved to Beaver to be nearer to him. We rented a house just across the street from the High School.

When we first moved to Beaver, there was a hole in the rooftop where the bats would come in and roost in the attic of our house. There were a lot of bats! A tree limb had fallen on the rooftop and created the hole. There were some honeybees that had nested in there as well. There were so many bees and there was so much honey up there in that beehive in our attic that none of us could believe the amount! We stored and used quite a bit of it, but we sold most of it, so it turned out to be a blessing. My father was a bee man and knew how to handle bees, but he knew that I was violently allergic to them, so he wanted me to stay in a part of the house where the bees could not get to me. He got a lot of stings, even knowing how to handle bees as well as he did. We had a ring-tailed cat in our house once, too!

I grew a huge garden there in Beaver. Dad was off with a sheep herd and mother was working as a maid…I raised that huge garden and also rabbits to breed and sell and buy groceries with…I had so many carrots from that garden that my father said I had grown over 20 TONS of carrots! I had to dig another big cellar just to store the carrots because our other one was not large enough for all the produce we had.

To my surprise, Letha Cartwright was one of the teachers in my eighth grade there in Beaver! I was seventy one pounds …just a little guy in that grade, because I was so much younger than the other kids…they thought of me as a pipsqueak. Some of the kids were friendly eventually, but most of the year I was “that little kid” to the kids in the Beaver High School.

There were about three fellows who wanted to make my life miserable when I was still “that little kid.” I was the butt of their jokes all of the time. Ray “Darky” Tolton grabbed me by the throat, as he had done several other times before, and I did not like that; so I reached up and got both of his little fingers and pulled forward on them with a quick jerk, really hard; he let go of me in a hurry …Ray grabbed me by the throat another time and I could feel myself getting weaker and feeling woozy, so I spread my index finger and middle finger about as wide as his eyes were and jabbed him hard in the eyes. He let go in a hurry and went home for the rest of that Friday and had to recuperate all that day and over the weekend; he never bothered me again…I have heard, and agree with it; boys who bully others are just cowards at heart.

I had a good friend in one young man named Howard Farnsworth. We spent nearly every day together when we were able to do it. Howard played center on our football team. When we were in the game for championship of the district, the Hinckley center kept bringing his knee up into Howard’s face over and over, causing his nose to bleed. It was the ONLY time I ever saw Howard lose his temper. It was the 3rd or 4th quarter of the game and Howard and Hinckley’s center were both called out of the game for unnecessary roughness, but it was the fault of Hinckley’s center, not Howard. Hinckley played an unusually dirty game, that day. They did win, but they won it in a dirty way.

Howard Farnsworth was a nice looking fellow and a good kid, like I was. We got along very well. He had a pretty wonderful father, too. I liked his Dad a lot. Very often I would spend time in his father’s shop and Philo T. Farnsworth, his father, would explain to me the rudiments of what he was doing. He named it “Television.” It was a wonderful mystery to me, but he explained to Howard and me, very often, how it would work. He would explain about what he hoped to be able to do. He wanted to start out slow and just be able to project an image across town, for instance. He would project an image from one room into the other. I did not know how he could project an image across town, but I believed that he would be able to do it.

Philo T. Farnsworth was such a fine man, a good person! Howard and I spent as much time as we could in his father’s shop, because it was fascinating to us. He would explain what he was doing, what he hoped to do, how he was doing it…his words were a challenge to me; I liked the idea of new challenges, new ideas, new inventions, …he stirred my imagination and that was great, I LIKED THAT!

I was so disappointed when the day came when he chose to move to Idaho. I missed both of them greatly when they had moved away. Of course years later, Howard’s good father became known as “The Father of Television” and his likeness was sculpted and placed in the Hall of Fame in Utah. It is also in our nation’s capital, and in the Hall of Fame in Disneyworld, as part of the American Adventure Pavilion.

During that time of my life in Beaver, I recall a huge sudden lightning storm hitting; and of course our property had very tall trees on it. Lightning struck the trees and followed down through the trunks; I was getting an armful of wood for mother to prepare lunch, and the lightning struck so close to me that it knocked me unconscious. I was laying flat on the ground when mother discovered me. She was wondering what happened to the wood, I guess- anyway, she discovered that I was unconscious, and she frantically dragged me in up to the front porch of the home and sent for the doctor. He came, and together they got me into the house; then, after a while, I started to come to. When I regained consciousness, I couldn’t remember who I was, where I was, who Mother was, who the doctor was, …I just couldn’t remember anything…and ohhhhhhhhh, what a terrible headache!!!

Dad had borrowed or been given a red mule that he was quite fond of and depended upon. He called it Old Red. Old Red was true and faithful to Dad and they seemed to love one another. It was obvious she loved Dad, and he loved her, too. He was kind to her and treated her well. At one time I think Old Red saved my father’s life. He had been out setting traps to catch coyotes that were bothering the sheep belonging to a Frank Williams.

Dad was investigating one string of his traps when he knew he was in big trouble. He had ulcers quite bad and one of his ulcers broke through into a blood vessel. He was bleeding to death. He just had presence of mind to mount Old Red and say, “Take me home, Red. Take me home!” and with that, he passed out from loss of blood and pain.

Red took him home, and she stopped- not at the barn, but at the gate, near the house, waiting for someone to come help Dad! I figure she actually saved his life that time. She had understood what he had said and she understood that he needed help, because she took him right where somebody would come and help him, rather than heading toward the barn and her own food and comfort where she might reasonably have been expected to take him. We called a doctor right away and Dad survived.

To give you an idea of what sort of trapper he was, there was a man called Mr. Wheeler who lived in Beaver while we lived there. He claimed coyotes were eating his sheep out near Pine Creek. He had previously boarded the government trapper with his horses, mules, dogs, etc. (a Mr. Carter) for just over a full month, feeding him and caring for the man’s animals. I remember that man coming to visit our campsite one time when Wane and I were at South Creek working. He had six dogs and wanted us to feed his dogs as well. We asked him how much he would like us to cook for him and he said he would require six eggs for himself and another four each for each of his dogs!

I felt quite sorry for poor Mr. Wheeler having to feed and board that trapper with all of his animals for a full month! It would have to have been a terrific expense. The trapper that had been hired was not accomplishing much, but he assured Mr. Wheeler that he had caught every coyote that had ever been living in the area for miles and miles around. (The trapper caught five coyotes in all that time.) He felt he had achieved tremendous results. The killings continued, but the trapper insisted that he had killed all of the coyotes and there were no more left.

The government man left and Mr. Wheeler called upon my father to come see if he could help him get rid of what he was certain was a coyote that had not been caught by the famous trapper for the government. I went with my Dad. Mr. Wheeler never had to pay a cent to board us. Dad would not even let Mr. Wheeler feed us one meal during the entire time he was there to help him.

Dad and I went out together, and Dad set up a string of traps in each direction, probably around 20 traps in each of two directions. Dad was a master of herbs and nature lore, a master of how to create scents and whatnot. He baited the traps with a scent that he had concocted on his own. He poured the scent on a bush near the trap and the coyotes were baited to come investigate the scent. Once they had come to investigate the scent on the bush, they would step in the traps and be caught. Counting the day we were out, the day we put the traps out and the day we left, we were there for 26 days. During those 26 days, we caught 33 coyotes and 5 bobcats.

I nearly lost my life there with one coyote. I was probably a quite young teenager, maybe 14 years old, but I did nearly lose my life because of a coyote. I came to a coyote caught in a trap, and he had been caught before. He was bigger than the average coyote by quite a bit, and he was vicious. He crouched so low he practically lay down with all fours under him and suddenly leaped right at my throat, trying to rip it out. I would have bled to death if he had been successful, but I caught him with the big stick I carried, and that stunned him. (I always carried a big stick, because I would hit them on the nose with that big stick I carried and that would stun them, so they could then be killed and disposed of.)

That spring I went out on the mountain with my father. I went along as the camp tender and he was a herder. That was one of the hardest jobs I ever tried, because I had to lift a large number of fifty-pound sacks of supplies onto those burros every day, and I felt some days as if it was just too much for me. I had to move camp almost every day, taking down tents, taking all the camp supplies and packing everything up and getting it to the new camp spots and setting up camp all over again constantly…hard, hard work! It was good for me, though, because I started to grow! Almost every time I went to town to buy supplies I had to buy new clothes, because I had outgrown all of my clothes.

One little mule was particularly trying; he would chew through his ropes and then rear back and free himself and head double time back for town. I could see that I had to do something about him right away, the little devil! I finally outsmarted him by tying and also hobbling him with chains. He could not chew through them! He was a pesky little devil, ornery, sneaky and smart…and stronger than all of the other mules together. He could carry just about anything, that one! In spite of his meanness, I loved him!

Eventually slinging all the heavy supplies and equipment everyday –and time, of course- paid off; I grew and grew and GREW. That summer I gained height and weight until when fall came I was 5’7 1/2” and 119 lbs. I had gained nearly 48 pounds of pure, hard muscle. I went out for football in that fall season and I was plucky and GOOD at it. When I made a couple of touchdowns in football, I gained status among the students and, “That New Kid” became pretty well known in the school. I surely enjoyed school that year.

We Beaver Beavers were playing the Hinckley Mustangs for the District Championship and we only went to district, we never did go to state for championships, so this was a BIG game for us. I was spoiling the Hinckley plays, because I could play anywhere I wanted to as roving fullback, and I just seemed to know what they were going to do. I told the other fellows what to look for, that the Hinckley team was going to go for an end run or for a forward pass, and the plays they attempted got spoiled with us coming out ahead of them! The Hinckley boys decided to DO something –something drastic- to get me out of that game; because I was spoiling their plays.

Anyway, they decided to get me out of the game, and I knew they were going to do an end run. They ran the ball around my side of the line RIGHT OVER ME! The big fullback, a Workman fellow, ran right over me. …Broke my nose, my collarbone, and a rib on my left side. I was unconscious when they came for me, with a blanket, to carry me out of the game using it as a stretcher and then they covered me with a quilt once outside of the playing field area. The Hinckley team said that they had to get me out of that game as I was spoiling so many of their plays and they had a better chance to win with me out of that game. They won by 3 points.
While I was playing on the high school football team that year my tonsils were becoming infected badly; they were causing a heart problem. The doctor said I needed to have my tonsils out. The doctor examined me and he said, “Boy, this boy doesn’t have much left of his tonsils, how can they be a danger to his health?!” My throat had been so badly burned, when I was in that bee keeping accident with the fire as a child, that the tonsils were almost entirely burned away; they were very, very small and what was left was so deep down in my throat that he was astonished at what was left of them there.

The doctor took them out, but it was such a terrible operation that I almost bled to death. He had to cut so deep that he could not see well enough, perhaps, for he cut some of the veins in my neck. On the fourteenth day I was still bleeding copiously. Indeed, I almost bled to death, because the tonsillectomy was not healing properly. In fact I bled so badly that it seemed like there was a snowstorm in the room. I was chilled to death and shivered in misery despite the heat all around me, thinking that the white spots I was seeing must be snow falling inside of our house. In fact I asked my mother, “How come it is snowing in here??” but it was not. I was so weak from loss of blood I could not even turn over. I was just bleeding slowly to death and quite weak, helpless and cold; very close to the point of actual death and seeing white spots that I thought were snowflakes.

My pallid appearance and my shivering alarmed Mother and when I asked about why it was snowing in the room, she called the doctor and he came to our home. He put cold ice packs on my throat immediately and gave me coagulants that would help stop the bleeding. I lost fourteen pounds in fourteen days, but I finally began to heal after Daddy administered to me. I was so grateful for the Priesthood of God and the blessing of having it in my life, for I began to heal fast after that. That helped to strengthen my testimony a great deal. That was the second time that the laying on of hands for a Holy Priesthood administration and blessings from my Heavenly Father had saved my life, I feel. When I got back to school the coach told me that he had me picked to play the right guard on the basketball team, but I was so emaciated, weak and white that he could not put me in after all, so I missed that opportunity.

One day when I was fifteen I was helping a Mr. Edwards top a tree so that he could get more shade from it when it would have to spread OUT not UP. He only had one arm, so it was hard for him to attempt such a task, and I wanted to help him. He had been tying himself to the trunk of the tree and chopping off each limb he wanted off.

I had been quietly suffering considerable pain on the right side of my abdominal area and after helping him for quite a while, it became so intense that I had to quit and go home because I had become so sick from the pain. I got part way home and was crossing a deep puddle when I lost consciousness from the pain and fell into the puddle. I landed on my back, thank the Good Lord, so I could still breathe, but I was out cold.

My mother had been coming down the street with a friend and they saw me suddenly crumble and fall from two blocks away. They ran to where I was lying in the puddle and attempted to drag me home. They had gone a little ways when I regained consciousness and pleaded with them to stop and let me rest; the pain had gotten so much worse with the dragging and bumping on the ground that I just felt I would surely about die from it. When mother had called a doctor, he wanted to take me to the hospital at once. He said it was appendicitis and I needed surgery quickly.

Mother told him that we had no money for a hospital and no money for a surgery and that they just could not afford him to take me to a hospital. He shrugged his shoulders and told her that she had better put me on a liquid diet then, and pray that I got better. She asked me if, feeling as bad as I did, I could somehow manage to kill a chicken for her, and I said I thought I could. So she had me kill a chicken and she boiled it and fed me the broth for my meals. For the next many days she boiled it again and again, until those bones had NOTHING LEFT to offer a broth! I was glad to eventually get feeling more like myself again!

I loved playing basketball, and when I had just gotten back to school from the tonsillectomy and the coach decided I was in too poor a health to be on his basketball team –or football, either- I was pretty disappointed. Some of us who had not been chosen for the basketball team decided we would make up our own basketball team.

We called ourselves “The Rusty Dozen.” I forget now who was in it beside Myself, Warren Griffeths, Ray Morgan, Aubra Morris, Wallace Shipp, Wallace Dean, Wallace Limb and Henry Limb, -but we thought we were pretty good. We loved the game!

One day we were playing around in the school gym before the regular team got ready for practice, and the coach asked if we would give his team a ballgame. We were delighted at the chance and told him yes…Well, to the coach’s ire, we tromped his fancy team of champions! We were so much better than they were that the coach was really chewing his team out. He worked them hard for a long time after that. Eventually he had them play us again for a rematch, and they were able to win that one – we gave them a darned good game, but they won that one. I surely had a good time playing ball with The Rusty Dozen!

My nickname in High School was “Happy.” I don’t know why they thought that up, but that was my nickname, because they said I was always so happy. Most all of my life people have said that quality described me to a “T” because I was always smiling and cheerful…and I think that I have always been really cheerful, because it is a happy attitude and a grateful heart that give us the joy and the inner strength to be all that we can become, even when things are bad.

I went deer hunting for the very first time when I was one week shy of sixteen years old. My brother in law Roy Stewart invited me to go with him and his father to hunt deer. We had extra good luck and all of us got good big deer. We had three women in camp and got enough deer that they each got a whole deer as well as the men folk who had gone hunting with the group. That deer season made me a confirmed deer hunter and I eagerly looked forward to the next deer season.

The next year we had eleven archers with us, and I remember there also being eight women in camp with the group. The first day I was hunting with a young man named Henry Deleau. We walked out on a ridge overlooking a deep canyon, but there was not an animal in our sight at that point, so I rolled a rock and a whole string of bucks walked in single file up the opposite side of the hill. Henry said, I will take the first and you take the second, I will take the third and you take the next one. We followed that procedure until we had killed seven bucks between us. We loaded a buck on each of our horses and started back for camp with them.

While we plodded back to camp, it started to snow. We were quite a way from camp, so by the time we got there, there was about ¾ inch of snow on the ground. We heard the mountain lions crying, as they would circle around us, and we saw their tracks in the snow, so we knew that there were at least three big mountain lions following us as we walked along carrying the deer. Since we had a deer on each horse, we were walking and leading our horses. The lions followed us clear to camp, circling and crying until we got back to camp and the campfire.

The cry of a mountain lion is very similar to a woman screaming. It literally sent chills up and down my back. We got to camp and hung the deer high in the trees, and the women of our camp and the other hunters who had returned early had a nice supper ready for us. Those mountain lions circled the camp most of the night, and once in awhile we would hear one scream. They did not like the fact that there were a large number of us near a large fire, nor that we had hung the deer high in the trees. The next day we went back for the rest of the other deer we had killed. When we had brought them to camp we loaded up and took the deer home.

One year I hunted at Pine Valley with Ace and Vernile Terry. (My daughter Bonnie would later marry his son, Brian Vernile Terry!) I could see a deer a long ways off that had been injured somehow in its right front leg and was just limping long. It was heading right and it had a right front leg crippled. It was a long ways off, really too far to be shooting at, perhaps, but I had a long-range rifle, a 30-06. I told Vernile I felt we ought to put that poor deer out of its misery because I was sure it was suffering and would eventually limp off and die somewhere.

I knelt and aimed high -at about two feet above the deer’s shoulder. It dropped as soon as I shot. I knew I would have to go a long ways and bring that deer back to camp if I could. So I started over toward the deer and Vernile followed me. I got over to it and discovered that it was a three-point buck. We dressed it out and drug it back to camp. It had been a LONG way off, could well have been the second longest shot I ever attempted. Vernile seemed stunned that the shot found its mark. Ace Terry tagged the deer and took it home as his, but I already had bagged a good deer, so I was glad he took it.

Another year Max Hamilton and I were hunting near Summit, Utah. I spotted a big buck a long ways off, maybe as much as several hundred yards. Max and I wondered if we ought to even attempt trying to shoot at it, it was so far off, but I decided to try it. I aimed high, well above his shoulders and he just dropped. Max said, “NOW you have done it!”

When we got to the deer, it turned out to be a great big four-point buck. By the time we had dragged that animal back to camp we were utterly give out…but it sure was a beautiful, big animal. Max did not get a shot at all that day. The next day I cleaned mine out and took him half of it. That was a habit of mine, I always gave my hunting partner the best half of whatever I happened to be able to get each year.

That year I was fortunate to get a job and worked at a local service station. I was a service station attendant when Wallace Beery -a movie star- came to the station. He wanted to buy gasoline one night when he pulled into the station and while he was inside the place getting rested and refreshed, I was delivering the gas into his gas tank. I also cleaned his windshield, checked his car’s oil and so forth.

He saw what I had done when he came back out to his car and was delighted to see what I had done for him; he said that in California they never did all of those things for anyone the way I was doing for him. He asked me, “Do you know who I am?” and I said, “Why YES! You’re Wallace Beery, the movie star!” He smiled at that and said that he was so pleased with what I had done taking car of his car that he gave me a FIVE DOLLAR TIP plus the price of the gas and oil! I was making about fifty cents an hour, I think, for working there at nights, so that was an absolutely unheard of tip he gave to me!

Being a religious person, inclined to be spiritual by my very nature and disposition, I took Seminary every year I was in High School. Seminary helped me spiritually a great deal. I learned so much about the Gospel and Jesus Christ and I loved it. I was actually the only boy who took 4th year Seminary. Every one else in that year’s class were girls. The teacher would say, “Girls,…and Morris!” to get our attention when she wanted to say something. I was the only boy and that made it a little awkward for me, but I was determined to graduate from 4 years of Seminary and I did it.

I believe it was during my 3rd year of Seminary that someone passed away and I was asked to sing for the funeral. I got a quartet of young men together and we sang for it.

My parents both became sick –mother had heart trouble and female problems and Dad had bad ulcer problems and other troubles. He may well have had cancer already in his lungs or stomach…I do not honestly know. I just know that he was chillingly pale and sick and could not work. At any rate, I had to work hard to support the family because they could neither one work. So much so I had to quit school as a junior about six weeks before school was out and go to work to help out at home. I had made arrangements with my teachers six weeks early to take my final exams three days before school closed, so I could hopefully get credit for the courses I had been taking during the year. I did that, and the lowest score I got on the exams was 95%.

I worked hard during that summer, for several people, stacking hay, which paid better than being one of the “pitchers” on the ground pitching the hay onto the wagons. I had that skill because Dad had taught me well; stacking hay was difficult and not everyone could do that, so I got paid better. I was 15 years old by now and I went to work down at the Milford Flat. I told a big fib then. Horace Palmer had a ranch there south of Milford and asked me, “Now- how old are you?” and I swelled up and tried to look as big as possible and said, “Ohhhhhh…about 16!” I guess now that I think about it, I didn’t actually fib, because I really was about 16. I worked primarily down on the south Milford flat, and in the fall I went out for football.

I made the team again. I made two or three touchdowns and that increased my status with the team and my schoolmates. We played a game in Milford and a girl left a note in my trouser pocket that read, “I LOVE YOU…signed a Milford Girl”…quite a few of the school girls tried several times, pulling shenanigans to get me to take them out, but it was against the rules for the team to do that, so I did not take any of them out. I could not have afforded to take a girl out even if I had wanted to, so that was not as big a hardship for me as it might have been had I been in better circumstances, financially.

I ran the 220 on regular track competition and usually won that and was one of 4 fellows who teamed together and made a half-mile relay team for the ½ mile run.

We used to have a nice swimming pool there in Beaver at the High School until one day a nice girl named Beulah Black dove into it, cracked her head on the bottom and was killed. I was there when she dove in and it was I, and my friend Warren Dean, who pulled her lifeless body from the pool and handed it to Coach Pierce and other faculty members… They tried to resuscitate her, but to no avail. They worked on her body for nearly two hours and then gave up. We had lost her.

It was a horrific shock to all of us. We had all cared about her, and seeing that happen was a traumatic thing. The whole High School was affected by that accident, but I think it was even worse for those of us who were there and saw it happen, and who had tried so hard, but unsuccessfully, to save her life. Out of respect to her, after that they sealed the swimming pool, roofed it over and made a shop area above it where we could work with woods, etc. That whole episode was a sobering shock for me.

I loved being in school plays and operas; they were just a joy for me. I learned the parts I had so quickly every time and soon had ALL of the parts memorized so well that I also became a prompter when I was offstage as well as being a stage hand when needed. In fact, I was voted the captain of the Royal Order of Stage Hands…I used to love to sing; mother had perfect pitch and I think that I inherited my voice and pitch from her. (A note from daughter Nancy; He has the sweetest, most flawless, honeysweet, rich, clear beautiful male voice I have EVER heard in all of my life. He was blessed with a solo voice that is the surely sweetest of this century, despite the accolades given to more famous singers. Hearing my Dad sing has been one of the most beautiful experiences of my entire life. -Nancy Buhanan Bauer-)

It was that year that I was a milker at Sam White’s dairy. He started me milking four cows, they were big Holsteins who gave a LOT of milk; then he increased my workload but not my wages- to eight cows…paying me –as he had originally started my “salary” as- a gallon of milk each day, a pound of butter as we needed it, and some cottage cheese as we needed it. He later put me on 12 cows -night and morning- but he did not increase my wages. The day he announced that he was putting me on 16 cows; I rebelled and said, “What about my wages?” He told me that my wages would not change. I said, “No sir; I cannot accept that; that is just not fair. You have increased my workload 400% but not increased my wages by anything at all! You can get yourself a new boy; I am not going to work for you anymore at all.”

My seminary teacher was interested in a group of us boys and proposed that we form a Boy Scout troop. I was picked as the Patrol Leader. Under E. Cecil McGavin, I made rapid progress in the Boy Scouts. I became a Star Scout. I was also a Life Scout. I forget the sequence of the ranks in the Scouting program, but I did attain those ranks…I finally made the rank of Eagle Scout just before McGavin left. I loved the Scouting program! I loved my scoutmaster and the associations in the group and the whole attitude and motto of scouting, because it helped a fellow to set goals and improve himself while learning life skills and helping people.

It was summer that year that a mysterious stranger showed up at our place in the Murdock Academy in Beaver. He had a Spanish-speaking wife with him and it was apparent that he knew my father and my father knew him. They greeted one another affably and I was justifiably curious to know who this mysterious stranger might be, but father would not introduce him to me. Of course, that made me all the more curious! This mysterious behavior by my Dad was unprecedented.

As a little bit of background to what I am about to relate, my father had invented a little windless placer (pronounced Plasser –like plaster without a “t” in it) mining thing; a deal that would separate gravel and sand from the material that we put in the hopper. It would then make the finer material sift though a series of sluices-long board affairs about a foot wide with a depth of three inches or more…we put a burlap sack on the bottom of the sluice and ran the sandy material over that. The gold and platinum bits would stay in the sack and the sand would float away. Then at night we would take the sack up and wash it in a tub of water and we would use quicksilver –liquid mercury - to amalgamate the silvery mercury with the gold and platinum. After we got back we would need to retort the quicksilver and then the god and platinum would be left. To retort it, you had to put it into a hot place such a fire. We got a BIG potato, hollowed it out in the middle, put the amalgamated metals into it, heated it in a fire and when the potato was cooked, the quicksilver would be evaporated off and the finer metals would be left; as a large nugget of gold and platinum, for instance.

Father and this mysterious stranger decided to go to the Henry Mountains together to placer mine for gold, each one paying half of the cost of the trip, and each one sharing in half of the gold we brought back. Well, we took that machine with us to the Henry Mountains -and, incidentally, we also passed through our old homestead on the way there and picked some apricots from our old apricot tree…we were glad the tree was still alive and bearing fruit -and my oh my, it sure tasted good to us!

After father demonstrated how to use his machine, he left the stranger and me to use it and he went to search for gold bearing strata where we could find gold bearing gravel. We stayed there in the neighborhood of two weeks placer mining. Each day the stranger and I worked together with Dad occasionally working side by side with us. We were together quite a good deal of the time because Dad was mostly constantly searching for a better place for us to do our placer mining.

I found that the stranger was a good worker; he was cheerful, amusing, and genial company, though he never shared his name with me. One day we two came into camp for dinner and I mixed up and cooked us some sourdough biscuits; one was a good deal larger than the others…two were smaller. The stranger took the bigger biscuit, and since I had a small one, I took the second smaller one, too…he said, but with a wide smile, “Damn you, I wanted that!”

After two weeks or so, our supplies ran out and we were forced to go home. We amalgamated all of our tailings of gold and platinum with the quicksilver and put it into a potato, baking the potato in a fire so that our tailings were solidified into one lovely BIG nugget of gold and platinum.

It was a BEAUTY! Enormous and very valuable! I was quite excited! The stranger said, “Now…Hite, I will take this to the bank in the morning and get it changed into cash and we will share in the profit!” The next morning, the stranger was gone, the nugget was gone …and I wanted to get the sheriff and go after him, but Dad just laughed and said, “Oh, he’s full of those kinds of tricks!” and he would not press charges…he just laughed it off and said we would let it go.
Not too long after that I saw a picture of Butch Cassidy and realized that he was the stranger I had been camping out with in the Henry Mountains. I went to mother and asked her about my suspicion… was the stranger we were in the Henry Mountains with, really Butch Cassidy? And she nodded and said, “Yes.” So I had spent two weeks in the wilds of the Henry Mountains with Butch Cassidy -and he had, true to form, taken the gold (and his wife) and run…robbed us blind! Dad always just laughed it off with the comment, “Oh, he’s full of tricks like that!”

…A number of years later my wife and I had gone to Kingston, Utah, where it was known that there were Bull berries that grew and thrived. My wife had a desire to obtain some of those berries and try her hand at making Bullberry jam. It happened that we met Butch Cassidy’s sister there, for she happened to be picking bullberries right next to us. We enjoyed getting acquainted with her and, during the course of our conversations with her, she told us he had once shown her a beautiful gold nugget that he said had come from the Henry Mountains…Hmmm!
For the next two years or so, I worked at various jobs trying to support my family; my parents were both sick and I was the sole support for my family. I was offered a scholarship to the BAC in Cedar City, which would pay my tuition and all my books, too, but I could not take it because I had a family to support. I recommended my friend Warren Dean get the scholarship. They gave it to him and he was glad to get it and use it. We had both been playing football for the high school, and he continued to play football and go to the college.

I worked at all the jobs I could find for two or three years to support my family. A very sacred thing happened when I was just getting ready to go to college at Southern Utah. I had gone through High School and had never had a date with a girl, because I‘d stayed out of school to work and support my family. I was about 21 years old then, and I had never had a date with a girl, though I would have liked to date a little. I could not date anyone at all, when I had to use all the money I was earning to support my brothers and sister and my parents who were still too ill to be able to work and support the family. I began to feel rather lonely, not being able to date at all because of my wages being so critical to our family’s survival, that way, and one night while my brother Wane and I were working on the Forest Service fence upon the South Creek, I made it a matter of prayer to know if there was a girl intended for me.

I told the Lord that I would like to know what she looked like and, if possible, where I could find her. I prayed earnestly to Heavenly Father and I humbly asked him in all sincerity, would he please let me know if there was a girl meant for me? If there was a girl meant for me, would he please let me know what she looked like and where to find her? That night I had a dream. I dreamed about a beautiful girl, she came to me and put her arms around me. She was wearing a white dress with red polka dots and a jaunty little tam on her shining brown curls… Her eyes were sparkling with gladness and goodness and her smile was so beautiful! I looked at her closely, memorizing her lovely features to heart, because she seemed such an angel. I knew when I woke that the girl I had dreamt of was “The One” I would one day marry. I was so grateful to the Lord for blessing me with such a beautiful affirmation that there really would be a lovely girl in my life, one day.

1932 – 1933: FIRST YEAR OF COLLEGE

When my parents were finally feeling better, it gave me an opportunity to think about ME going to college. I went over to the College in Cedar City hoping to go to school there. I contacted the supervisor of student employment and asked him for a job, which would make it possible for me to go to school. He said, “Morris, do you want to work, or do you just want to collect the money?” I said, “Mr. Cooley, I have been taught to work hard for what I get and I would earn any money I received.” He asked me what finances, what backing I had…and I told him I had fifty cents and the sweater on my back. He said to me “My heavens, Morris, turn around and go back home!”

I told him I did not come to Cedar City to go to school just to turn around and go back home, I came there to go to school and I intended to DO IT. He said he liked my looks and he liked my determination. He said he had a trench he wanted me to dig to lay some pipeline. It had to be two feet wide and at least 30 inches deep. It was through rocks and gravel, which made it hard labor, let me tell you! He said it would take me a full week to dig that trench; I had it finished in three days. When I told him I had it ready, he said, “I don’t believe you.” …so I took him out to see it. He measured it and agreed it was ready to lay the water line, and I could see that he was very pleased and not a little surprised.

As a result of that, Mr. Cooley gave me a job painting. He said if I could paint the home economics department in such a way as to please Rose Thompson, the Home Economics teacher, then I could have a job painting other things there at the college. I evidently pleased her, because I was sent up to the art department next, to paint there. Miss Bastow was the art teacher…I evidently pleased her, because my next job was in the president’s office and then from there into the other classrooms, the halls, then down to the dairy.

The first time I went to Mutual at the church house in Cedar City, I was chosen to be the Secretary of the Young Men. There were so many fine young men there that I was a little surprised, but I accepted the job (I feel that whatever job the Lord calls one to do, one says yes –like it or not- and just does their best at it.) and I tried to magnify that calling. It turned out that I was quite overwhelmed at first, but soon managed to make it a good experience for all of us. I found there were days that I liked it -and also a few days that I wished I had not been chosen, because I wanted to be able to go to Mary’s ward, too. As time went on, (“Time went on” for quite a long while, as we did not meet for some time…when we finally did meet, on Nov. 09, ‘32, December 7th was our first date) I would bring Mary to my ward for Dances and then go to her ward when there were dances in her ward. That way we got to get together quite frequently in the evening.

I was rooming that year with two other fellows; my good friend Wallace Dean and also Ellis Armstrong. Ellis tried to play a prank on me one day when he was rummaging in our refrigerator for something…he grabbed a raw egg and threw it at me, calling “CATCH!”…Well, I sidestepped and the egg splattered all over the place…Wallace and I were just laughing about hard enough to split our sides watching Ellis on his knees cleaning up all of that raw egg! His expression was so comical and chagrined looking!

Halloween came along as it did every year and pranks were still the order of the day back then. One day I went to school and discovered that my friends had completely dismantled a Ford car and entirely reassembled it on the third floor landing in the school library building!

My VERY first date was to occur in Cedar City at college and was with a very popular and quite pretty girl who jilted me when I arrived at her house!
My roommate Ellis Armstrong was dating Kay Seaman as her steady boyfriend and he was determined that I would go on a double date with them and take Kay’s beautiful older sister, Bertha, as my date.

I was to pick her up at 7:00 PM. I had worked hard all day long, at school and then working on campus and I was exhausted and felt scruffy after so much labor all day long, so at 6:00PM when I was finally free, I hurried home to shower and dress and get over to that girls place to take her out. When I got to the Seaman place, Ellis Armstrong and Kay Seaman were just walking to the door to leave...I said, “We’ll hurry and catch up with you!” …Oddly, they did not answer my comment, they looked at me queerly but just left without telling me anything….

Bertha’s brother ushered me into the room where Bertha was. I walked in all smiles, ready to leave with her and told her that Ellis and Kay had already left but we could catch up to them or meet them later. She looked up as I spoke to her, but did not move. She was sitting on a sofa reading a magazine, looking very untidy, obviously not dressed or ready to be going anywhere and announced that she had decided she was not going to go. She looked up at me very disinterestedly and said that she had been on the mountain with her father and did not get home until 4:00 PM and did not feel like going anymore, so she’d decided not to go because there was not time to get ready, anyhow… She never even bothered to lay her magazine down, just told me she was not going and then ignored me.

I was terribly disappointed, because she was quite a popular, beautiful girl and I had gone to considerable effort to get spiffed up and I’d had to walk clear across town to get there on time to take her out -and I had looked forward to finally getting to go on a date. It made me feel like I was just old garbage to be cast aside so callously when I had gone to so much effort to be there on time and take her out.

My second date was with a girl named Belva Swapp. We went to a Glee Club party and when I took her home, she ran ecstatically to hug a fellow who stepped out of the shrubbery as we arrived near her porch! Well, I felt like a fool just standing there while my date hugged another fellow, so I just told her thanks for a lovely evening and left them there together. That was as awkward as the first date and being jilted was, and it did not make me anxious to ask anyone else out on a date after having two disastrous dates!

One day as I was standing with my friend Wallace Dean on the sidewalk that led from the library building (where we were coming from) to the science building where a group of students were coming toward the library building. In the lead, talking and laughing with a young man, was the girl -the very girl - that I had dreamed about! She had on the white dress with red polka dots and she looked exactly like the girl that I had dreamed about! I told Wallace that I had to find out who she was, that I felt she was going to be a Very Important Person in my life.

Since Wallace worked in the library, he saved a library card for me that she had signed out asking for a German dictionary. Well, I’d found out who she was! Once I knew her name, I went at once to the registrar and found out all I could about her from the registrar; I learned that her name was Mary Cox and that she was a senior in High School. I learned that she was a good girl that did not partake of some of the more questionable activities around campus. I learned that she was a girl with the same standards and beliefs that I had.

I learned that she was the most intelligent of all the intelligent girls on the campus. Her scholastic records showed that she was the top girl, scholastically! I obtained a copy of her class schedule and began to haunt the areas around her classes! Then I began watching the classrooms and the halls and the campus to see if I could find her and make acquaintance with her. I couldn’t find anybody who knew her and who knew me for quite some time. One could not just approach a girl improperly, one had to be introduced, back then; I hunted for a long time before I could finally find somebody who knew both of us, and it happened this way.

At last the day came when I had a chance to meet her. There was a Music Arts number –it was free to all students, where two women -Margaret Summerhays and Mable Jenkins- were putting on a musical program- I went to it, alone, and Mary happened to go to the same Music Arts number with a girlfriend named Marie Froyd. Well, I knew Marie Froyd, because I had danced with her at the Freshman Dance! She introduced Mary and me and I walked both of them home that night. Well, I was on Cloud Nine; I not only knew who she was, I had met her and to me she was already a dearly beloved friend. I had cherished high hopes I would be able to talk with her and become acquainted with her; -and I DID!

I saw Mary on the 17th of October but I did not have a dime to ask her out until I had my November paycheck. I finally had met her on the 9th of November and I asked her to go out with me in December, on a Sunday morning for the next Friday evening, which was December 7th, 1932.

She wondered what kind of guy I was, so during the week she asked a few girls from Beaver and some others she thought knew of me and wanted to know from them what sort of a fellow I was…they said, “OH! Has he asked you out?! I wish he would ask ME out! I have been trying to get him to, for just ages!” They assured her I was a good person and that reassured her.

Well, Mary decided she was willing to go out with me after hearing those girls talking about me. We went out to see a movie that was playing in town. It was bitter cold outside and we were walking to the movie, so I slipped her little hand in my white sweater pocket with MY hand and kept her hand warm and when my other hand grew cold I knew that hers was probably cold too, so I slipped around to her other side and did the same thing with her other hand.

When we got to the theater to see the picture show, it was called, “Are These Our Children?” It was a picture about some young people who had started out as nice kids from good families, but who had little by little become more and more dishonest until they were all involved in an armed robbery and a murder. We didn’t like the movie, but it did create a way for us to compare our own goals and ideals on the way home; we compared our hopes and dreams and what our life goals were and we discovered that we had a great deal in common. Our goals were exactly the same. We both wanted to finish college, we both wanted a temple marriage, we both intended to be honest people with integrity, worthy of temple recommends, we both wanted to have a family on earth as well as an eternal family, we both felt that we wanted to become teachers as a career choice, we just seemed to have EVERYTHING in common.

As we walked home I was braver; I held her hand in one pocket and put my arm around her waist as we walked along and then would switch sides as before. When we arrived at her house, she invited me in to get warm before I had to walk back through the bitter cold to my apartment. I remember that there was a wonderful grillwork in her main hallway that was just above the furnace in the basement and it was toasty warm to stand on it and feel that wonderful heat blowing up and warming you, through and through!

Mary’s mother liked me. She made me feel so very welcome in their home and as we dated more often, she frequently would ask for Mary and me to sing hymns for her, usually she would have chosen two or three hymns she wanted to hear us sing after each date, while Mary played the old pump organ as accompaniment. I conceived the idea of replacing their pump organ with a nice piano, which would be easier for her to play. I knew a man in town who had a good piano for sale. (–A Mr. Thompson, who was going to put a grocery store in his home, so the piano was for sale so he would have room for his shelving in there-)

I approached Mary with the idea of getting the piano for her and at first she refused, fearing that I would use it as coercion to get her to stay involved but on a considerably deeper basis with me. I assured her that I would give her the piano with NO STRINGS ATTACHED, that it did not matter a whit whether she continued dating me and things worked into something deeper or not. She accepted on that basis with the condition that I allow her to help pay for it. This I was willing to allow, so the deal was struck and the piano purchased. They gave their old organ to the 2nd ward church and it was used for Jr. Sunday School and Primary etc for years before being purchased by Frank Petty. Frank put the old organ in his cabin on the mountain.

Well, back to my story; I really liked Mary’s family; especially I adored her sweet mother. I seemed to fit into that family so well that I felt that her mother was my mother, too. I thought of her as “Our” mother. Her mother loved me back and called me, “My Other Boy.” She always told her children, “…if anything ever happens to me, be sure you call my other boy!”

I had taken Mary out with me about five times when I asked her to consider going steady with me. About three weeks after considering it, Mary announced to me that she had decided that she would go steady with me. I went home walking on Cloud 9 that night! I don’t believe my feet ever touched the ground!
Mary and I had been dating a number of times after that when my brother Wane happened to be in an assembly there at the BAC…he was majoring in Drama, so he was often in productions on campus. This particular day he was doing a cute little comedy routine for the audience and Mary happened to come to see it, but she was late slipping in the back door of the auditorium and finding herself a seat…well, Wane saw her coming in and tipped his hat to her; his partner on the stage said, “Hey, how come you tipped your hat to that pretty girl?” and Wane grinned at him and the audience and said, “Well; this is my brother’s hat –and that was my brother’s GIRL!” and the audience burst into hee haws of laughter while Mary turned a fiery red and burned all the way through her seat and onto the floor with embarrassment!

Wane loved drama and music and so did I. I was part of the prestigious Glee Club. I sang 2nd Tenor and was picked to be part of a smaller group of singers from the Glee Club that got to go on tour together as sort of a good will tour. We went to other schools and towns in Sevier County and Beaver County, the object of the trip being to recruit new students for the BAC from those areas. We sang three concerts in Beaver County and three concerts in Sevier County, and after the concerts there was always a dance. We had a dance band with us, the boys would sing a song and then there would be a string trio, then a solo or two, and so on.

We went to dances after each of the evening performances and some times the girls at those dances got quite possessive…for instance, at one of them, a pretty little blue eyed blonde girl picked me out to be ‘hers’…she kept making plays for my attention and cutting out other girls that would have been my dance partners, telling them “He’s MINE!”

I wanted to join a wholesome and elite Fraternity while I was at the BAC, and I was blessed with a fine mind and scholastic ability that was such that the Phi Kappa Delta fraternity –the most elite, scholastically excellent one on the entire campus- allowed me to be one of their numbers.

I still remember being made to wear my “pledge goat” beanie and a gunnysack that said I was a freshman pledge to the group…we had a photo taken of our group and I keep it as a memento of the fraternity. My fraternity group was a group of GOOD boys and we had a strict moral code, which, if broken by anyone, meant their immediate expulsion from the fraternity. There was nothing of drinking or swearing or any other bad habits indulged in by my fraternity brothers or me.

(A joke from school days…
Keith Mac; “I have always liked Scotsmen. In fact I am pleased to tell you that there is a little Scotch in ME!”
Morris Buhanan; “…I know it. I can smell it.”)

I asked Mary to marry me on Valentines Day, 1933 during our first year there at the BAC. By this time we had dated for nearly three months and of course I fell hard for her and was deeply in love the moment that I saw her and realized she was the girl from my dream. I searched the town for the most beautiful Valentine I could find. I had invited Mary to a show and when I called for her I gave her that beautiful Valentine. She caught her breath in delight when she saw it, because I really had found the most exquisite creation to be found anywhere, and she was thrilled to have received it. She thanked me prettily for the Valentine and we started for the show.

We enjoyed the movie and one another’s company, too, and when we got home we visited with the family just briefly and then sat on the lounge visiting with one another until all the family had pretty much gone to bed. I stood up like I was going to go home, (I was, actually) so she joined me standing, and I took her in my arms and told her that I loved her dearly, with all of my heart, and asked her to marry me.

She gave a little gasp, hid her face on my left shoulder and murmured audibly, but quite low, “Maybe, …Sometime!” Well, she didn’t say YES and she didn’t say NO…I still felt quite encouraged that she might say yes to me someday, though.
…Dare I tell this? I kissed her goodnight (!!) and went home!

I loved going to college, I loved learning! Getting “A”s meant a lot to me because I wanted to do my best, and I knew I was capable of that standard, so I would not allow myself to get anything less than that. That is one reason why I felt a little chagrined when the following events happened;

Oh, dear! I don’t like to brag…I would not say this if my daughter were not pumping me to tell the story here, but I was all too often accosted by pretty girls on the campus who would stop me and visit with me while I was in a hurry to get to class… There were many, many times when I would be late for my next class because of girls who would stop me and try to flirt on my way to my next class, so when I discovered another male student, Gilbert (or was his name George?) Owens, had the same problem, we two worked out a plan to avoid the girls and get to class on time. He was the most handsome fellow that I ever saw and he was rich, too; he owned 3 ranches and 350 head of cattle and he had a good sized bank account, as well. Girls swarmed him just like they did me!

We knew we would have to come up with some sort of clever plan to avoid the young ladies that swarmed us between our classes, because we were very anxious to get a good education and keep up high grades, our futures depended on it. We could not afford to be sidetracked, so much. We would stick our heads out from behind a building and check to see if there was a group of girls lying in wait for us and if there was, -and there usually was- we would say, “Well, we’ll have to make an end run!” and we would dash out around the girls at a dead run! Most of the time that worked quite well…of course there were times when it did not work, but we made it to our classes on time much better after we discovered that ploy! It was kind of fun to outwit the girls and still get to class on time, kind of fun that they wanted to stop me and would flirt with me, too, I guess, but I wasn’t interested in them as I had already fallen hard for Mary! Once I saw her and realized she was my Dream Girl, I never looked at another girl.

Sometimes girls were very aggressive and forward about being with me and I still remember a number of times when they would make plays to be my dates or hoped I would fall for them and ask them to be my steady girlfriend. Many girls told Mary that they sure wished that I would ask them out. Sometimes they would call out to the other girls, “I saw him first!” and that would just embarrass me, so terribly!

I would like to insert a little bit about my brothers and my sister, for despite the fact that this is MY history, they were very much a part of my life and meant a great deal to me. My brothers and sister and I had a very close, strong bond of love between us. Elva sang quite well and was always in school operas. She never did play an instrument, -that I knew of, anyway- but my goodness, she had a beautiful singing voice. I hasten to add that singing was a thing that all of my siblings and I did.

We were a musical family, in many respects. My mother had a beautiful voice with perfect pitch and was the one everyone depended upon in church to give the pitch for the hymns. She once sang with the choir in the Tabernacle for General Conference in Salt Lake City. She often sang duets with Annette Betensen because their voices were both so fine and blended so well. I often would hear my father lament with a little quip, “There must be some music in me, because I never have heard any of it come out!” and then he would chuckle! He would not sing, but he could “step dance” marvelously! He was as good at it as the man who later on did the tap dancing on the Lawrence Welk variety show program on television.
We brothers all played the harmonica and we used to love to play them together in harmony. Wane and Roe could also play the guitar and they were quite good at it. Quite often we three would play together with Wane on harmonica doing melody and I on the harmonica harmonizing with his melody and Roe on the guitar accompanying us both. Of course, we sang together, too.

Wane and I were called “The Buhanan Twins” at the college when Wane came to Cedar City to attend school, too. I always felt my two brothers were two of the smartest, wittiest, most fun-loving and wonderful men around.

Our personalities were not the same. Wane was a little more inclined to be a little brash and tease a girl, and joke about things I never would have done, for instance. I was extremely respectful of the female sex and my courtesy and behavior to them was reverent and respectful. Wane might –and actually did- quip and tease them and say things like, “This is Virginia…you can call her “Virgin” for short, but not for long…”

Wane chose to take four years of seminary (as did I) and was a superb scriptorian. He just was amazing that way. He was also exceptionally good at dramatics and loved doing plays and stand up comedy on stage, -a great thing, because he was so good at it!

Wane was the first man in Utah to volunteer to join the navy after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He had first attempted to join the army, but was refused because he had flat feet, so he went across the street and joined the Navy, and was taken at once into active duty…never even got to go back home to pack!

He became a bombadier, tail gunner and aerial photographer over enemy lines in the Navy Air Force. He was one of two hundred sixty four trainees for that in the Navy Air Corps. He was shot down four times and still managed to survive each time despites the odds, but of all 264 young men who took training with him for that position, he was one of only TWO of those young men who came back alive after the war.

My brother Roe was a superb high jumper. He could easily clear jumps that nobody in the track meets had been able to clear. For instance, after one meet, when nobody had been able to make one or two of the jumps without clipping the bars, Roe –dressed in his street clothes and street shoes- came to the track afterward and told the fellows to raise the bar a couple of inches…they did, and he walked up to the jumps and cleared them easily…the coach was dumbfounded! “How on EARTH did I EVER MISS YOU??” He demanded. He put Roe on the track team the very next year!

Roe was intelligent, too, and became a civil engineer. He was drafted into the army. He got appendicitis and was immediately released from duty. He built 18 airports in one year! That was a new record, we were told.

Elva was the only girl among three brothers, and I loved having her as our sister. She was a jolly girl, full of chuckles and had a good sense of humor. She could always see the humor in a situation and had a sunny, optimistic nature, like my own. She elected not to go to college; she married right out of high school and became a lovely and successful homemaker. I loved her with all my heart. She was such a dear, special sister to me! She was well liked at school as well as at church. We all were well liked at school and church, actually, and we were all “good” kids.

At some point during that school year in the winter quarter, I got a sheet of blueprint paper from Scott Gardner for a whole nickel or a dime…I rolled it up, so it would not be spoiled by the sun and also covered it with a sheet of wrapping paper to keep the sun from it. I showed Mary how to make blueprint pictures from the negatives of photos. We would take a sheet of the blueprint paper, put a negative over it, cover it with glass, expose it to the sun and put it in water for the picture to develop. We made pictures of ourselves, our families, our friends…we had a good time with the whole process.

A little later I made a printing box and bought printing paper and chemicals from Zion photo. Then we made REAL photographs using real photographic paper. She was amazed at what I could show her and loved learning it all.

You have to have a REALLY dark room to use photographic chemicals and photographic paper.

It is very sensitive to light. Mary was not sure if she wanted to be alone in a dark room with me at first, but her curiosity gradually overcame her timidity and she decided she could trust me after all. We took turns printing photographs and developing them. Oh, she was thrilled to get to do that! To print her own pictures! That thrilled her! It brought a whole new world to her, bless her heart. Her family was, also, amazed and pleased that we could do our own pictures. Mary got a little coloring kit and learned to use her skill to tint the photos that we would do. Mary was an artist anyway and her tinting was a fun and creative way to express that part of her nature.

That hobby, printing my own pictures, led to lucrative employment later on, at Zion Photo. I have given the particulars of the job at Zion Photo in another area of my history. Photography was to play a part in my life for many years to come.

At the end of the school year in the spring of 1933 Wanda Steele called Mary and asked her if it would be alright to ask me to take her to her Sorority Dance. It would be the last time she would have a chance to have a social life with her sorority, Wanda told her, because she was graduating that year. Mary said, “Certainly, We have no strings on each other, you can ask him if you want to.” (I had asked Mary to marry me on Valentines Day, but she had not said yes or no, she had simply said ‘Maybe, …sometime.’ And to ME that meant strings on one another; I was in love with her and I thought that she loved me, too; but I guess since she had not decided on me, yet, that meant ‘no strings’ as far as she was concerned. When Mary told me she had told Wanda that, I was deeply wounded, but I tried not to let that show.)

So Wanda asked me to the dance, and I went to the dance with her. She had every dance arranged when we got there. I danced the first dance with her, the first dance after intermission with her, and the last dance of all with her, but other than that, she had me dancing with every other girl there. They were all delightful girls and very lovely. I had a really good time, because all of them were such nice girls and they wanted to make it a really special time for everyone there, because it was the last time they would ever be together. The next spring, Wanda moved to Delta where she taught school for the next year. Sometime during the next year or so Wanda and Mary’s brother, R. Reid Cox, began to correspond and eventually that led to their marriage. They were “special” friends for a few years and then were married in 1937, just a year after Mary and I were.

Summer Job After First Year College

I went home to Beaver after school was out in the spring and I worked at every job I could find that summer trying to get money for school and still keep supporting my family, because Dad was not entirely well, and they needed help, too. I hated to leave; Mary was going to be working in the creamery on campus that summer, wrapping butter with 15 handsome college boys and herself as the only girl in the creamery, and that made me feel a little apprehensive that I might be cut out of her affections!

Sometime during the summer Mary invited me to go on a picnic with her. I was to furnish the marshmallows and help pay for the chicken sandwiches. I was also to furnish a canteen of water. We went up in Right Hand Canyon (part of Cedar Canyon) and found a beautiful little wooded spot with an open area where we could build a fire to roast the marshmallows. We ate our picnic and talked and laughed and sang songs together around the campfire in harmony, just had a glorious time! When we had toasted our marshmallows and it was time to go home, I put out the fire and said, “Shall we go home?” And she didn’t move. She just looked at me, oddly. I had already put out the fire so I saw no reason for staying there, since we had had our picnic and the fire was out; but she still stood there and looked at me; so I said, “I think we had better go home now.” I took her hand and we started walking for home. It had been a wonderful picnic, we had had a wonderful time, and I had thoroughly enjoyed being with her in the open among the trees.

We wrote often, and that first summer I came to see Mary a time or two when I could afford the trip to Cedar City. Then one day she had written me a letter telling me she had a young man staying with them and he was sure fun to be with! They had had three dates to movies, she wrote to me, they had another one planned; he had taken her to St. George and to Zion and to the Iron Mines. He had taken her to Cedar Breaks and Navajo Lake, too...and now, she wrote, they were planning a date to go to Bryce Canyon! Wellllllllll…!!! I was a jealous swain! I was mighty worried about this young man courting my sweetheart, cutting in on MY TIME, having fun with the girl I thought was mine! I caught a ride with Roy Puffer, who was going to Cedar City to take business to St. George. That gave me a chance to visit with Mary while he was in St. George. By now it was approaching fall and the young man planned to go to school. She did not say where… Actually he was planning to go to school at the BYU, but I did not know that, because she didn’t tell me. I was horrified when I walked into her house that day and saw “my girl,” Mary, holding both hands with a tall and very handsome young man! “Morris,” she smiled at me with a decided twinkle in her eyes, “I’d like you to meet Austin Tyler; my cousin!”

1933 – 1934: SECOND YEAR AT COLLEGE

Summer finally drifted into fall season and college classes were starting up again at the BAC in Cedar City. I made my way back to school with hope in my heart and a good deal of happiness, because Mary would be there and I would be able to see her far more often!

That Fall I went out deer hunting, as had now become my wont. Mary and I had been dating long enough that I was comfortably like a part of her family, as it were. I borrowed a rifle from her brother Reid Cox, because my old rifle was a trial to me. It was a 25-35 rifle that Reid loaned me. On opening day I was tied up with school, so I was not able to go hunting until Saturday.

There was a young man named Cleon Stoney who came to me during that week of school, and he had a yen to go out with Mary. I had already asked Mary to marry me, but we had not made it official because she had not actually said YES to me. She had just ducked her head and mumbled, “Maybe…sometime.” He knew that I knew her and wanted me to introduce him to her with the idea of him dating her. I said we were practically engaged, but it did not matter a whit to him. I said, “If we were married would that make a difference?” He said, “Not a bit. If she would go out with me, I would still take her out.” I did not introduce him to her!

Cleon went out just days before I did, to hunt deer out near Pine Valley, and was shot in the head and killed just before I went deer hunting in the exact same spot that Saturday following it. I crossed the same big flat where he had been killed a few days previous, only I did not know it until later on when I was at school Monday.

I bagged a four point buck that year and divided the meat, giving the best half of the deer to the Cox family for their own use (Mary’s widowed mother was a bedfast invalid whose final days were drawing to a close; so money for their little family -of mother, two sons and two daughters- was scarce. It was Mary’s sweet sister Inez and their good brother Reid who kept money coming in for them to buy necessities) and I gave one quarter of the deer to my landlady, Mrs. Coombs. I kept the last front quarter of the deer for my own use.

Well, I dated Mary every weekend. We saw one another every Friday night all that college year, again. I knew that Mary was the one girl in this world that I wanted to marry. I knew it when I saw her that day and recognized her as the girl in my sacred dream; but as each day went by I loved her more, and realized more and more that she was someone very special. I had a harder time convincing Mary that I was the only one for her! Mary was not an easy girl to pin down to marry. She had other chances for husbands, for she was a pretty girl, intelligent and vivacious and she had so many wonderful qualities and abilities that made her a very desirable partner. The registrar told me that Mary was the most intellectually brilliant girl on the entire college campus! I had a real struggle to win her when there were other young men –some with their own homes and farms and money in the bank, too- who were just as determined in their pursuit of her as I was.

On May 27th, 1934 Mary FINALLY let me talk to her mother about us getting married. She gave me permission to ask her mother for her mother’s consent and blessing for us to marry someday. I did! I talked to her mother and her mother said, “OHHHHHHH, YESSS!” She was so GLAD! She was so glad that her daughter would have a secure future. She told me that her heart had been weak for years and that her kidneys were now failing, too, so she would not have much longer to live. Her kidneys and heart could not give her the health she needed to keep on living. She said she would be GLAD to have me for her son in law. And I knew that she meant it, too, because I had felt her very deep love for me for a very long time by then. I was her ‘other boy!’

This was May 27th, 1934 and she died, a few months later, on December 2nd, 1934. Mary later told me that her mother had long considered me the ideal son in law even before I ever asked for her permission and blessing to marry her daughter.

I was in two or three operas during my second year of college. William H. Manning was the music instructor and he wanted to put on operas with two casts. I wound up being in both casts, which tied my time up every night, instead of every other night, going to practices. There were three of us who were in both casts. One Opera was Madame Butterfly, one was Rigoletto, yet another was The Chimes of Normandy. That took a lot of time away from my studies and made it harder for me to get those “A”s that I wanted in all of my classes. I surely loved the experience of singing in those operas, though. I loved music and I really enjoyed the chance to sing with good people.

My second year of College was a rough year for Mary. We started the year in good shape but several weeks before Christmas, Ted got Scarlet Fever, and Reid and Mary and Ted had to be quarantined. Mima (–Mary’s Aunt, Jemima Hamilton-) and Inez had already had Scarlet Fever so they took care of Ted upstairs. Mary’s mother was bedfast and could not manage taking care of the Scarlet Fever victim. Inez could still go to work providing she bathed and wore fresh clothes every day before leaving the home. The others had to be quarantined in the basement, with a dirt floor and no room partitions at all. Any partitions they had were made of bedding or canvas hung (tacked to and hung) from the floor joists. I could see Mary through a window but I could not touch her or talk to her except through the glass of the window when I would come over to visit the family. This lasted for nearly a month.

At the end of their quarantine, Mary had her tonsils removed. They had been seeping pus into her body and causing illnesses for some time. That necessitated her being out of school and right down in bed for several days, too. Inez and I would bring her lessons and homework to her while she was quarantined and take her completed work back to school for her…I had to write several themes and stories for her for her English class to help her keep up.

Summer Job After Second Year At College
I worked my second college summer at the Coombs Coal Mine up in Cedar Canyon. From the mine, I would sometimes walk down into Cedar City to see Mary after work, and I would stay in Cedar at night at the Coombs’ place, where I was rooming that summer (and winter during school, too) and I would ride back to the mine the next morning for work when the coal truck headed up to the canyon and the mine there.

I nearly lost my life there in that Coombs Coal Mine during the month of July. I was working in the mine as one of the last three to leave for the day. Without warning, the roof of the coal mine fell in on us and sealed us in there to die. It blew out our lights and shut off our air. We were back in the coal mine with no access to the outside in any way. The other two fellows, (Leo Bullard and a Beatty fellow) were larger than I was, so we had decided if any one of us could get out and over the top of the pile, I had to be the one, because I was the smallest and had the best –the only- chance.

Oh, MAN, that was scary! I was genuinely frightened, because I knew full well how many men died in coal mines every year because of cave-ins, like that one. I knew how dangerous moving around in there with no light was, how unstable the rocks were above and around and even below us and I was frightened. It took a lot of courage to risk my life climbing up over that precariously unstable rock and debris! I knew that the other two men were counting on me, though, and that if I failed all three of us would die in there, buried alive.

I climbed up over the fallen material that had caved in onto us, groping in the total darkness over the slag and shale, and, coming to the other side, found the rails for the little railroad car that we had used to take the coal out with to load onto trucks outside the mine. I then felt my way back through the darkness and rock and told the other men what I had discovered and helped them to follow me up over the heap of shale and clay and stuff that had fallen in.

We did not dare light a light, because so much coal dust in the air all around us would have exploded with considerable violence and finished us off. We actually had to climb up above the roof to get past the material there. We kept working at moving rock and debris as needed and finally made our way to the railroad tracks and, following them, we found our way to the opening of the coalmine. I cannot begin to tell you with what gratitude and relief I greeted the fresh mountain air when I finally clambered out of that mine alive!

The next morning we had to move all of the material that had fallen in and block up the ceiling of the tunnel again and haul out the rocks and slag that had fallen into the mine. We finally got back to the face of the coal, where we put in the under mine… It took all of that day to move that stuff out and prop up the ceiling.

Mary was not without her share of traumas and danger that summer, either. I wonder, looking back from this time of my life to those years, if the reason I was so prompt in rescuing Mary Cox and Beulah Black from pools where they were lying on the bottom…was because I knew what it was like to be trapped under the water and unable to breathe.

This particular summer I had officially gone with Mary for about a year. We thought it would be a grand and glorious adventure to go swimming at Veyo Hot Springs. Reid and Mary and I went to Veyo in Reid’s little pickup. Veyo was a swimming pool built over a hot spring in a volcanic area in Southern Utah. It was just north of Saint George, Utah. People had gone there for years enjoying the nice hot spring and a family there had developed a swimming pool over the hot spring, where they could get a little money through charging people to come there and swim in the pool. Mary and Reid and I intended to go swimming there together.

Mary, being very shy and modest, rushed out of the girls dressing room and dove into the pool as quick as she could so we would not see her in her bathing suit…and she bumped her head on the cement bottom -because she had inadvertently dived into the shallow end of the pool and not the deeper end. It evidently knocked her unconscious, because she stayed down there and did not move after impact.

I jumped into the pool and raised her to the surface of the water where her brother Reid got her out of the pool with me, and we laid her on the cement by the pool. We started giving her artificial respiration. “Out goes the bad air, in goes the good. Out goes the bad air, in goes the good…” we kept saying as we struggled and tried to help her breathe again. It was not long until she began showing signs of regaining her consciousness again. She gasped for air and promptly threw up.

Poor girl! She had a bad goose egg on her head where she had hit the cement bottom of the pool. As soon as she regained consciousness, and was breathing normally again, we loaded into the car and headed for home. We were worried about Mary, did not know just how badly she had been injured and we wanted to get her home right away -and if necessary to a doctor. There did not seem to be any doctor available there at Veyo, and we drove her home in some anxiety. Inez helped her get into bed where she rested for the rest of that day and the night. She seemed to be perfectly alright the next morning. I do not believe we had to call the doctor at all, but to be honest, I do not really remember all that well whether we did or did not. She seemed perfectly normal the next day, though, and I confess I was mightily relieved, because I frankly loved and adored her and I had been quite terrified for her when I saw her lying apparently lifeless on the bottom of that pool.

1934 – 1935: THIRD YEAR OF COLLEGE

I needed another job and applied at Zion Photo for one. Homer Jones needed another photo finishing man, because his regular photo finish man had joined the army and left for the summer. I felt I had a good chance of getting the job, because I had done business with him before; I had done some housekeeping for him, and I had taken film in for developing. The interview went well and I was hopeful, but Homer was a careful man and wanted to be really certain of my character. In order to be sure I was really the right man for that job, he set a little trap for me; to implement it, he called his friend Arthur Gardener at the bank. A couple of weeks later, when I went in to cash my school check, Arthur gave me twenty dollars too much money. I called it to his attention and gave back the twenty dollars he had overpaid me. He laughed in delight and with a twinkle in his eye, said, “Because you returned that twenty, there is a job waiting for you at Zion Photo. Homer Jones called me and told me that you were applying for a job with him, and that he was of a mind to hire you, but as a final test, he wanted to see what sort of person you were when placed in a situation of extreme temptation. We knew you needed money badly. We laid a trap for you to test your integrity, and you have passed with flying colors, so the job is yours if you want it!” Homer was so pleased with my work there for him that he offered me a full half interest in Zion Photo as a full partner in his shop if I would stay on…but I realized I would have had to stay behind the front of the shop and in a dark room all the time if I took him up on his generous offer -and I did not want that. I wanted to be able to be with people, not all alone in a dark room always.

When December arrived, Mary’s dear mother was at death’s door. I was at Mary’s place on December 2nd when her mother passed away. Mary’s Aunt Annie Thorley Cox and I stood on one side of the bed and Inez, Reid, Mary and Ted stood at the foot of the bed with their arms around one another when she closed her eyes for the very last time. Aunt Annie took my right hand in her left hand as we watched our beloved Mama die. I sobbed, I just couldn’t help it. We ALL loved her so… She was a wonderful woman; I LOVED that woman just as though she was my OWN mother.

(Note: Dad still loves her so much, even now, that he got teary about her as he told me this; -NBB-) Inasmuch as I loved Mary’s mother so very much and I had spoken to her and had received permission to marry into the family from Mrs. Cox, I felt alright about going to the cemetery with the mourners when she was finally laid to rest. The funeral was held on the 4th of December. It was a cold, bleak day and matched the mood of those of us gathered around her casket, whom she had left behind.

For the next 10 or 12 days, Mary was very, VERY cold to me. I did not know what I had done wrong. I had the feeling that she wished I would just go away and leave them alone with their grief. I felt I must have offended her going to the funeral with the mourners, perhaps, but I also felt that Mrs. Cox was my mother, too. I loved her like a mother. I felt I just HAD to be there, because I had LOVED her, and it was hard to lose her from my life! I was Mary’s fiancée, I wanted to give them my caring and support, and I wanted to help them cope, to lift their spirits if possible. At the very least, I hoped I could give them some comfort and strength when they needed it most. I think Mary was cold to me because of her grief; because of the loss of her dear mother. She had loved her mother dearly. All of us who knew her mother loved her mother, dearly. Mary’s sweet mother was, quite simply, an angel. It was close to a month before Mary was able to feel more like she was a part of life again.

It took several months before she felt like her usual cheery self, but by spring she had recovered her usual health and good spirits. She really NEEDED a wonderful carefree night to go out and have a wonderful time. It had been a heartbreaking winter for her and when a dance came up and I had to be on guard duty for it, and could not take Mary to it, Mary asked -and went to the dance with- V.R. Magleby. He was a very handsome young man, fun to be with; -and he played in the band, which made him attractive to Mary, because she had played in the band, too. While she was on the inside and danced with a lot of different boys, I was working on the outside of the dance doing guard duty. I kept hearing from fellows that my girl was sure having a good time in there, that I had better look out! I was getting paid $2.50 an hour, which was just unheard of wages at that time, the usual wage was about 15 to 25 cents an hour, but, we three boys doing that guard duty made a good solid ten dollars for our work there during the dance that night! I figured that with Mary on the inside dancing the night away and having a glorious time –“the time of her life,” as I later heard- and me out there on guard duty not getting to dance with my girl at all, and instead having to deal with drunks, and packing a gun with instructions to “shoot to kill,” I had more than earned that ten dollars!

Summer Job After Third Year At College

By then, it was very close to spring. Four of us were then set to irrigating the fields. It was from there that Mr. Flannagan was going on a vacation and needed some young man to take over working to keep the grounds for him while he was away.

All of us needed jobs desperately and all of us fellows who had been hired during the school year wanted to be the one chosen to have summer employment there, too. Only one of us could be kept on, despite the fact we were all hard workers. I was the only one who took care of his tools and cleaned them up after using them each time, so when at the end of the school year Mr. William Flannagan came to the tool shed and asked whose tools those were that were so nicely taken care of, the other fellows told him they were the ones that I had been using during the school year and he decided that the guy who took such good care of his tools was the guy he wanted to take good care of the grounds, too, so I got a good summer job as a helper taking care of the college grounds.

When I was taking care of the campus that summer a lightning storm came up; lightning struck a Southwestern locust tree and knocked me unconscious. When I came to, partially, I was covered with limbs and leaves and debris and didn’t remember who I was, where I was or why I was there. It took quite some time for me to come to regain my mental faculties. Through the power of the priesthood my life was again spared. The Lord has truly been good to me; and He has strengthened my testimony through incidences such as those that happened where the power of the priesthood helped greatly.
It was about this time that I decided to take Mary to Beaver to meet my family. She was my affianced bride, whom I loved with all of my heart and soul, and I wanted my family to love her and I hoped that she could love my family, as well. I took her to meet them on the Fourth of July and they liked her immediately and she liked them, too. I felt that was a grand beginning!

1935 – 1936: FOURTH YEAR OF COLLEGE

I had been doing some training as a teacher in Hazel Granger’s 5th grade classroom. One day Superintendent N. J. Barlow dropped into the classroom while I was teaching and thought he would give me a curveball as far as teaching went. He showed the class a picture of an Australian Kookaburra bird that he was pretty certain I could not identify and then he asked the class if they thought that Mr. Buhanan could tell them what it was.

I did happen to know quite a little bit about the Kookaburra, so I told them about how it was from Australia, how it’s song sounded like a donkey braying, a good bit about it’s habits and how it liked to find snakeskin and weave it into it’s nest if it could find it, just oddments of things that I thought they might like to learn. I told them I knew a song about a Kookaburra and I taught it to them, “Kookaburra sits in the old Gum tree.” I then had them sing it in a three part round, which delighted the kids and made the Superintendent smile broadly.

When I came in from recess where I had left the kids, Hazel Granger and Superintendent Barlow were talking about me, and he said he had enjoyed his visit in my class, thought I was well versed and had the interest of the kids at heart, and that the kids had actually drafted and sent him a letter asking if Morris Buhanan could be their Fifth grade teacher. The letter was such a nice letter he had decided to come check out this teacher they wanted so badly. I grinned when he said, “When you get through school today, come on over to the office; there will be a contract waiting for you, and it will be in Cedar City teaching the 5th grade.”
After that, EVERY TIME anyone ever came to visit the Iron County School system, they brought him or her into MY room. I taught school for 42 continuous years in Iron County and in all those years that pattern never changed!

During the first year I taught school, Mary and I were not yet married. Both of us taught school that year; I taught the 5th grade and Mary taught the 1st and 2nd grade. When Barlow had interviewed Mary, he was impressed with her and would have liked to hire her, but she told him that she only wanted to teach a year, and then she planned to be married. He told her that he had been given instructions that he was absolutely not to hire any young female that would not commit to teaching every school day for at least 3 years. He called Mary back into his office not long after that first interview and told her that he had been very impressed with her and would like to offer her a job teaching first and second grade for a half day each day of the school week.

Both of us taught in Cedar City at the North Elementary School. I was asked, during that year, to give a science lecture and demonstration at a meeting of the Utah Educator’s Association convention up in Salt Lake City. I had never even been to Salt Lake City before in all of my life, and I looked forward to seeing it. I had also never been to one of those UEA meetings before, either, because I was so new to teaching, but I was asked to teach science for it. It went very well and they were very pleased -even those with Masters Degrees were complimentary, so I was glad of that.

When weather permitted and when I was not actually in the classroom and teaching school, I worked for Mary’s Great Uncle John Hamilton, as a carpenter’s assistant. I also worked for local farmers. The money I earned doing those things plus the money from my teaching job and the money from Mary’s teaching job helped us prepare for our marriage and home comforts.

Each paycheck we got we would save what we could and pool our money so that we could buy furniture to furnish our apartment. We bought a little stove and of course we already had bought the piano. We bought a couch, a table and chairs and a bed before we were married. When we were finally married and moved in, EVERYTHING was paid for. We owed nothing to anyone.

While it is common these days for couples to get their endowments long before they are married to one another, Mary and I had not ever gotten our Endowments and so we would go through an Endowment session and get our own Endowments and THEN be married on the same day.

On June 26th, 1936, we drove to Saint George, Utah and were married at noon in the St. George Temple for time and for all eternity, before God and Angels and those family members and friends who were able to be there with us.

We had a whole roomful of witnesses. I felt that ‘our Mother’ Mary Hamilton (Mame) Cox and Mary’s father, Edwin Reid Cox (Ted) both of whom had passed away earlier, were there with us in that sealing room of the temple to witness our marriage. My mother, Vera Newberry Pendleton Behunin was there with us, but my father was away with sheep. Inez and Reid Cox were there, John and Genevieve Hamilton were there, Jay H. Messer and Mary’s Aunt Sarah, were there, Her Aunt Jemima (Mima) Hamilton was there, there was a roomful of other people there to witness our marriage, but I have since forgotten who each of them were.

After the wedding, Wane and Roe met us outside on the temple grounds. They were so pleased for both of us and welcomed us with open arms when we came out as newlyweds! Just ONE photo of us was taken on our wedding day and it was Roe who took the picture. I deeply cherish that picture, because it is the only photographic reminder we have of that wonderful, momentous occasion.

Wane took a picture of Roe and me…I do not know why he did not include Mary in that picture, but he did not, and I wish
we could go back in time, because I would take another camera and take LOTS of wonderful pictures of our wedding day!

While we were still in the temple, one of Mary’s friends, Maggie Petty, requested that we might do sealings that day for her family members who had passed on. We went through before doing the sealings and then spent time doing those sealings for Maggie’s deceased family members. Roe and Mother and Wane went back to Cedar City while Mary and I did the sealings for Maggie Petty, and Inez and Reid acted as witnesses for the sealings.

We did not leave the temple and get home to the spare room upstairs in Mary’s family home until it was dark and all of us were exhausted. The temple had no air conditioning and it was even hotter and stuffier inside of it than it was outside of it in the 100-degree weather of June.

We lived in the room upstairs (which had been Mary’s lovely mother’s room) for a month while we finished the little apartment in the basement. We finished four rooms and a bathroom. On July 30th, 1936 we moved in to our little apartment in the basement.

After Marriage - Early Years…

I would like to say something about my wife. She was the ONLY ONE that I ever loved enough to consider marrying. She was the only girl in the world, as far as I was concerned. I LOVED Mary, with all of my heart and soul, and, though she has been dead for nearly ten years now, I still do!

In due time, as the years unfolded, the Lord blessed our home with five children. Our firstborn son, Dale Cox Buhanan, was born on April 9th 1939. Dale was bright and inquisitive, creative and exceptional. He made a working phonograph out of his erector set as a 12 year old! He seemed destined to succeed at all he attempted and I think he has fulfilled that destiny. He was gifted in his ability to memorize and remember everything he ever read, multi-talented in music and in science. He was intelligent, eloquent and had tremendous charisma. These traits and his love of the Lord and tender heart helped hone him as one of the legendary greats as a Gospel Doctrine teacher. His birth was especially neat -coming, as it did, on Easter Sunday.

One by one all of the rest of our children entered mortality into our loving home. All inherited rich spiritual and physical gifts as their heritage. All were wanted; all had been prayed for; all were welcomed with love. And, as it turned out, they were all spaced about 5 years apart, which prevented a lot of sibling rivalry.

All of the expenses for each child’s birth at the hospital in Cedar City were paid for by us at the time they were born, too, so we kept our promise to one another to NEVER GO INTO DEBT FOR ANYTHING during our entire married life together. We had promised one another this before we married, and we lived by that promise every day of our lives and taught our children to do so, as well. Whether it was buying our home, or cars, or childbirths and other hospital costs, or just plain anything else, we always paid in full, using cash or check. We never did have a check bounce, in all those years. We just saved carefully and planned carefully, budgeting our resources so that we could always be beforehand with the world. That was a promise we made and kept to one another which I feel greatly blessed our lives.

We all got along with each other remarkably well. Our golden-red-haired daughter, Phyllis, followed Dale on January 20th, 1944. Phyllis was a beautiful, refined girl full of grace and poise who was a fine student with good study habits. She loved art and she was really talented at it. She was a good girl and had many friends. With a curious combination of imagination and horse-sense, she maintained a calm, level headedness. Phyllis seldom asked for anything and was an obedient child. She took dancing lessons, and her daughters all became gifted dancers as well. She learned embroidering and sewing skills from her mother when just a little mite and Mary’s gifts in that area have been multiplied in our Phyllis. Phyllis became a legendary cook, too, with a natural and acquired acumen that would do credit to a renowned five star chef.

Just over five years later, another son -with rich, dark brown hair like his older brother- Paul Morris, was born on May 26th 1948. Paul was gifted in science, building and constructing things, also in music and poetry. He was interested in chemistry, weaponry and amateur radio. The high school and college chemistry instructors he had both indicated that Paul was the most gifted genius at chemistry that they had ever had in their classes. He built a fluoroscope machine, capable of x-raying for long periods for a science fair as a young man. With his very smart and inquisitive mind, Paul was into even more creative fun and mischief than his older brother. When Paul grew to be four or five years old, he wanted a little sister very badly, and we told him that the one who would decide those things was God, so he petitioned the Lord with all the faith of his heart and then on August 27th 1953 our Nancy, an artist and dancer, but with deep auburn red hair, joined our family. Paul believed that Nancy was his; his very own baby, because she was God’s answer to his prayer for a little sister.

Nancy had such a sweet and tender spirit. She was always full of love and smiles, spiritual insight, and playful charm. Nancy was gifted in music and art. She could hear a tune, come home and play it on the piano. I never saw such a thing before! She would often sit down and “just play” with no idea beforehand what she would “compose,” but the music would ripple and flow. I was always surprised at how talented she was. Her little quartet performed often and won the county talent show. Mary and I were always being impressed at how gifted Nancy was in music and in art. She got her first commission for her art in junior high. She was gifted with eloquence and a talent for writing, drawing, painting etc. and for accelerated reading. (ALL of our children got a gift for reading exceptionally fast and well, and also for eloquence and exceptional communication skills.) Nancy was an intuitive, knowing things before they happened, and adept at counseling and relationships.

And lastly, on June 14th 1959, Bonnie was born… She was a dedicated pianist, loving music. She was invaluable and very willing as an accompanist, highly sought after, and could play about anything. She, too, sang in a quartet of girls and enjoyed it. She also was a marvel at math, at taking care of little children, (she LOVED taking care of children and often spent her tending money on things for the children she babysat) and she had that gift for poetry, writing and social graces. Our girls, especially, had that gift for social graces. Dale had it, also. Like Nancy, Bonnie, too, sometimes would have unearthly experiences that would help her know things before they happened. Bonnie wrote poignant poetry, though not large amounts of it, and was a consistent journal keeper. She was an adept at relationships and at listening and advising. She could wheedle better than any child born!

Most of our children played the piano and other instruments, and all of them sang well and loved fine music, art, and chances for learning. All of them had been tested, and each of our five eloquent children had a genius IQ and considerable creativity.

Our home was a place of happiness. We read the classics together as family each night after chores were done and sang around the piano in harmony together. We had a prayerful home filled with scripture study, deep abiding faith, eloquent daily discussions of the Gospel and sharing of testimony building experiences daily. The Lord was the most important thing in all of our lives, and learning of Him and talking of Him and His Gospel was a joy that we never tired of. I have gotten ahead of myself, though, and will return to telling about the first few years Mary and I were married.

The second year I went to UEA I took Mary up with me and we made it a sort of little Honeymoon. We had never really had a Honeymoon, so that was fun for us. Mary was the county substitute teacher. If anyone was ill, it was Mary who was called to substitute for him or her. She loved that! She loved the challenge and the variety and I think that Mary especially loved teaching the upper grades Math and Science. The students and the upper grade level were new challenges to her, and oh, how she loved it!

Mary had been called to be the county substitute teacher not long after we were married. She accepted that joyfully and thoroughly loved the job. It would take her all over the county. The kids loved her and sometimes would applaud when she walked into their rooms. She would be the county substitute teacher for 2 ½ years after our marriage, and UEA that year was a fun trip for both of us!

The following spring, Mary and I were asked by Grant Redford to help him with the production of an Easter Pageant which would be performed for the public in Zion National Park, wherein the last 12 hours of the Savior’s life and His resurrection would be portrayed. Grant himself took the part of the Savior and I took the part of one of those who put the Christ on the cross and later took him down. I also was part of the chorus of mourners who shed tears at his crucifixion. Mary was one of the women who were the first to go to the empty tomb. It was a marvelous experience for both of us. Many people were part of the pageant, and many people watched it and appreciated the production. We were disappointed when word came from church headquarters that we were not to do that again. It was not through the church that we had been doing it, but we stopped as soon as they requested that we stop.

Mary and I lived in the boundaries of the Cedar City 2nd Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Henry Jones was Bishop, Albert Albertson and Rulon Knell were his counselors. I was put in as the Ward Clerk in that Bishopric.

Vernee Frame was the Bishop the second time I was Ward Clerk. I was put in as Ward Membership Clerk and J. Ralph Thompson and Ted Cox, Mary’s younger brother, were put in as his counselors. When that new Bishopric was put in, Apostle Harold B. Lee was called to Cedar City to set them apart and organize the new 2nd Ward Bishopric. There had been no activity in the clerk’s office for over three years. The records were in a disastrous state! President Lee laid his hands on the heads of the new bishopric and ordained them and then turned to the bishop and said, “Now Bishop, any one of you can ordain him as a clerk, but I feel inspired by the Lord that I personally am to give him a special blessing.”

Typically only the Bishop and usually his Counselors would have been set apart by the visiting Priesthood Authority from Church Headquarters in SLC, but this time I, too, was given a special blessing and ordination by Harold B. Lee, who later became the Prophet, (Prophet Seer and Revelator) and President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. As he laid his hands upon my head to ordain me, I felt tremendous power flowing. He blessed me with gifts and abilities I did not dream I would ever have! He blessed me with incredible things in that blessing! I have NEVER had a blessing like it. I was given powers and abilities that were just incredible! I would later be experiencing one miracle after another for the next year, because of that marvelous blessing he pronounced upon my head.

There had been NO work done in that job for over three years. We had 1,864 membership records in our little ward that I was sure did not really number more than maybe 700 people. It seemed like an insurmountable job. But after that blessing, I could pick up a membership and I seemed to “know” whether or not those people really were part of the ward or not, if not, I seemed to know where that membership really belonged. It seemed I could “know” whether they were in this or that ward in many other states, and I could send to the main church office in SLC and from there they went to the presiding bishop’s office, then the membership records were sent to the various wards and stakes where the people were living.

One of the first things I did was to meet with every family in the ward and get those particular ward memberships up to date. Then I started to find memberships of members that I did not realize where it might be that they had moved away to …I could pick it up and suddenly I would just know what ward and stake and state in which that family was currently living. I sent those memberships to the presiding bishop’s office in SLC with the recommendation that this or that person or family might be in such and such a ward in such and such a stake…just giving the suggestions of where to send the memberships -and they were always right. I knew that they would be, because the Lord had given me the information, so I knew that it would be accurate, but since I had not got physical proof of them, I sent them in as suggestions. I know that was a direct result of the blessing that the Apostle of the Lord gave to me when he set me apart and ordained me to that church calling. There were baptisms, births, marriages, deaths, etc. to be made accurate and carefully written down on the church records before they were sent out. I felt the Spirit of the Lord working with me every time I worked on those church records. I was able to do things in that calling that were just not possible except by the additional help from the Lord, because of that blessing.

It took me a year to go through all of those memberships and record all the information needed and send it all to the wards and stakes that the Spirit seemed to inspire me to do. At the end of that year, I had all of the ward records up to date at last and all of the others who had long since moved away were also sent where they needed to be sent. The Spirit of the Lord helped me so much! At the end of the year, I had it all done. Then those special abilities left me; the work had been done. Now it was just a matter of keeping our own ward records up to date. I felt a great debt of thankfulness to my Heavenly Father for having blessed me so abundantly! I felt a great debt of gratitude to my dear wife, too, for she had been so patient during the time I worked on those ward records.

When I was ordained a ward clerk a third time, with Roscoe Grover as Bishop, I was really touched to learn from Bishop Grover that he had told them, yes, he would be Bishop only on the condition that he could have Morris Buhanan as his clerk. That made me feel just ten feet tall, to think that he felt I would be that valuable to him! While Bishop Grover was in that position, he had a habit of suddenly announcing out of the blue to the congregation that the next speaker would now be Brother Morris Buhanan…! YIPE! I had no more warning than just time to walk up to the pulpit! He was asked to remain as Bishop for a longer term and, again, he said he would IF he could have me as the ward clerk.

I was released from that job when they wanted me to be the 1st Counselor in the Stake Sunday School Presidency. I was in that calling for about four years. Then I was asked to be a member of the Stake Aaronic Priesthood committee as 1st Counselor. After that, I think, I was called to be Supervisor of the Aaronic Priesthood in our Stake. I was Supervisor of all the Aaronic Priesthood workers in all of the wards. We moved into another ward…that is to say, another ward was created and our records moved, though WE did not physically move anywhere else…and eventually I was put in as ward clerk in that ward, also. Hal Campbell, a marvelously talented pianist and gifted musician was to be called as the Bishop that time.

When I was ward clerk in that ward, we had 18 young people who were involved in illicit sex…we saved all of them by getting them married or just getting them to stop…but one of the women was the mother of a nine year old daughter. She was a prostitute and said she wanted to stay one. She wanted her daughter to be one, too. She felt it was a lucrative and rewarding job, because she had fun with a lot of men and she met so many of them…we were so heart sore to learn she wanted her daughter to do the same.

We tried and tried, repeatedly, to get her to see why what she was doing was so harmful and wrong, and why she and her little daughter deserved better than that, and I wept many a tear for her, but to no avail. Actually, all four of us in the bishopric wept for her, because we could see that she just did not realize what a serious thing she was doing to herself and her daughter. She later committed suicide, because she realized she was really NOT happy with what she had been doing, and she did NOT want her daughter to be doing it… She came up to Cedar Breaks one day when I was working there and was going to jump over the cliff, but I prevented her from doing that.

Ten days later she killed herself anyway, by taking poison of some sort. I think it was strychnine that she took. We placed her little daughter with a good family who were going to move away from Cedar City and take her with them. I have wondered and wondered how her poor little daughter’s life unfolded, how she’s turned out…we felt good about the family we placed her with, but I have often wondered about the poor little mite.

Logan To Renew Teaching Certificate

I needed to renew my teaching certificate after within three years of getting it that first time, so I had to go to Logan to renew it. Mary had to stay in Cedar City with the baby, because I had already planted our lovely garden area for the summer and it needed caring for so we would have food to eat. It was a struggle for both us, and a real problem. Some of the young women teachers and students were so forward and anxious to have a romance with me that I had to be very firm with them. I never did tell Mary that, because I did not want her to worry, but I found that Satan had prepared a number of lovely –at least outside- young women to try and ensnare me while I was away from my wife. There were times when I felt downright embarrassed by their forward behavior.

I remember going to my Psychology class and hearing the teacher say that out of 264 students, all of them would get C’s and D’s but perhaps just a few B’s…that he NEVER gave A’s to anyone in his classes. I didn’t want a C, I wanted an A, and I told him so. I wanted to know what I could do to earn an A. That I was willing to work hard for it, would he tell me what I had to do? He told me to be at EVERY class, to take notes on his lectures every day in class and turn my notes in near the close of the semester. There was just one other young man who was determined to get an A in the class, and I told him what Dr. Blotts had told me. He was told the same thing. He and I would usually sit together. We became good friends. At the end of the class term, we turned in our notes and made sure they were neatly written, and sure enough…when Dr. Blotts thumbed through mine and read them, he saw I had dated every one of them and had attended the lectures. He could see I had really listened and worked hard for the grade I wanted. He looked at me and said, “Morris, I seldom ever give an A, but you have been a good student, you have attended every class, you took marvelous notes, and you have done a considerable amount of extra work. I am giving you an A.” The other young man got an A as well. I got straight A’s in all of my other classes, too. I knew I would get an A in Ornithology, because Dr. Stanford told me I knew more about birds than HE did…(happy blush!)

We put on a play in the music class. I took the part of Joseph in the Christmas Play. It was called The Nativity. Roma Gans was the teacher. She wanted me for Joseph; because she said that I fit the part. She was surely a nice teacher. She had come to Logan from Columbia University, too.

I had a bad experience with a bee sting in Logan when I was going to school up there. I was coming to my apartment from the class room and a little brown bee stung me in the fleshy part between the ring finger and my baby finger of my left hand. I stumbled the remaining few steps to the boarding house and told the proprietor, Mrs. Black, to call the doctor who lived just two houses away. He arrived promptly with his surgical kit and administered an anti bee venom which he had. By then I could hardly breathe, I could not see, I was swelling up so badly and so quickly that they put me in bed and kept my left hand in cold ice water to retard the circulation. Then for three days I was unable to keep anything on my stomach, I could hardly breathe, I was badly swollen over my entire body. I was pretty much an invalid for three days and three nights. The doctor told me, “If you ever get stung again, I give you 35 seconds.” Eventually I did recover my full health and strength and began attending school again.

One class that I just loved going to was a bird class. My bird class was an interesting one; the teacher was a Dr. Stanford. He was just a marvelous teacher, and we used to leave our homes at 5:30 in the morning and go out to look at birds and hear their songs. When Dr. Stanford did not know the name of a bird we could see, he would turn to ME and ask me, “What is it, Morris?” and I could tell what it was and it’s habits etc. The other members of the little class got to calling me Professor Buhanan and saying to me “Tell us what you know about it, Professor!”

I was with Arthur A. Allen, whom I had met through the birding class. He was from Columbia University in New York. He had been in the Southern US recording birdsongs and was there to record songs of birds there in the Logan area, as well. Dr. Stanford did not know where to find a water ouzel so he could record it, so he told him that if there were a water ouzel anywhere around, Morris Buhanan would know about it. As it happened, I had found a water ouzel nest and had been watching the little bird family. The Dr came to me and wanted me to take him up in Logan canyon and show him where they were and help him to photograph the birds and record them. I did that for him.

I knew exactly where the little Ouzels came up out of the water to eat their food gathered from the stream. I knew where the Ouzel came up to sing and where their nest was. Dr. Allen wanted to place a microphone on the rock where the little bird would come up to eat and sing. He asked me to wade out into the stream and put the microphone as near the spot where the water ouzel came up out of the water as I could place it. I took off my shoes and socks and rolled up my trousers and placed that mike on the very rock where the water ouzel came up to sing. That water was PLENTY COLD, let me tell you! I had hardly gotten back to the shore of the stream and rejoined Dr. Allen when the Water Ouzel came up from the water and stood right on the microphone!

It sang and you could hear its little toenails scratching on the microphone and Dr. Allen was delighted; elated. He wanted to know where the nest was, and found that the little birds were almost ready to leave the nest. He photographed the little birds in their nest, too. He told me that the water ouzel was grieving; its song indicated it was sad… It was singing a sweet song, but he could hear in its song that it had had a tragedy strike, because the song was sad. Sure enough, we discovered, while we studied the nest, that one of the babies had died. There were more eggs than little birds. We could tell that one of the little birds had fallen from the nest and been swept away by the stream.

We became quite friendly and he exchanged colored slides of birds with me. He went back to his teaching post at Columbia University, but, for awhile we still exchanged slides and I got some good ones as well as he did.

While I was there in Logan I learned through letters from home, particularly one from Mary’s sister Inez, that my dear wife Mary and my infant son Dale were awfully sick with the flu and that she wished that I was home to help take care of them. I was seriously alarmed by the tone of the letters, and I was considering quitting school and getting home as quickly as I could to take care of my little family. I felt it was my responsibility as the head of my family to be there. Without going into detail about a sacred experience, while I was walking home to my boarding house there, a very, VERY sacred experience occurred to me that increased my testimony of the Lord –dramatically- and also reassured me that my wife and baby boy would be alright and that they were getting well just fine. I was so relieved and grateful for such a wonderful manifestation from the Lord over the matter! I did not go home to be with them at once and take care of them after all, once I was reassured through that experience that they were alright.

When I DID finish up my classes and get to go home, it pleased Mary quite a bit that I had gotten straight A’s in all of my classes. ...when she saw them, she said, “Well, I guess you DID work, didn’t you!” I complemented her lavishly, too. She had worked hard in the garden, while I was up in Logan going to school to renew that teaching certificate. She had taken care of our baby and our home and been so conscientious that she was nervous wreck by the time I returned home. It had been a hard six weeks for her, she almost had a nervous breakdown she was so exhausted from it all.

The thing that she was most grateful for was that I would get up at night with the baby so that she did not have to. She had him on bottle-feeding by the time I came home from Logan. Once I was home, I was the one who did all the yard work and gardening work outside and she did not have that chore to wear her out, anymore. I was also the one that got up with the baby at night each night and I let her rest, because she had been with him all day while I was at work. That set the pattern for the rest of our life together. I got up at night with the sick children, and when they were infants on the bottle, and I let her sleep because I felt she needed it, having to take care of them all day while I was at work.

1940 – 1950: BUILDING OUR DREAM HOME TOGETHER

Mary had been drawing house plans for two or three years when we chose our favorite of her plans and began building it. Her brother Reid and his wife Wanda came over to visit us one night and suggested that we all build our homes together…that we could pool our efforts at building and help one another build our homes, and Mary and I felt that was a wonderful idea, so we all helped one another build homes at pretty much the same time. Sometimes we learned from the mistakes the other made, as in the case of Reid and Wanda learning from the problems with our basement.

We dug our basement in the fall, which was a mistake, because the frost of the winter affected the sides of the basement and shriveled it. We had a lot of shovel work to do in the spring because of that. We could not even dig our footings until after we had corrected that problem. We poured the footings and then the foundation, but could not go any further until we could rough in some plumbing materials. THEN we finally acquired enough cement to finish the foundation work.

Early on, we had committed to God and to one another never to work on the Sabbath Day, so our building was done on Saturdays as we were able, after work on weekdays and on holidays, as well. That made our building move along much slower, but we could feel good about it, because we knew we were keeping the Sabbath Day holy when we worked on our home on the other days of the week and spent our Sabbath Days going to church meetings, reading our scriptures, studying the gospel together in a study group, etc.

We had a difficult time finding any building materials available to us, because during the period we were building, World War II was on and our nation was mobilizing all materials to help the war efforts. We got lumber for our home by scouring all of Southern Utah for it. We found unfinished lumber in Kanab and had it shipped to us in Cedar City, where we then had a Mr. Wood and his sawmill plane it down for us to work with. It made pretty good lumber then. Reid and I also tore down an old CCC barracks at Leeds and that gave us enough lumber for our sub-flooring and window and door casings. We would load a pickup truckload of lumber and bring it back to Cedar City where we would use it in our construction then drive somewhere else to find more building materials.

We hired Elmer Wood to do the finish plaster work and the outside stucco work on our home, but most of our work we did ourselves. Mary did quite a bit of the lathing and the painting; Wanda helped her a little with the lathe work and did some of the painting, as well. Inez Cox helped us out by tending our children for all of us and fixing us suppers and cookies to support us and cheer us on. Mary, Wanda and Aunt Inez helped take turns babysitting the children so that others could work on home construction.

It was rough finding any building materials and when we DID find them, we often had to take whatever we could get. There was no option, for instance, about what color of countertops and linoleum flooring we had, because there was only one kind available to us on them and a number of other so called options. Money was also a concern, because we were struggling to afford any materials at all. We did not want to go into debt for anything, not ever. NO MATTER what it cost us in time and patience, we always kept to that rule, too. In all our lives, Mary and I never did go into debt. Our house was totally paid for when we finished it, after five long hard years of construction work, and moved into it on May 27th, 1946.

I remember the glorious day when we finally finished our lovely new home. We had spent an entire day moving all of our belongings into it and fixing it up, just so, and we were exhausted at the end of the day when we finally finished and were ready for bed. I remember our little Phyllis crying, “Mommy, I am tired! Let’s go home now!” and Mary and I told her that we WERE home, that this was our home, now. She cried, “I want to go to our REAL home!”

We built our home on just about a half acre lot. We had to donate ALL of the land for the street, because Horace Dover would not donate any of his property, which was the property on the East side of our street. He was difficult because after we moved in, he would keep the water for himself and not let us have any at all. We had equal rights to the water, but he was not willing to let us have our equal shares. He got his water turns first, and finally we had to take the problem to Mr. Parry, the Water Master. Parry settled the dispute by telling Dover that he was to give us our water as soon as his turn was over. PERIOD. And that settled the trouble. He was the only neighbor we have ever had trouble with.

I enjoyed teaching school with all my heart, but I also had a little potato chip business on the side there in Cedar City for about six months. I learned quickly that the chips I bagged in red bags far outsold the chips I had marketed in blue bags! I kept lowering the prices on the blue ones but even at half the cost of the red ones, the red bagged chips outsold the blue ones. The chips in the bags were identical chips, but still the red ones sold the best. I finally just bagged all of the chips in red and decided not to bother with blue bags! I did not much enjoy that little side business, so I sold it to LaMont Kenny. He had a sister and two brothers whom he could hire to work the business with him. He was ready for something like that and he was glad to take the business.

It was during the early 1940s that I began to take photographs for the schools, so that students could have class pictures to remember their school experiences. I had taught my class a good deal about photography and after I set up a darkroom there in class, I helped them develop and print their pictures right there in the classroom. My class had wanted to have a class picture made, so I took a picture of the class and printed it up. They all wanted one, so I made enough that each of my students could have one. They helped me with the cost of the printing by paying a nickel to me for each picture.

It was not long before other teachers and students from other classes came to me and asked if I would take some for their classes. I did not want to do it on that sort of scale without consulting the school Principal, first, so I spoke to him about it. He wanted me to do it for the entire school. Accordingly, I brought it up in faculty meeting and it got a resounding affirmative vote. I had worried about what to charge for the pictures, I did not want to charge too much, because I wanted every child to have a memento of their school year, and I knew that some children had little or no money available to them. I settled on just five cents per picture.

I started taking class pictures to give the students a nice reminder of how they looked during their school years and their classmates and teachers. I found it was a whole lot more work than anyone could imagine!

The pictures at the North Elementary were so popular that the other schools in Cedar City, and then later on even outside of Cedar City, wanted me to take pictures for them. I eventually was taking the yearly class photos for all of the elementary schools in Iron County excepting Newcastle and Enterprise. I had gone in the hole financially with the projects some years, so I eventually raised the picture prices to fifteen cents each to help defray the costs of printing them for everyone. I took and printed thousands of pictures!

It eventually got to be such a hassle for me and so expensive in time and resources that I decided it was more than it was worth to me and I quit doing it. I had spent hours and hours at night in the darkroom after school when my work at home was finished. Some nights I was up until two in the morning trying to get pictures printed for everyone. Eventually, it was just not worth it to me to keep taking pictures for the schools any longer, no matter how much they wanted me to do it. I did quite a lot of wedding pictures for people, as well. Sometimes I would take birthday pictures for people, too.

My students loved to secretly bring tiny phials of real cinnamon oil to school and dip toothpicks in them, then put the toothpicks in their mouths and enjoy the rich cinnamon oil flavor in the toothpicks for quite a long time. The oil caused a few problems for some students, though…sometimes a student might get blistered lips or mouth, sometimes it would be burning their eyes because a thoughtless finger had touched it and then rubbed an eye… and a few times students got GIANT hives all over them. Other classrooms had students bringing the cinnamon oil phials, as well. I had sometimes to take students from other classes, as well, up to the hospital for emergency treatment, after flushing the oil off of the afflicted areas with soap and water. I might add that my own children were just as “addicted” to the glories of cinnamon oil dipped toothpicks as my students were at school, and my home had cinnamon oil carefully secreted in one or two bedchambers.

Children love goodies and that gave me an idea. I decided I would like to let my students sell popcorn and spudnuts (spudnuts are especially delicious raised donuts, deep fat fried in hot oil, then glazed with a thin icing glaze) from our classroom both to help them with math and business skills, experiences to help them with honesty and banking/handling money, social interactions and to earn money for the class. The money we earned selling spudnuts went to buy a big professional popcorn popper like you might see in theatres, bags, salt, and special, buttery flavored solid oil. We sold theater style popcorn for ten cents a bag to the rest of the students in the school during lunch period (I wanted my students to HAVE a recess, not have to sell popcorn or spudnuts during their recesses, so I primarily had them selling it during their free lunch time) and we used the profits to buy two organs and a lapidary setup for the classroom. (I actually paid for a good deal of the first organ out of my own pocket, but the class earned money did help some on it) I always had the class officers go with me to bank the money we earned, that made them take their responsibilities more seriously that way. If we were going to buy something with the money, they always were with me to withdraw the money from our classroom account.

One year we had a known culprit for theft come into my class. She’d had a long and infamous school career of stealing from students and teachers desks each year, so I knew I would need to help her conquer that nasty habit. I put her in charge as the chairman of the popcorn sales committee several times and she never EVER came up short on the cash. I would praise her lavishly for that! Every time she checked in, her money was right -to the penny. One day she came up to me after school and told me, “Mr. Buhanan, I have learned something that I think is going to be really important in my life…You taught me that being Honest is a precious thing…I have learned that it feels better to be trustworthy!” I gave her a hug and years later when I was invited to her wedding, she hugged me with tears in her eyes and told me “Every day I thank GOD for you! I was headed down the wrong path until you came into my life. You gave me LIFE! You showed me a whole wonderful way of living life! You changed my whole life, my whole outlook on life- and I am a better person because you taught me so much and helped me become the girl I came to Earth to become.” Well, that made me a little teary; I deeply appreciated her saying that to me.

Once in awhile I felt that my students had earned a special privilege, so every so often, maybe about two weeks apart, we had a popcorn break/reading period where the kids could have all the delicious, buttery popcorn that they wanted as they read their books, just as long as they read quietly and were not restless. Once they got restless or began to talk, then the leftover popcorn got put into bags for later, and we went on to do other things without any popcorn.

The kids learned many skills and privileges because of selling popcorn, and one of them was learning how to create pretty things out of rocks. I refer to lapidary projects. I taught my students how to do lapidary work…that is, to cut and shape and polish semi precious stones into various pieces of beautiful jewelry. This included rings, bracelets, necklaces, pendants, key chains, decorative pins, brooches, tie bars, tie tacks, cuff links, watch fobs and bolo ties. The kids just loved the whole process and we could do it right there in my schoolroom, because we earned the equipment selling popcorn and spudnuts!

One student, JL Bess, ADORED doing lapidary projects… He did more projects than most other students. (Cute little Emily Jane Eager did the most projects of ALL the students I had over the years…she did 32 special lapidary projects for her family for Christmas! She was SUCH a sweet, good little girl and such a good student! She always came very early in the morning to do her lapidary work, and I made a special little platform for her, because she was so petite it was difficult for her to work without something to raise her up a little higher)

I kept the students’ money for those projects in little file envelopes in my office for safekeeping until they needed it. The money envelopes and other valuables were kept in a drawer that I kept locked away from prying little fingers, so that, when they needed to do lapidary, I could get out their envelope for them and they could use the money in the envelope to pay for a new project. They knew I would keep their little bit of money safe and secure for them, and I did. Years passed.

When I retired from teaching and that last year of school was out for the summer vacation months, I was cleaning out my belongings to take them home, cleaning up my classroom for the next teacher who might be using it when fall rolled around and school started up again…and I found one little envelope that had been in that drawer for years, and somehow was overlooked. It belonged to JL Bess, and it contained fifteen cents. I packed the little envelope up with my other things, and when I got home with everything and my classroom was clean and neat, I tucked it in my cedar box for safekeeping until I could find out where he was living and take it to him. One day I learned he had married and was living in Saint George, Utah. I heard he was in Cedar City visiting his parents, so I took his envelope and money to his parents’ home in Cedar City to give it to him. He was not there, he had gone on an errand of some kind, but I visited his parents and left it there for him. They told me that when he came back home and they handed it to him, he said, “That Mr. Buhanan is the most honest man I have ever known.” Such kind words were nice to hear.

Lapidary was not for “Accelerated Students” only, it was for EVERY student. Sometimes a student who had failed at everything else could do lapidary work and succeed at it, so that they had something to be happy about achieving. Lapidary work helped quite a number of students who had not done well in school until they were in my class and got interested in learning and in the creative activities we had there. Two boys came to me with reputations for sluffing school so often that there was serious doubt that they would even attend my class, let alone make it past the 6th grade. They both got so interested in lapidary work that one of them became a jeweler in Las Vegas. Yet another creative, enterprising young man went on to become a foremost Master Jeweler and multi-millionaire in Murray, Utah. He told me, some thirty years later as he showed me through his shop, that he had told everyone since that time in my classroom that “Mr. Buhanan” was the man responsible for his success in life. He showed me through his jewelry store and made me feel as though I had been a Savior to him that year in school. One man who worked in the store mentioned to me that he had heard my student telling him and dozens of others over the years that his 6th grade teacher, Mr. Buhanan, was responsible for his success and for his career in life, and he claimed that he was delighted to meet the teacher that his boss had raved about for so many years. That visit and their words touched me deeply; it was a special event in my life that made me feel very validated, made me feel I had done something really worthwhile.

(Interestingly enough, during the course of my teaching career I had many students sent to me as teachers in training. One of them turned out to be Washington LaVand Bauer, who many years later became my daughter Nancy’s father in law when she married his son, Daniel LaVand Bauer! HE enjoyed lapidary work, also, and taught his students to do it.)

I felt that the best classroom was outside, so I took my classes outside for a great many things. We went after fossils in creek beds, leaves during different seasons. We did conservation projects, planting thousands of seedling trees, etc. and seedling bitterbrush plants for feeding the starving deer. We also gathered geological specimens, and studied the clouds, weather and nature firsthand. In the spring we went out bird watching and studied the birds we saw….
My students loved those experiences! I took them up to Cedar Breaks where they watched for chipmunks and squirrels and learned to snowshoe and try their hands at skiing, too; and they thrived at it. I also took them up there to see the varieties of wildflowers in the canyon, and we studied all about them. After each outing the students wrote up their experiences and illustrated them with pictures of it all, and then we displayed the pictures and stories in the main hallway of the school. Some of those children had never learned how to adequately express themselves until they learned how to write about those experiences.

I got in touch with the Fish and Game department and asked for permission to hatch out some Rainbow Trout eggs in school as a project. I told them that we would put the resulting fish in Kid’s Pond, up in Cedar Canyon. They let me have about 500 fish eggs and we put them in quite a large aquarium in our room, where they hatched out. We carefully took care of them, fed and cared for them. There were only three of them that we lost of the 500.

In the spring, after we had enjoyed them in class most of the winter, we got permission to drive the children up to Kid’s Pond in a school bus and took the little fish with us and put them in Kid’s Pond under the supervision of a representative from the Fish and Game Department. He gave the students a nice lecture and thanked them for their efforts. It was a very interesting and profitable project, taught us a lot about conservation and also caring for the fish and game in our area. We had such fun imagining fishing up there one day and finding some of our very own fish swimming around waiting for us!

That project was so popular with the students that the next year I asked the Bureau of Land Management for permission to plant some Bitterbrush. I got some 16, 000 tiny new seedlings of Bitterbrush. I knew where deer wintered over in the foothills near the highway between Cedar City and Summit, so we took a school bus and my class went to that spot to plant the little seedlings.

It took us most of the day to carefully plant 16,000 Bitterbrush seedlings and we were exhausted when we finished. It was a good project and the students felt we had helped in the preservation of wildlife by planting food for them to forage on. The next year we obtained another 16,000 seedlings and we went into quite close to the same area we had planted seedlings in the year before, but a little further into the hills. To our delight, we saw 7 deer feeding on the seedlings that we had planted the year before! The children were so delighted!

They went to work planting those new seedlings with a will and great enthusiasm. The next year, we wanted to plant Bitterbrush again, this time over in the Minersville hills. But to my surprise, the other sixth grade in our school and all of the Parowan sixth grades wanted to join us, so they all trooped there with us and we all had a great time working with the students from Parowan and planting 40,000 Bitterbrush plants. I felt it had been a good project and had made a direct impact on the area’s wildlife for good as well as on the students and their parents, who were more inclined to think with conservation as a priority after that.

I loved teaching children and wanted them to discover what I had personally discovered; that learning is a joy! One way I helped them discover the joys of learning was through a game I invented. It was a game of matching a picture of a bird (or perhaps an actual rock or the leaf of a plant or some other thing like that) with its proper name. If you touched a little probe to each of two that matched one another, then the board would light up with a red light on the picture or object and sound off a buzzer to indicate that the choice was correct.

It was so popular with the children that boys and girls from all over the school would come into my room during recesses, lunch hour and before and after school to play that game. The kids all over the school -from every grade- enjoyed playing with it and learning about the things on it so much that I wrote about it to the Audubon Society. They wrote a thank you letter back and asked if they could publish an article about it and a photo of us in their magazine. My students loved that idea, so we gave permission and they published a picture of the students and I, and the game, in their Audubon Society magazine. My students joined the Audubon Society every year. It only cost about ten cents per child and I often paid the money so that they could all be part of it.

(Note from Nancy; The students truly loved it, and years later I have learned from numbers of Dad’s former students that among so many other things he taught them that mattered to them in later life as well, learning about birds that way stayed with them and became an enriching part of their lives into adulthood and a rich part of their families lives, as well. Many of his students are thrilled to be able to tell their families what this or that bird is that they can hear or see around them at different seasons and they have a great appreciation to Dad for making the learning of such things so fun and exciting that they never forgot what he taught them.)

I felt that music was an important and enriching part of life and I wanted my students to be conversant in how to read music, play an instrument and work to perform a piece of music together. I saw to it that each child had a harmonica and a tonette flute to learn to play. We had a grand time playing in harmonica and song flute bands! I bought a little organ for my school room, as well, and some instruction books. (Part of that organ was paid for with popcorn money the students in my class had earned) The children loved playing that organ at their leisure! Several students came every morning very early to play that organ and learn how to become more proficient at it.

One girl became exceptionally proficient at it and played a solo during one of our school concerts. Her parents had NO IDEA that this girl had ever touched a piano or an organ, so her performance was a surprise that she could hardly wait to spring on them! When our concert night arrived and her turn to play came, I watched her parents’ faces…they cried! They were so thrilled they both cried! After the concert had ended they came up to me with tears still in their eyes and could hardly talk, they were so overwhelmed and thrilled. They thanked me over and over again for helping their child learn to play. It was a beautiful moment for me, seeing the joy and thrilled astonishment in their eyes as they listened to their own child –whom they had never thought had touched a keyboard-actually playing a song in a public concert! And she had done it so beautifully, too!

We were often invited to play our harmonicas and tonettes at Relief Societies and at civic clubs like the Lions’ Club and the Rotary Club. We were also invited to play in a broadcast over the radio, which thrilled the kids no end. We played over the radio several times, actually. Over the years we played several times for various organizations or over the radio. I was so proud of my students’ accomplishments as I would hear them playing in harmony together!

Along with music, I taught my students how to dance…we did ballroom and square dancing and they became proficient and loved both. Very often the high school or college athletic departments would invite my students to perform during half time at their ball games. One coach, after watching the students dance, said, “I am going to require that every one of my athletes are going to have to learn how to square dance and ballroom dance before I will put them on the team!” I never have heard that he did, but it made me smile to hear him say it, anyhow!

I wanted my students to have a good grounding in literature and so I had them learn famous poems (Jest ‘fore Christmas, Raggedy Man, Little Orphan Annie, The Highwayman, etc.) and write some of their own. A college Literature professor from the College of Southern Utah invited 13 of my students to come and recite poems in his classroom. That was a real thrill for them! He was so impressed and the audience of students in his class was very pleased and delighted by my students, as well.

One might think that, with all these activities my students were able to have in my classroom, their academics were slighted; but consistently, when tested nationally each year in the fall and then in the spring, my students had made three years of growth in that one year in my class rather than the normal one year of progress. They were READY to move on to more difficult things!

I always had a good class organization with a President, Vice President, Secretary, Treasurer and Monitor. I would have class elections for the offices and I tried to hold them often enough that each child had a chance to be a leader and gain that experience. They loved that! The president usually called the class to order; if the President was gone or could not, then the Vice President, if they were both gone, the Secretary and then the Monitor. It worked well, because if called away, I would just tell my class officers to take over while I was called away during emergencies at the school. I needed to be sure that things would run smoothly in class and chaos be avoided while I was away, because I sometimes had to leave at a moment’s notice and could not call in anyone else to help out. One time we had to put on a harmonica program over the radio and had it practiced and polished, but on the day of our broadcast, I was ill at home. My class president took them down to the radio station on time, they performed beautifully, he took them back to school and into the classroom and when the principal walked into the classroom to check on them –expecting a wildly rowdy heyday in the room- he said that my students were all at their desks and working quietly just as if I were still there with them!

I was “Dr. Buhanan” at the school, and I was called upon for help in any medical crisis that the students got themselves into. I was often called upon to take a child to a hospital or a doctor or to check injuries. I had had First Aid and I always taught First Aid to my students, too, because if there were a crisis and I was not there, one of the students could take over.

I did not like to have children miss recesses or stay after school to complete their work, but there were times when a child simply could not keep up. HUNDREDS of times I would go to the homes of students and work with them and their parents to help the children catch up and be sure that they understood how to do what was required. I would tell them that if they went into the Jr. High not knowing something, it would either be their fault or mine; and I did not want it to be MY fault, so if they did not understand a thing, let me know!

It sometimes happened that a child did not come to school because they could not get there for one reason or another, and I sometimes worked out creative solutions to getting a kid to school and home each day. When a child was physically hurt and unable to write spelling words, math problems, answers or reports, I would have them tell me what they would write, and I would write it for them…and more than once I would gently prod them, “Now, rethink that answer, will you please? …is there another answer that might be a better one?”

Sheila Houchen was one such child I frequently visited at home because she could not come to school. She had contracted polio. She had gotten so far behind while suffering from it, that when she became a little better physically, she refused to go to school. I went to her house every day or two and took her assignments to her and I helped her understand what we were studying in class, and then helped her to get her assignments done if she needed help with math or anything else assigned. Then I would take her completed work back with me.

One year a young boy in my class did not attend for nearly a week after school started. I usually called after just a day’s absence to check on students during the year, but often times during the first part of school students might miss a few days due to trips with their families or other things so I sometimes waited a few days near the first of the year before I would call home and check with the student’s parents about the absence and the reason for it. This young boy had never yet attended, school had been going a week and I became concerned and called to talk to his parents about his absences. They replied that their son was blind. They felt school was a waste of time for someone like him. They would not drive him there nor would they take him to the bus stop before or pick him up after school, they were so certain that schooling was a waste of time for that child because of his disability. I strongly pleaded with them to let him come, because I felt it would be an important step in his life; one that would be of great benefit to him. I finally persuaded them to put him on a horse they owned and send it into town to a neighbor’s corral…and the boy rode the horse in as far as that corral, where I waited every morning to meet him and help him get to school from there. After school I would take him back to the horse, put him up on it and send the horse off with him and it would always take him right back to his home. I always felt that the Lord sent an angel to guide that horse and another to keep that boy safe during those trips back and forth. He had a Braille book that he could use to work lessons in and he surely was a good, patient, kind and sweet little chap. I loved that little boy, he was a good child. His mind was so eager to learn! Years later I learned that he had used his knowledge to study and learn and he now has a career. Someone recently told me that he had found that there was a surgeon who could reverse his blindness not long ago and now he can see!

One year I became interested in Taxidermy. This probably came about because so many townspeople and children in the town brought small animals and wounded or dead birds to me and once in awhile there was no way to save the creature. I would mount the creature to make it look lifelike again and take it to school for the students to study up close. The students wanted to know how in the world I did that, so three or four times over the years I actually did taxidermy for them in class to show them how it was done. I felt that there would be some who could not handle watching something like that, so I gave them a choice of doing art, or reading, or catching up on studies, or watching me mount the bird. My daughter Nancy learned years later, from one of my female students, that the young woman had always remembered that experience in my room and had been utterly riveted and fascinated by it. At one time I had 78 mounted specimens I had done.

Parents and students wept at each year’s end and assured me that they would never forget my class and their experiences in it, and that was a better paycheck for me than the one I took home and cashed each payday. I hoped that I could make a difference for good whenever I interacted with another person, no matter what their age was, and those many treasured letters and comments from former students that have come back to me over the years since I taught are a source of tremendous joy to me. I guess that a man always has hopes that the world can be a better place because a man has lived.

During World War II, every available man was given a number. Then if your number came up you were drafted into the service. I was one who got drafted into the armed forces. I still remember the day I found out that I had been drafted into World War II.

I was at school teaching, and my sister in law, Inez Cox, came to school and entered my classroom looking very grim. I could see at a glance that something was terribly serious at home from her expression, and then she told me, “Morris, I have some bad news for you.” The students all just gasped! I think that they had a good idea of what it was. Then Inez told me “You have received a letter from the Draft Board.”
I felt mixed feelings, as I was a very loyal and patriotic man -and yet, I was married and had already had one child and we had another one on the way. Both of my brothers were already in the service, Roe was in the Army and Wane had volunteered to be an aerial photographer as soon as war was declared and before he could even go back home and pack or talk to the family, he was shipped out for training as an aerial photographer in the Navy. (264 young men were trained to do his same assignment…of all 264 men shipped out in that position, only two returned; my brother Wane was one of them; all the rest of them were killed in action. Wane personally had 4 planes shot down with him in them as photographer over enemy lines)

Well, I was to report for service in Salt Lake City on December 7th and Phyllis would be born in January just a month and a half later. The superintendent had hired another person to teach my class and many of my students wept when they heard I was being drafted. The draft board called me in on December 4th and told me that they were not taking men with families anymore, so I was free to go back home and take up my job. Mary had not shed a single tear in front of me during the entire time we prepared for me to be inducted into the service, but on the day that I came back home from the draft board office and told her that I would not be taken off to fight in the war after all, she broke down and just sobbed and sobbed, poor darling!

When I talked to the superintendent to see about getting my job back, he laughed and laughed. He said he had already known for three days previous to that day that I would not have to be inducted after all. They had told him they were not taking me, but they had sworn him to silence so he would not talk to me about it until they could tell me themselves. I got my job back and the kids were so thrilled when I walked back into the classroom to teach them that they whooped and hollered and cheered like mad. They all gave me such swarms of hugs and hurrahs and whoops of joy that I began to wonder if I would ever get order back in that class that day! (Laughing) My goodness, that made me feel good!

The war effort actually helped to confirm in my mind a story once told me by my father, Hyrum Smith Behunin. I believe as his story went, he said to me that he was about 8 years old and had wandered away from camp, looking for some cows that had wandered off. He was on foot searching for them and came upon an enormous snake coiled around the trunk of a huge Cedar tree. As soon as the snake "saw" him, it slithered off of that tree and went after him very fast with the obvious intention of devouring him as it's next meal. Dad ran for all he was worth and still the snake was coming. He was terrified that the monster would catch him, but after a very long run as fast as he could go, he escaped it. When he ran back to camp without the cows and told the story of the enormous serpent to the men there, they all laughed at him and teased him, figuring it was just a "fish story" sort of exaggeration, because snakes that were 27 feet long and a good 10 inches or 12 inches in diameter just did not exist except in fairytales.

Dad swore he was not exaggerating and insisted that he had been running as fast as he could go to outrun the thing, because he was afraid of being crushed to death in its coils and swallowed whole. Still the men scoffed at him. He was so insistent, though, that some of them followed his tracks back into the sandy area where he had been when he had seen the monster snake.

They found to their astonishment that there really was a trail made by a snake of tremendous proportions. When it had been hurrying after him, Dad said, the tracks showed to be a good 10 inches wide imprint in the sand. When it was at rest, the tracks of the snake were a full foot in diameter. Two days later, a cowboy shot an enormous snake that was said to be 25 feet long and a good 12 inches in diameter and everyone for miles around were talking about it.

As near as Dad could figure it, he thought that the snake could perhaps have been an Anaconda, though he wondered how one could have come so far north of its natural habitat. (It may well have come from a circus or side show and escaped, too.)

Several decades later, while my brother Wane was still in the Navy, he was sent to verify a story that a Navy owned mule had been killed by a giant snake along the Amazon River. He was taking photographs from a Navy aero plane and saw an enormous snake of those same proportions! He said it was easy for him to believe Dad's story of the monster snake, because he had seen the snake that killed the army mule. Dad says that Wane killed the snake that had killed the army's mule, by the way. He said the snake was well over 20 feet long, and its diameter was similar to the size of the one that had reputedly chased after our father!
In the year 1947, Edward Sandgren, a local music teacher for either the High School or the College (I forget which) asked me and a number of other men he had hand picked if we would like to organize into a group of male singers known as The Cedar City Master Singers.

His idea sounded good to all of us, so we immediately organized and began singing together. There were twenty five of us in the original group. I enjoyed tremendously singing in that group. We sang our concerts for free, never charged anyone to come, because we sang for the pure love of singing. Other men heard us sing and wanted to join the group, so we enlarged our group and eventually became a group of seventy five singing voices- all men. For a LONG time, I was the only 2nd Tenor in the group, but my voice was strong and we still blended beautifully. Our first accompanist was Virginia Larson. When her husband became a member of the faculty at BYU, she moved away and we had to have a new accompanist. We got Irene Hyatt. She was our accompanist for quite some time and then we got Reed Barrett. Reed was also choir director for our group for a while.

When we had seventy five of us in our Cedar City group, we sang in Las Vegas and also up in Salt Lake City in the world famous Mormon Tabernacle on Temple Square. The fellow there said that the acoustics were so good that he could drop a pin at the podium and everybody in the entire room will be able to hear the pin hit the floor even without a microphone. He demonstrated that claim to us and no matter where you were in the tabernacle, you could HEAR that pin land when it was dropped!

In 1977 we became inactive for a number of years. It was not until Kent Myers started it up again and became president of the group in 1997 that we reorganized.

By then there were only six of us from the original group who were still alive and actually able to sing. Blaine Johnson (who taught choir at the college) directed us then and his wife accompanied us. Not long after that, Hal Campbell had moved to town and was music teacher at the College. He became our accompanist. He also directed us for a short time. He was a tremendously talented individual with a very brisk and friendly personality. We added many new voices to our more recent original six members until at the present time there are nearly forty in the group –I think the exact number of voices now is thirty eight. Saint George organized a group of male singers under the direction of one of our former members, Floyd Rigbee. They joined with us several times singing concerts and it was a sheer joy to sing with so very many again! Once when we sang with them I was the only 2nd Tenor. Harold Shirley was the last director of our group when I quit singing with them. I could still sing, and I still loved being part of the group and loved singing, but I had to give up singing with the Master Singers in 2003 because I got so dizzy when I would stand to sing with them that I could not keep standing and would just crumble into a heap. The Master Singers are still singing concerts in Cedar City and Saint George and other towns, and oftentimes I will see this or that member of the group and they will ask me to come back and sing with them again, which makes me feel good! I don’t suppose they will ever know just how much I yearn to be able to do just that. I loved singing with the Master Singers, I truly loved it. I loved the music and the singing, but I also loved the association with such fine, decent people. They were fine men, GOOD men. There was a special spirit, an uplifting spirit that clung to that group of tried and true priesthood holders as they sang, whether in performance or in practice, and I miss very much being part of such a wonderful group.

I have always felt that knowing pets and other animals enriches life tremendously. When we had three children, we decided to adopt a little dog we named Tyke. Tyke was a beautiful little puppy, golden colored with white, and he had some cocker spaniel blood in him. He was sweet and cute and we adored him. He was also an active puppy with a tendency to create catastrophe and he was not a dog that we wanted in our house, because he was not a clean little guy. He had a tendency to shred belongings and chew them up and to drag our things away and lose them. We all loved him with all of our hearts, but we decided to give him to a family in Kanaraville who could give him a good home –outside- on their farm, where he would not be constantly soiling a house. They were thrilled to have such a beautiful little puppy and they tied him in their yard with a long rope that first night to help him stay there. The next morning they could not find Tyke, however, because he had chewed through the rope that tied him to the family in Kanaraville and he had begun the long trek to Cedar City to try and find us again. He finally arrived at our house so tired he could hardly stand and with feet that were bleeding and raw. He was starved and exhausted but so overjoyed to be home again at last and so glad to see us again that we all wept over such loyalty and immediately resolved that if he loved us enough to have gone to such lengths to come back to us, then we would keep him and give him a loving home for as long as he lived. The next day he was missing. Nobody knew what happened to him, it was an unsolved mystery forever after that. I have long suspected that “someone” thought they were doing us a favor to rid us of him, but I have no proof of it.

Another pet we adored was a feisty Raven that Paul acquired. He named it Sam. Sam was something ELSE! He was the most mischievous pet we ever had and one of the most interesting! Sam was amazingly intelligent, you could see him thinking and reasoning things out -without even a trial and error sort of learning, he would analyze a situation, cock his head and reason it out; and he could solve tricky problems. (Pictured; Nancy with Sam, who would often go after and attack anyone who got argumentative with our children) He deduced very quickly that the cardboard cartons that were delivered by the man in a van each morning onto our neighbors’ porches were filled with fresh milk, and he would fly to porches and rip open the cartons and drink the milk in them, well before the owners could get their milk inside and use it themselves. (We bought a LOT of extra milk for our neighbors because of Sam!) He adored things that were colored red and he adored shiny things. One of the things that was most interesting to me was that Sam learned to sing. He would practice his singing in soprano, alto and bass. He could imitate other kinds of birds perfectly, too. He learned how to talk fluently in addition to learning how to sing, and he would practice his vocabulary the most at around five AM each morning just when I was hoping for just a few more winks of sleep!

He could imitate ALL of our voices, he had a large vocabulary, but he especially loved imitating Mary calling Paul to come and Paul’s reply to her! A few people say that you have to split a bird’s tongue in order to enable it to learn to talk; that is not true. Sam was adept at it and his tongue was intact, just as God created it. He would come with me into the garden whenever I was out gardening and help me catch grasshoppers; and of course he devoured the ones that I caught and fed to him, as well. Whenever I would pick string beans, Sam would come along and pick grasshoppers instead of string beans. He loved to take a bath in the water that would shoot out from the water hoses in our front and back yards, running under the running water and ecstatically throwing himself into his baths, dipping his tail in the water-splashed grass and flapping his wings, preening and cleaning himself very neatly…we could even put the water to come straight out of the hose at a nice slow rate and call him to “Come and have a bath, Sam! Come and have a bath!” and he would hurry over to enjoy a bath over and over again, then go preen and shake off the water only to return again as if he could not resist the fun of it. One day I gave that delighted bird 26 baths! He hated getting sprayed with water from those same hoses, though; he would fly away quick if somebody turned the hose on him with gusto just to tease him. He adored playing the tease with us, though. He would steal a shiny bit of jewelry or a shiny coin or bit of foil and hide it from us and then bait us and tease and strut around to see if we could find it. He loved the game if we were stumped and he could find the object and bait us again before we found it, but if we got close to his stash, he would scurry over and grab the object again as quickly as he could before we might get it, and he was most annoyed if we successfully retrieved the object of his desire. He would swoop down from the rooftop upon the family if anyone left the house with a piece of toast and jam or cheese and snatch it from us if he could do it, but if not, he would follow them and coax until he got it anyhow.

The Orville Isom family, about three and a half blocks away, had a large Weimariner dog named Sailor. That dog ruled the entire west area of the town wandering around bullying wherever it went. Every child in our neighborhood was afraid of Sailor, because he had bitten some of them numbers of times and chased every one of them. Sailor was one of a large number of dogs and cats that saw in Sam a fine meal…and lived to regret the idea everlastingly. It only took once for a dog or cat to learn that Sam was not to be trifled with! He had a knack of pecking a dog or cat with a nasty little twist as his bill came up full of the unfortunate critter’s flesh and it was most effective at causing agony. He would dive bomb them and peck at them with that little twist to the pinch and they would run away yelping and crying and never come back again. Sam became our neighborhood legend first and soon his fame grew around town. He would rescue our children when bullies were picking on them and he would cuddle up and fluff his feathers in contentment when we would stroke him and croon to him. He would talk to us as we petted him and frequently would caress us with his bill just as if kissing us or cleaning us. He was very protective of us.

When Mary was picking off the old spent rose haws from our rosebushes, Sam watched her, cocked his head and then followed her along the row of bushes carefully picking off all of the little rosebuds that LOOKED LIKE rose haws to him which she had “missed” in her work.

That rascally bird became so dear to us! He was so funny and so smart that he just delighted us every moment of every day.
One summer our family went to Yellowstone National Park together –except for Phyllis, who was working at Bryce Canyon National Park as a reservations clerk and could not leave to come with us- and we asked Mary’s sister Inez to feed Sam for us each day and let him in and out of his enormous “pen” each morning and night. She wrote to us that Sam was giving her the very devil of a time; he would not cooperate with her and would do naughty things and then sit back and mock her for her efforts. As she put it, in her letter while telling us about trying to get him in his cage at dusk and have his supper, “That black devil sat on my fence and laughed at me.” It eventually happened that we were brought by circumstances -and long suffering neighbors- that our darling funny Sam was so mischievous that we could not keep him any longer. It was a deeply heartrending day when we finally drove far out into the countryside with him and convinced him that he had to stay there and not come back with us. He did not want to leave us and he made his way back to Cedar City to find us again several times, causing quite a stir one time when he stopped off first just outside of the High School’s biology room.

One summer he returned to us to bring his new mate and show her off to us so we could become acquainted with her. She was very shy of us and would not fly down and perch on our arms nor eat from our hands, but she did at least alight in the apple tree in the backyard and allow herself to be as close as seven feet from us, which seemed to be a real sacrifice on her part. Each year that passed brought him back more and more infrequently, but he returned to us for many years. We all still love and miss the little rascal, all these years later! He enriched every one of our lives tremendously.

Mary used to chastise a little Brewer’s Blackbird that yearly made his home in our pear tree in the backyard. For some odd reason, that little male became very partial to me and got quite possessive of me. He would not let her come outside to me when I was working out there without giving her grief in the attempt. He would dive bomb her and cheep at her angrily. With me, however he was a pure joy. He would follow me all over the yard and keep me company very companionably quite a lot of the time during the summer each summer for a number of years. He would stretch out one wing and fluff his feathers and then stretch out his other wing and I would tell him how beautiful he was and he would preen and preen. He LOVED being called Pretty Bird! He would stretch out his feathers and preen and show off when you would tell him that! He would attack when our neighbor Dick Dover came to talk to me outside and his attacks caused Dick actually to turn tail and run back home-screaming invectives at that Blackbird and ducking all the way over there to his house every time! He raised a ruckus every time a stranger would come over and he also went after our good neighbors, including family members like Reid and Wanda Cox and Inez Cox. He would fly at and attack just anyone else that ventured into our yard…he was a little tyrant to anyone at all who ventured near his tree or ME…but he did not attack my daughter Nancy, for some reason. She was the one person he did not attack except for me. Mary had warned her about the feisty little fellow and how protective and possessive he was of me, but she managed to win him over, somehow, and he left her unmolested. He surely was delightful company for me while I had to be out working in the yard; he was quite a fun little guy with a funny, quirky little nature. There were some people he liked and some he did not like…and he let his preferences be known!

I hasten to assure the reader that we always tried to be good neighbors and we liked everyone on our street. We were always having fun Gospel study groups together and planning neighborhood efforts for the 4th and 24th of July parades. We would have block parties together and our children played together and adventured together.

Every child on our dear old street had eight extra “mothers” to reprimand them and protect them, for every child mattered to every woman (and man) living on our street. I was always “Uncle Morris” to every child on the street just as my own children called Clara Green across the street “Aunt Clara,” for instance, though we were not related to one another at all, and Aunt Inez was not really a true aunt to half of the children on the street, but she was still everyone’s beloved Aunt Inez. We treasured our good neighbors, every single one! We have had good feelings between us and the various Dover families for many, many years and though we have long since had to part ways because of all of us moving elsewhere, we have all had wonderful memories of life together on our dear old 900 West.

1950 - 1960

Mary and I decided to help organize a local square dance group -The Rainbow Rounders- that numbered some 30 couples. Oh MY we enjoyed that! We eventually were elected presidents of the group, though at first we had Dan Crawford and his wife Helen as Presidents and then Gail and Audrey Duncan, then Mary and me and after we had served our term, Howard and Orma Wood took a turn as presidents. It was a good group of good people and we enjoyed our association with them. We started the group in around 1948 or 1949 and that helped Mary get over the disappointment of being released from the Young Women’s Mutual Improvement Association.

Mary was a natural dancer, she had such grace and such fire and rhythm that she was a sought after partner. I blush to say it, but I was just as welcome a partner as she was. I was a fine dancer and I loved to dance, so I was never turned down and was a frequently sought out partner. We always had a good time wherever we went, because we were both such good dancers. I hate to say it because I don’t want to brag, but the truth is that Mary and I and Audrey Duncan and her husband Gail were the top four best dancers in the entire group, and that was why we were so popular with the other dancers in the groups. Mary always made our square dancing outfits herself.

It was a common thing back then to have public dances in the towns of Southern Utah, and Mary and I were delighted at chances to go to the dances and have a good time together. Mary and I also went to other towns to do ballroom dancing. We were both particularly good ballroom dancers, and we especially enjoyed dancing the two-step, the fox trot, the waltz, the Schottische, the three-step, etc…. We sometimes would drive to Milford, Kanab or Beaver to dance at Square Dance Jamborees and to Hurricane or New Harmony for ballroom dancing. Wherever we went we taught other couples the Schottische, and they always loved it, it was a cute dance. We danced a dance to the tune called “The Ten Pretty Girls,” it was a more difficult dance, but it was a lot of fun, too. We often went to ballroom dances with Clemont and Ruth Adams, who loved ballroom dancing as well, and were our good friends. We always got lavish compliments on our Square Dance costumes, and since Mary had made our costumes herself, that was a nice experience for her. The Stake MIA sometimes would put on dances, as well, and we were always among the dancers. Bob and Helen Linford were the Stake Dance Directors.

The square dance group slowly petered out in the 1950s and another group called the Hey Cedars Square Dance Group started up instead of it.

It had been a really fun eight or ten years for us dancing with the Rainbow Rounders Square Dance group, but all chapters have a close and there was plenty of life to be lived outside of the dancing life, as well. We still continued to go to public dances for the Stake as well as town dances in other towns and our own, and we always had a good time and seemed to fit into each group of dancers wherever we went, so it was not as though we suddenly dropped out of the dancing picture altogether.

I had met Clemont Adams when he came to my room as a teacher trainee. Clemont was ten years my junior and possessed of a friendly, cheerful disposition. I immediately liked him tremendously, because I could see he was a man of intelligence, integrity, a genuinely good, accommodating, thoroughly delightful man with a delicious sense of humor! We have been friends for over forty years, now, and I consider him the best and dearest friend I have ever had, outside of my family members. He and I hit it off immediately, and when October loomed closer and it was deer hunting season, we quite naturally talked about deer hunting. I learned that he would like to go, but had no rifle of his own; so I invited him to go with me, loaned him one of my two rifles and some bullets for the rifle, and Clemont and I decided we would go off deer hunting together that year. We always liked to go deer hunting together, and we did so every year after that for 35 straight years. I suggested that we might share our deer, each one giving the other one half of whatever we got. Clemont agreed to that, and from then on, we gave the best half of our deer to the other man every year. We got a deer every single year we went hunting and we always shared a full half –the BEST HALF- of what we bagged. Our friendship made the hunt pleasant, and knowing that if one of us failed to get our deer we still had twice the chance of having venison that fall was a nice bonus, too.

Clemont and I also went to UEA together in Salt Lake City. The county members elected me chairman of the science committee and I wanted Clemont as my partner, because he was quite simply the best person I could imagine being able to work with and being in his company was always such a joy. We were responsible for that science exhibit every year for 35 years.

Because of Mary’s ill health in or around 1986, I had to stop going deer hunting, because I could not leave her to go; she needed ‘round the clock care every day. Clemont professed that it was a bad blow to him to not be able to go on the hunt with me that year when it had been such a beloved tradition for us to go each fall for 35 years, and eventually he went with his grandsons. It runs in my mind that Clemont came to the house to visit me after the hunt and brought me some venison that year, for old times sake, because he knew I would have gone and enjoyed being with him for the hunt if I could have done so. I would have, too. I dearly loved that time with my good friend Clemont and I was grieved to have to give it up. I never did get to go on a deer hunt again.

Although I never was able to go hunting again, our friendship still continues as strong as ever. I consider Clemont Adams my oldest and dearest friend –next to Mary’s brother R. Reid Cox, who was my VERY dearest old friend- and Clemont proclaims that I am his oldest and dearest friend, as well.

Sometime after we were married and had several children, I had a sacred experience that confirmed in my mind once again, but in a more physical way, the testimony I had of the truthfulness of the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I saw and handled a pair of Nephite garments.

They were sewn or laced very carefully together into a sort of shirt or dress robe of some kind. I felt they had probably belonged to and been worn by a man, but I do not know if this was so. They were made of animal skins, bleached very white and softened to an exquisite softness. They were beautiful and I handled them reverently with my own hands and with my own eyes saw the sacred markings, identical to the markings on my own temple garments, in the correct places. I knew at once that they were sacred when I saw those markings, and when I heard the story of how they had been found I knew that they were truly of ancient origin.

I learned that they had been found in a red sandstone cave near the town of Torrey, in Wayne County, Utah. The garments were found by my uncle, Earl Behunin, under a ledge or overhang inside of the cave, as I understood it. They were in a cylindrical container of some sort that had been sunk into the sandstone or sand in the cave bottom and the container was covered by a sandstone rock on top of it and then sand covered over the top of that, as well, effectively hiding the little cache from prying eyes and destruction from the elements of weather.

Seeing those specially marked skin garments was a tremendous proof of the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon to me. Here was proof that the Lord had blessed the race of people who once populated this land with the gospel of Jesus Christ, long before our own race of people had been given power of government here.

We later learned that other people were apparently there when Uncle Earl found the garments and twelve beautifully made baskets nested in one another. I have not mentioned the baskets until now in this narrative, but they were of exceptional quality and there were twelve of them, ranging from about 30 inches or so in diameter to perhaps five or six inches in diameter. They appeared to be made of split willow or some very durable rush or other water plant. They were tough and durable and some had been colored with beautiful designs on them. I was not as interested in those lovely baskets as I was in seeing those incredible skin garments, so my memory of the baskets is not as strong as it might be had I been more interested in them at the time I saw them.

A few years later I saw the same garments on display in the Church History Museum in Salt Lake City, Utah. They were in a protective glass case with the name of Ephraim Portman Pectol on a card in front of them as the man who had donated them. I was thrilled to be able to share the story of the finding of the garments with my children, and noticed that a museum employee nearby was listening avidly to every word I spoke to my family about them. I had to leave our little group for a moment to find one child who had slipped away from our family group in front of the garment case and when I returned to see the garments again and show them to him, a new attendant had taken the first one’s place. The garments were gone! I was shocked and immediately asked the man about what had happened to them. He claimed not to know anything about them. I have never seen them since. It is my understanding that the Pectol family is currently endeavoring to find out what happened to them, but so far the whereabouts of the sacred skin garments are shrouded in mystery.

I had the very great privilege of being ordained and set apart as a Seventy (and not long after that as the leader of them all) as one of the seven Presidents of the Seventies (in the Stake) by Joseph F. Merrill, an Apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. As a President of the Seventies, I felt it was important that Missionary work be done, for that is part of a Seventy’s calling. We decided that we would try to keep a missionary out in the field at our expense at all times. To do that, we had to work hard! Times were rough, and work scarce. We had to work hard to get enough together each month to keep a missionary out. We did all the jobs we could find, plus our own employment. Nights after school and on Saturdays, we did all the odd jobs we could. We built and moved houses, loaded wool, picked turkeys and crated them, cleaned yards…any other jobs we could find that would bring money in over and above what we had to have to support our families.

I was put into the Presidency of the Stake Sunday School two different times, also.
I wanted so badly to be able to go on a mission for the Lord during my lifetime, but I had to give any money I earned to my parents to keep my family alive, so I simply could not afford to go. When I had the chance to go on a Stake Mission after my marriage, I was very happy about it! During my mission I was thrilled to teach the Gospel, and I had the privilege of baptizing 27 or 28 people! There could have been 5 more, but they had to move out of state and go to Oklahoma when their baptism dates got closer so I was not able to have that joy. I assume that they were baptized when they had relocated in Oklahoma, though.

I heard about a possible job in the Utah Parks system through a Karl Croft I had met. He was asking me one day what my plans were for the summer season when school was not in session and I told him I planned to work for local farmers during the summer, but that I wished very much that I could find something more steady. He said that his father was in charge of the Utah Parks Employment and that I ought to go and see him and learn if he had anything available. I went to see Karl’s father and he said, “Thank GOD for YOU!” It turned out that they needed someone quite desperately for the summer up at Cedar Breaks National Monument as a maintenance man. He said the man that they had hired previously had been caught out at baiting deer and generally accepting paychecks but not delivering any labor for them. He had been collecting checks and just lying around puttering and playing up there instead of doing any sort of maintenance.

Mr. Croft drove me up there immediately that very same day I saw him. We walked all over the Breaks, him showing me what he felt ought to have been repaired by the other man and work that still needed doing, and me telling him what I thought needed doing, as well. Well, when we had driven down the canyon and he dropped me off, I drove the “Yellow Dragon” and went right out and bought screen wire and other materials so I could get to work up there that same afternoon he had interviewed me. I could see at a glance when I had been up there with Croft that there were young girls up there working and living in cabins that had no doors and no windows on them! Those poor defenseless girls had no protection from bears and other animals and no privacy and protection from any human intruders, either. I dropped off the materials at both the shop and at my own cabin up there for the materials to be handy for me to work at making doors and screens etc. even when I was “off work.”

I put screens and doors on for the girls before doing anything else up there, because I felt that their need was the greatest of all the things that needed doing. After I was certain that the girls would be able to live up there safe and unmolested, then I made doors and screens for the other cabins, because tourists often wanted to be able to stay up there during their visits and many of them wanted to stay in a cabin, not a tent or trailer of their own. We generated our own electricity with a generator of our own up there. We got our water by pumping cold mountain water to three tanks on the hill and then relying on gravity to get it down to where we needed it.

There were LOTS of mice at the Lodge when I first arrived up there. I set three traps in the lodge right away and in one night I caught 18 mice in those three traps! (Yes, REALLY! I caught 18 in one evening and I only used 3 traps!)

During my three years at the lodge as a maintenance person, I chopped wood for the lodge cook stove and fireplace and kept the pump running and so forth, just generally handled any maintenance issues that came up each day or night, but I had leisure time at nights to do what I wanted, so I decided to use my leisure time to teach the lodge employees about Cedar Breaks’ flora and fauna. I dearly loved Cedar Breaks and nature in general, so I had taken many photos of flowers and plants, trees and animals etc. and had made them up into slides which I used them to do little Nature Talks for the employees and any guests who wanted to come. I also taught Square Dancing up there and that was a delight for all who participated, as well.

One night a man named William Krueger, who turned out to be the superintendent of the parks, came to the Breaks and learned that I was doing photography of the flowers, animals and formations and lecturing on them at the lodge for the employees and tourists in my spare time. He quietly stopped by to see what was going on and after hearing me talking to the kids and the visitors, he said, “You are far too valuable to the Parks to be kept working here this way. I need you at Point Supreme in the Visitors Center. I want you to be a Park Ranger and our Chief Naturalist and work from the Visitor’s Center, you can teach these things to visitors there and explain the surroundings to them. I went out to Point Supreme as he wanted me to quite a number of times out of uniform, and the next spring found me in the official uniform of a Park Ranger with the Chief Ranger/Naturalist badge. I had to be sworn in and deputized as a United States Marshall, acting as Head Park Ranger and Chief Naturalist for Cedar Breaks. That was in the spring of 1955, after I had been maintenance man for the Lodge three years.

I drove up in the early summer each year, while the drifts of snow were still between 16 and 30 feet deep and saw to it that there was a road cleared into the park for visitors to travel on. I was the one who interpreted everything that visitors saw up there. I showed them around the park, took them on hikes and explained the natural formations, the flora and the fauna of the Cedar Breaks for them. I solved any problems that they might have which I could do anything about, as well. I had to take people to town on emergency runs a few times at night, because at that altitude there was less oxygen in the air and in the campground people would fall asleep and have problems breathing, or their hearts would seize up etc. and they would need aid.

It was then that I started implementing day hikes, creating trails, doing evening programs and so forth at the Visitors Center. Two of the trails I created were a trail to take visitors to see the lovely Alpine Pond, and another to see Spectre Point, (the Bristlecone Pine trail- one old Bristlecone Pine in a group of Bristlecone Pines was over 2,000 years old! That marvelous old tree was a hopeful young sapling when the Savior of the World was born in Bethlehem!)

I made a large number of signs for each of the trails, describing the various sights, types of trees and so forth that people would be likely to see on the trails, so that when they hiked the trails they could enjoy the hikes more by knowing what the things were that they were seeing. I saw opportunities to introduce visitors to postcards and colored slides, so I began building up a good slides file and postcard display. I sold my own slides and gave the money to the National Parks.

I used my taxidermy skills to good advantage by mounting birds and animals that had been accidentally killed in the park or found dead and placing them in a glassed case in lifelike poses for visitors to look at and learn something of. I had a mountain lion, a badger, a Great Horned Owl, a Prairie Falcon, (he created quite a stir, because they are very seldom seen anymore) a Kestrel, a Raven, a Red Breasted Grosbeak, a Western Tanager, a Black Headed Grosbeak, a Bulloch’s Oriole, a chipmunk, a squirrel, a Golden Eagle, a Yellow Bellied Marmot, a Red Fox, a Coney, I had a large collection of insects, numbers of butterflies and so forth…even the infamous Mormon Crickets.

I made a geology exhibit featuring the layers of the Earth’s crust. I had a base upon which I created layers of rock representing the layers of Cedar Breaks and Zion and their volcanic formations. It showed the Archaeozoic layer and every other layer that lay on top of it as time had gone by. Tropic, Temperate, Transition, Canadian, Arctic, and other life zones were also shown in a display I created. I had put a large slab from a Bristlecone Pine Tree in the visitor’s center and counted the tree rings in it several times until I knew their exact number. I placed little markers on it to show various major earth history events and how old and how large the diameter of the tree had been when they occurred.

I was also in charge of the campgrounds. At first there was no fee to stay in them, but by the second year’s end the fee was about a dollar a night.

The National Park Service built three adjoining cabins and wanted me to live in one of them and stay there full time so I did, for six summers. I felt keenly the frustration of having to leave my family so much, though, so I gave up my position as the Head Ranger up there and Byron Hazeltine and Theron Togood stayed there all the time day and night after that for two seasons.

My niece Lyona was up there at the lodge with Nellie Parry and others- we were all having to miss our church meetings when we had to live up there so I decided that we needed to start having meetings of our own up there for ourselves and for any visitors that wanted to share them with us. I checked with and got permission from the Stake President in Cedar City and also a Mr. Williams, the Superintendent at Zion National Park. (They were over Cedar Breaks, too, at that time)

Once I had permission officially granted, I started the practice of holding weekly Sacrament Meeting/Sunday School up at the Cedar Breaks. Clemont Adams and I were Seventies and I got him to help me toward the end of the year, so that we could have and pass the Sacrament in our meetings from about the middle of the summer to the end of the season. He would come up once in awhile and we could pass the Sacrament to the members there at the meetings.

I taught one girl and we baptized her, and I taught one fellow (Alan Zack) from New York City who was a violin virtuoso. I brought him to Cedar City to play violin in meetings in Cedar City. When I started working for the National Parks, being able to teach the gospel to people up there through our meetings on Sundays faltered; because I could not participate any longer in teaching the Gospel except as the kids asked me questions. I was not permitted to participate in any gospel oriented discussions at all (I could answer questions put to me, but that was all) this was a rule because I was affiliated with the National Parks.

The three years I worked at the Lodge plus the six years I had to “live” up there, I missed a great deal of time with my family, and I was lonely for my family and missed being with them very much; especially my beloved Mary.

(Note from Nancy; ALL of us in the family have been so proud of Dad and his wonderful work up at the Breaks and so proud of what a huge asset he was and how many people he was able to impact for good…we never felt he had abandoned or neglected his family, he was so good to all of us! He more than made up for any time away by being so much more than he needed to be when he was back home with us. He was so marvelously suited to his job up there and made such a huge difference in so many thousands of lives because he had learned SO MUCH about botany, zoology, geology etc.! By the way, he actually discovered a new species of aphid while working up there. He found it in colonies, feeding almost exclusively on the beautiful columbines plants up there. He showed them to a guy from Smithsonian or some major university and quantities of them were taken back east when the expert left the Breaks. It was found that Dad’s aphid variety had never been discovered or catalogued before. When they discovered that and realized that what he had found was unquestionably a new species, they even named it after him as a tribute to him for discovering it! If I remember any of this right, I think that the official name was to be something that had Aphis and Buhananii or something in it)

We had visitors from all over the world come to see Cedar Breaks. One such visit from an Australian gentleman might well have changed my life and the lives of my family. The man was bright and inquisitive, visited with me for a very long time, asking me thousands of intelligent questions and when I had answered them, he said that he was from Australia and he had a high position with the government there. He wanted to hire me, have me take my family and to move to Australia where I would work directly under him in setting up Australian National Parks and Monuments and to create displays of the flora, fauna and geology of Australia in each place I set up the Parks.

He said that if I would just come and work there for three years and set up their national parks system, he would pay the full costs for our entire move there, pay for our entire passage, pay for a moving company to pack up and send all of our belongings, he would buy a good place for us to live, give me a salary that was so astronomically high as to set me to reeling in shock, almost, and on top of all of that he promised me that if I did not like it there in Australia after three years, he would even pay the entire moving costs to move my family and me and our belongings back home. He said I would be over all of the parks and national monuments in Australia.

Well, I was so thrilled and overwhelmed by so much confidence in me and such desire to have my expertise put to work for him over there that I could scarcely wait to get back home to discuss it all with Mary.

We talked it over at great length for several weeks and at last I had to give the man his answer. We chose to stay in Cedar City. Mary did not want to leave her home and family for even three years, she feared that if we went there, we would not come back, and we would never see the extended family members again. I reluctantly turned the job down.

A German couple with a 9 year old daughter had just arrived to see the Breaks after a trip to Canada. They had been speaking in German and I attempted to speak what German I could remember from college, but when they learned that I was limited in my ability to speak German fluently, they switched to English…another couple came to see the Breaks moments later and spoke German, as well…I mentioned to them that the first group was speaking German also and when the first couple with the 9 year old girl returned, they all got to talking…turned out that they had come to America and Cedar Breaks only to find out that they all had lived on the very same block in Germany! They kept exclaiming over and over how amazing it was that they all had arrived here in the United States at the same time all those years later and had never known until that day that they had lived on the very same block back in Germany!

While working at Cedar Breaks I met people from all over the world. I remember one man spoke 16 different languages fluently!

While working in one capacity or another, I met a number of fairly famous people from the motion picture industry. While I worked at Cedar Breaks, for instance, motion pictures were being filmed there in Cedar Canyon at Cedar Breaks and at Duck Creek, quite nearby. I met a number of people while they filmed Gunsmoke, The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again, My Friend Flicka and Thunderhead-Son of Flicka, for instance. I was not awfully well acquainted with the cast of Thunderhead, but I had considerable commerce with the casts of other movies being filmed up there. I was surprised that they actually killed a real lion while filming the movie My Friend Flicka. They actually killed that lion, though; I know, because I watched them do it. I met a number of people who worked in the motion pictures industry, during my lifetime. Some of them I became very well acquainted with, because they were spending a week or so in my company every day. Among them were;

Sophia Loren
John Wayne
Jack Holt
Wallace Beery
Tim Conway
Don Knotts
James Arness
Morgan LeFay
Amanda Blake
Ken Curtis
Milburn Stone
Roddy McDowall
Preston Foster
Rita Johnson
James Bell
Deana Hale
Jeff Corry

I met numerous very famous people who were not in the motion picture industry by profession. One of them was the Crown Prince of Sweden, who was very impressed with the Breaks and our entire National Parks system and our nation’s culture.

It was fun for me working up there in the fresh mountain air, seeing the incredible beauty all around me everywhere and being able to feel I was making a difference for good there. I enjoyed so very much being able to help people, or take people on hikes where I could explain the geology, the flowers, the trees and the animal life. It certainly delighted the visitors when I would imitate bird and animals calls, and show them how to call the various birds down from the trees to them and call the little chipmunks and squirrels out of their hiding places! They would cry out sometimes with purest enchantment and marvel that anyone could call wild creatures out of their natural hiding places and coax them to come visit. That surprised them so very many, many times! Many times visitors would exclaim that being able to see that was the highlight of their visit to Cedar Breaks.

I was out on patrol one time and got a call from the young ladies who worked at the Cedar Breaks Lodge about a drunken man causing problems at the Lodge where they were working. I was out at the North View and drove at once over to the lodge and found the man dancing on top of the tables, using vulgar, profane language. He was obscene, vulgar, loathsome…bragged about his plans for what he would do to those poor frightened girls in great and filthy detail. I felt sick having to be in the same room with such a coarse and vicious man and I felt no small fury that he had subjected those good girls to such obscenity and unpleasantness.

I told him to get off of the table. Which he did, but then he was going to force ME to drink whiskey. I told him that I would not drink any liquor for him, he threatened to pour it down my throat, if he had to, but that he would see to it that I drank whiskey if it was the last thing he did. When he grabbed hold of me, I shoved him away and then he hit me. That was a mistake on his part. I had taken an FBI training course and I knew where and how to hit him to lay him out cold, which I did. His ugly threats of what he intended to do to the girls at the lodge and then to me convinced me that even had he not hit me, he was a man who needed to be hauled off at once. While he lay on the floor out cold, I told the girls to call the sheriff, and they told me that they had already done so. Sure enough, they had called him. The sheriff came into the lodge quite soon after that. He packed the drunk off and placed him in jail in Parowan. I do not know what happened to the man, but when you tangle with the Federal Government, you get a whole lot more trouble than you bargained for.

Another time on patrol I could see that there was a tall young man who had played basketball for Cedar High at one time, drunk as a skunk, and on the side of the road in front of the lodge. There were actually a total of three of the young men drunk, and they decided they were going to force me to drink with them. They announced that one of the reasons they had come up to the monument was to see that they got the ranger up there drunk. The moment they attempted to lay hands on me I used a few choice self-protection techniques I had learned through the FBI training course and soon had all three young men laid out on the road. I sent for the sheriff and he took them down the canyon to Cedar City where they spent time in the jail there.

Working at the Cedar Breaks was not all that safe sometimes. Besides the constant possibility of mountain lions and bears roaming around bothering one, I also had a few close calls with predators of the human variety. One such close call was during bow hunting season. I was on night patrol and noticed that somebody by Spectre Point was spotlighting deer. I drove over there and left my vehicle to go out in the meadow and confront the miscreants.

I knew that there was a big contest on in Las Vegas for bow hunters to enter and win a whopping amount of money as a prize. There were always hunters looking for deer with a huge wide rack of antlers and I suspected that whoever was out there that night at Spectre Point was probably looking for a big rack for that contest.

They came across the big flat by Spectre Point in a pickup truck, there were six men in it, three in the truck bed in back looking for deer with their bows nearby, but UNSTRUNG, and three in the front doing the spotlighting. One of them was a BIG MAN who had once upon a time been one of my young 6th grade school students in Cedar City. As I spoke to the men, he (the big fellow whom I had taught) saw who I was and kept saying to them over and over, “Let’s NOT DO it! Let’s DON’T DO it! I know this man! Let’s NOT DO it!” I checked them for bows that were strung with arrows ready to shoot, but they did not have them strung and no arrows were ready for use when I stopped them. There were no guns loaded with ammunition, either, with them. I was just getting ready to let them go when the Superintendent drove up. I knew he carried a .22 pistol in the back of his belt between his pockets. I told him I had stopped the pickup of men because it was deer season for bow hunters, and I had seen them spotlighting the deer within the boundaries of the park, where it was forbidden to hunt. The men drove away without a fine being levied on them because I felt they had not actually done anything seriously wrong. They had driven across Cedar Breaks LOOKING for deer, but they had not shot at any of them, so I just let them go on their way with an admonition not to get carried away and shoot them on federally protected property. Quite some time later the same Superintendent had an opportunity to speak with the very big one, who had once been my student, when he happened to see him working on a road crew up there. He came back and told me that the fellow had told him that before he and the other five men had left Cedar City, they had all agreed that if a park ranger tried to stop their truck, they would kill him and throw his body over the rim. He had stopped them from killing me, because I had been his teacher and he had loved being in my class, so he would not let them harm me!

Another time there was a close call when a car stopped near Chessman Ridge; I saw a man coming toward me from near the rim. He was carrying a bow without an arrow. He came up slipping through the trees, and I saw and intercepted him. He admitted to me, during the course of our conversation, that he had decided that if a ranger stopped him while he was killing a deer, he would kill the ranger and hide the body up there. NO arrow in his bow and his bow being unstrung made him less dangerous to me, so I was thankful I had not happened upon him when he was armed and dangerous. I could not find that he had successfully shot a deer anywhere in the vicinity, either, so eventually I had to let him go free, despite his assertion that he had planned to kill any ranger that caught him with a deer he had shot.

We often got information from Government and local officers regarding traffic regulations and people breaking traffic rules. I had received notification not to stop a car that was on the way to Page Arizona. It was a car with three men inside that were armed and dangerous and the message said that they would kill anyone who meddled with them. We at the Cedar Breaks did not know if that car was even going to be driving through the park area, but we were told not to stop the car, because we only had one man available at any given time, and there was no backup. The situation was too dangerous to meddle with when a ranger was outnumbered and they were all armed.

I stopped a car that was speeding at 75 miles an hour within the confines of the Park. I had to stop them, they were speeding that fast in a National Park where the maximum speed limit was only 35 miles an hour in the most lenient speed zones, and they were in one of the more heavily trafficked areas, so it was a much lower speed limit there. I wanted them to know that if they ever came back into the park, they needed to be careful and keep to the speed limit, and I explained the several reasons to them when I had stopped them.

They were on a road near where the road turned off to the pump house. There were three men in the car, two in the front and one in the back seat. I explained to the three men that when speeding on Government owned land, the Federal Government prosecutes offenders and that the penalty would be far more severe than on land not owned by the Government. I thought that they would want to be aware of that fact for their own protection in future. In addition to that, I explained to them that it was dangerous to other visitors in the park who were always wandering around looking at the flowers and so forth, and therefore less likely to see a speeding car and also that if a deer or other large animal happened to be in the road, it would not only kill the animal, it could probably kill the occupants of the speeding car, as well.

I treated them with good-natured courtesy, I was just trying to help them see they would do well to slow down; I was not trying to harass them at all. As I turned to leave them, the man in the backseat spoke up; “It’s a G.D. (they used foul language) thing that you didn’t try to arrest anyone, because I had this 357 Magnum trained on your gut the whole time.” With that, they drove off. Then, of course, I realized that they were the very car that I had been warned about, and I felt quite a number of mixed feelings over the whole event. I had not recognized them as the car that had been in the bulletin, I did not realize that it was the same car we were warned to avoid at all costs for our own safety until that comment from the man in the backseat as they drove away. I at once radioed Zion, Bryce, Page Arizona, Kanab and Cedar City and let the officials know I had seen the car and where they were last seen headed. I was very relieved that although I had stopped the car and placed myself in harm’s way, they had not killed me. The car was later stopped by a large group of officers over near Page, Arizona, and the three men were arrested.

There were so many narrow escapes that way that we were eventually told to carry sawed off 12 gauge shotguns and semi-automatic handguns on our person and in our park service vehicles. Our reputation got to Parowan, I know, for I heard that the last few years we did that, people were telling other would be miscreants, “Don’t mess with the Cedar Breaks rangers. They carry guns.” They still carry them to this day.

I felt very protected by the Lord’s hand all of my life, and there were times when I came down that steep and treacherous canyon that I knew of a surety that the Lord had had a hand in my safe arrival back home.
One time I was driving home from Cedar Breaks at evening and a giant rock broke loose from the ledge above me and rolled and bounced down passing JUST OVER the hood of my car, bounding out of sight. It was so large that it blotted out the entire view from my windshield. All I could see was that enormous boulder! If it had not gone right past me without a hit, it would surely have killed me in an instant.

Another night as I drove down the canyon I felt my steering was not responding to my control. I was attempting to make the proper turns and so forth, but it felt as if I was not the one controlling the car at all. I needed to fill up the gas tank by the time I arrived in Cedar City and between that need and the questions I had about my steering, I decided not to drive home at once; instead, I drove directly to the service station to have the car checked. The attendant lifted my steering wheel right off of the steering column! He said, eyes all bugged out, “HOW ON EARTH did you make it down that treacherous canyon without any steering on this car!?” My steering wheel had not even been attached! I could not possibly have steered that car down our steep canyon with its “S” turns and cliff sides! I knew that it was the hands of the Lord that guided my car safely down the canyon and delivered me home alive to my family.

I was giving an evening program and was showing a slide picture of some large puffball mushrooms and after the program, two women from Belgium asked me if I had eaten those puffball mushrooms -and I said no…they told me, “You poor, foolish boy, don’t you know that they taste like Beefsteak when they are fried in butter?!”

I discovered quite an interesting phenomenon between a little marshy place where the water tanks overflowed; there were some big white puffballs there in the marshy area that had formed themselves into a fascinating formation. Three of them were in a group of three together and then there were nine others around them…it looked for all the world to me like a representation of the three main patriarchs or perhaps the “presidency” or head of the twelve apostles speaking to the other nine of the twelve. A young man asked me once for a picture of the mushrooms, because he wanted to use it in a talk on his mission, but I have since lost the negative AND the picture.

In the years I stayed at the Breaks at night I often would have to bring people to town, because they could not seem to breathe at night and would wake up with heart trouble or be gasping for air. Dr. Farnsworth told me one time that up there, there is less oxygen and that your body goes into a rhythm of breathing at night that slows down, so if you slow your breathing in sleep, you cannot get enough air…if you lie down to go to sleep at night in that situation, raising the head of the bed helps the problem quite a bit. I would share that with the campers and it helped most of them quite a bit to deal with the problem. Sometimes they were so frightened by the problem that they would insist on going to see a doctor in Cedar City, so I would drive them down. I would try to lighten their humor driving to the doctor in Cedar City, so I would often tell them to close their eyes when we went around the scariest corners in the steep winding road; that was what I DID! Of course I was joking, but it got a rise out of them

Near the bottom of our Cedar Canyon, there was a steam plant on the river from the canyon, which was used to activate machinery to generate electrical power. Of course we know that a stout electrical shock can cause quite a pain…I used to tease my passengers and say, “Now as we pass the steam plant, you will notice there is electrical power being generated…put your hand on the window and see if you can feel the PANE”…and when they would tell me no, they felt no pain, I would chuckle and remind them that they had had their hands right against the pane! The windowpane! Then they would laugh and say “Oh! DARN you!” and that would take their minds off of their fear and help them to feel a little better.

I remember one time Mary brought our children up to the Breaks and the altitude affected her quite a bit. I had her lie down with the head of the bed raised up a little and she rested for a while as our children went on a little hike.

I was driving home for the breaks one evening and a car came speeding down the highway going the same direction that I was. There were two young men in the car; they were both very drunk and unable to drive straight as they careened wildly down the canyon road. They made it as far as the Tucker coalmine and went off the road on a steep curve there. I could see that the car had rolled and immediately pulled over to help them. One boy I thought at first was completely unconscious, but closer examination revealed that he was dead, not simply unconscious. The other young man was a fellow I had taught in school he said, “Mr. Buhanan, if I have killed my brother, I will kill MYSELF!” He HAD killed his brother, alright. I called the sheriff and ambulance; they arrived at the same time. I turned the case over to the sheriff. The sheriff put the dead boy in the ambulance and they took the body up to the mortuary while on the way to take his injured brother to the hospital.

When I retired from Cedar Breaks they had a community program, with the National Parks Director for all of the Western United States as one speaker, Governor Scott Matheson was one of the speakers, I had to give a speech, somebody sang a song, and I forget now who it was or what the song was, for that matter. There were big write-ups in the newspapers about me and the 25 years of service I had given and some of the things I had done while in that job; apparently nobody else had worked in the Parks system for as long or done as much for them as I had, they told me. There was a great deal made of the fact that I had become “The Olde Ranger” who WAS Cedar Breaks to many, many people; and lots of mention of the fact that numbers of wonderfully flattering letters regularly came to the National Parks System specifically naming me, with gratitude and praise. There was a big steak dinner/banquet, also, where we went to Brian Head and ate a glorious dinner at the restaurant there with the dignitaries who had spoken, other employees who had attended the program, my family and I etc. We had to listen to a good deal of flattery praising me for my service again and the things I had done while I was there…I think we all had quite a glorious time and laughed and talked during it.

There were some letters read from people who had visited the breaks and met me there, learned that I was retiring and wrote letters mentioning meeting me, things that I had taught them, how much they appreciated me and the work I had done to make the Breaks such a special experience for them. One letter arrived from Belgium, another couple of letters from two different women in Norway, and another letter from some other country, but most letters were from areas of the United States. I saved them because they were special to me.

I would like to mention that I deeply appreciated my dear wife Mary for carrying on at home, for her many summers of devoted care given to our children while I was away from home up in the canyon working on weekdays. Most Sundays were taken up with church work and weekdays were taken up working at earning a living for the family, so she had a big responsibility at home and I was grateful too, that we had Reid and Wanda next door, Inez just a house away from ours, Ted and LaVerle across the street and Mary’s Aunt Jemima (“Mima”) Hamilton across the street so that she had a good number of loving, supportive people who could be relied upon to help her if she needed any help. Inez, Wanda and Reid were especially helpful.

There was an article written about my retirement from Cedar Breaks and placed in the Deseret News by Afton LeFevre. It featured a close up portrait of me in uniform and the caption above the title of the article read, ‘Mr. Cedar Breaks’

’Mr. Cedar Breaks’
“Park ranger notes 25 years by Afton LeFevre, Deseret News correspondent
Cedar Breaks National Monument, Iron County-Morris Buhanan, affectionately known as “Mr. Cedar Breaks,” a name he has earned, for his dedicated service as a ranger-naturalist, has served the national monument for 25 years. He was honored recently by park personnel for his long-time service to the public.

He recalls that once during the filming of a wildlife film, two tame wolves got loose, causing quite a stir, and efforts were made to recapture them. Finally, someone saw the wolves near Brian Head and, thinking they were wild, shot them.

“Once a 2-year-old wild black bear tried to get into the ranger’s cabin,” Buhanan said, “and another time a mother bear and her cub wandered through the park.”

Buhanan can tell many anecdotes and stories about the national monument and the interesting people who have visited there, and his love for the area is evident as he discusses the majestic beauty of the Breaks.

The ranger’s office at the visitor center overlooks the vermilion sandstone pinnacles and deep gorges of Cedar Breaks. Buhanan said, “I love the beauty of the Breaks, and the colors and shapes. Forty seven shades of color are present in the amphitheater of the Breaks,” he said, “the intensity of the color depends on the amount of moisture in the air and the movement of the sun. The more moisture, the darker the color.”

Buhanan has prepared an itemized study of the flowers and animals that exist within the park’s boundaries. He has listed 250 varieties of flowers, 90 kinds of species of birds, 28 kinds of mammals. He has made a collection of insects, but finds it impossible to collect a sample of every kind of insect in the area. He has seen cougars, coyotes, mule deer, bobcats and bears, as well as many smaller mammals, such as the grey fox, squirrel, chipmunk and porcupine.

He has co-authored a book entitled “Living Color,” which is about flowers found within the park. Others who worked with him on the book were Dr. Hale Buchanan, a botanist from Weber State College, and J. L. Crawford, a naturalist from Zion Park.

Photographs and information he has compiled are often used as material presented during the evening nature programs held for visitors at the monument.

Buhanan said he has met interesting people from all over the world, from congressmen to movie and television personalities. He recalls John Wayne as friendly, good natured and down-to-earth. He enjoyed meeting James Arness and other cast members from the “Gunsmoke” T.V. series. Just recently, the movie “Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again,” was filmed with the Monument.

Looking back over the years, Buhanan said the best thing that has happened is paving and widening the road through the monument and the saddest thing was the removal of the lovely lodge that once provided jobs for college students and food, lodging and good stories and company for visitors.

Buhanan taught school in the Iron County School District for 42 years, and has served as a ranger-naturalist during the summer months. He retired from teaching two years ago, but continues to serve as a ranger and enjoys working in such beautiful surroundings and meeting people.

He and his wife, Mary, live in Cedar City. Their five children are all grown with families of their own.”

One article my daughter Nancy still has saved that appeared in the Color Country Spectrum on Sunday, September 16th, 1979 was written by Rob Moore, a Spectrum staff writer. His article is as follows;

“…Morris Buhanan will spend the winter finishing some rooms in the basement and cataloging his slides. He’s accumulated a lot of those over 25 years. Many of them have been taken at Cedar Breaks. Really, they have been of various facets of Cedar Breaks.

“Oh,…thousands,” said the naturalist with a smile.
So much for Cedar Breaks being just another big hole in the ground.

One has to assume it was a suburban tourist family that Buhanan stopped dead in their tracks one day.

“It was a family of four and they came in and walked over to the window. They looked out and said, ‘Oh, very nice.” And then walked back out.” He said.

“That’s the fourth one today,” either the mother or father had said.

“Then,” Buhanan recalled, “I asked them, ‘what did you see?”
The family’s visit lasted at least another hour, while Buhanan performed his stock and trade. It is one he has plied for the past 25 summers as seasonal interpreter at the national monument. What is a seasonal interpreter?

“He interprets the area from the standpoint of the visitor’s center,” said Buhanan. It also includes lectures and guiding walks on the trails along the rim.

Inside the center are displays of artifacts Buhanan has gathered over the years, including stuffed animals that were found dead in the highway, captured butterflies, pressed flowers, wood samples from trees…and of course, pictures. He is considering donating much of it to the Park Service after retirement.

Buhanan was honored last month for his 25 years. Barring something unforeseen, he’ll be back at the visitor’s center when it opens again in June.

All that time at Cedar Breaks has been an extension of what he had done for 42 years in Cedar City-teach.

His real avocation is photography, something he has done even longer. It has produced a very meaningful fruit; a book entitled Flowers of Cedar Breaks.

Buhanan and photographer J.C. Crawford recorded the subject matter for the colorful, handsome volume written by Weber State College Professor Hayle Buchanan. A follow-up edition by the same trio is due out anytime, he (Buhanan) said.

The book is used intensively by botany students at Southern Utah State College.

Buhanan has had the fortune of spending a great deal of his life around Utah’s beautiful landscapes. He was born in Fremont, Wayne County, and spent his growing years at what is now Capital Reef National Park.

His family migrated to Beaver, and Buhanan eventually ended up in Cedar City, a student at the Branch Agricultural College, now SUSC [note from daughter Nancy, added to this in 2004; the college is now SUU, having reached University status] Buhanan had a teaching job in Cedar City lined up before graduation.

He has taught science and about every other subject except music and art, at the old West Elementary school and the North Elementary school.

In the process he became a self-taught naturalist. That helped him land a job with the Park Service when he visited Cedar Breaks one summer to do some power company maintenance work.

“When I got up here I found no evening programs or interpretation of any kind.” At the time, the national monument had the facilities of a full-fledged national park, with a lodge and visitor’s cabins.

Buhanan occasionally lectured visitors about nature in the park. “When the superintendent saw that, he had me meet the buses.” Joining the Park Service followed.

Changes at Cedar Breaks over the years have been good and bad. When Buhanan started, the access road was dirt. After it was paved in 1966 visitation boomed.

In 1973, though, the lodge and cabin accommodations were closed. “That was quite a blow to traffic,” said Buhanan.

The Park Service found that the cost of fire insurance outweighed the benefit of having the accommodations open for the area’s short season, from Memorial Day until the day after Labor Day, he said. This year the visitor’s center stayed open until Saturday.

The largest recorded amount of snowfall at the national monument is 364 inches in 1968. The visitor’s center opened June 13 that year, said Buhanan.

This year we have equaled or maybe even surpassed that” he said.
The meals at the lodge he remembers as excellent. “Their specialty was fried chicken, potatoes and gravy and strawberry shortcake, served family style.”

Faces of some visitors have become familiar over the years.
”One man has been here for seven years in a row and said he never grows tired of the place.” The naturalist said.

A couple from Parowan camps for a few weeks each summer. “They’re almost like family,” he said.

Buhanan expressed his enjoyment of teaching, both at the park and in the school. Of his school system job he said, “I wasn’t ready to retire.”

Even if they (visitors) don’t ask questions, you can always tell them things about the park.

”Being behind the desk is the least valuable part of the job. You need to be out mingling in the area and with the people,” said the naturalist.

“I go out on the trails sometimes and talk with them. Some have a real concern about the parks and why they’re set aside.”
(…the rest of the above article is unavailable for reproducing here.) -Note from daughter Nancy, Dad has been widely -even universally- acknowledged as knowing more about Cedar Breaks National Monument than any other person who has lived. He put his time there to good use and filled each day with valuable knowledge he could use to benefit and enrich the park and the public.

1960 - 1970

One bitter cold, very stormy night, we heard a noise at our front door as if an animal was trying to get our attention from the confines of our front porch. Nancy opened up the door and found a cute little orangey gold and white dog there on the porch coaxing to come in with us out of the storm. He had pleading soft brown eyes, but very much like precious gems, and such a short coat and tiny, delicate feet that we knew he was desperately cold out there. The children fell in love with him instantly and pleaded to be allowed to let the little fellow in. We gave him some nice hot food for his little tummy, to warm him up a bit, and he was very grateful for it. He soon made friends with everyone in the family, and although we did try for six months or so to find his owners, somehow or other he never left us again until his untimely death a year and a half later. He was such a cute little pixie of a dog that we named him, “Pixie,” and he soon became a favorite of the whole family. We all loved him, with all of our hearts. Coming home with him there to welcome us ecstatically meant he was on his hind legs dancing and cavorting, vocally welcoming us with happy little yips and squeals and little moans of purest joy… he was utterly loyal, obedient, intelligent, kind, forgiving…a pure treasure; a pet well worth keeping.

Pixie liked everyone he met, except for one mailman who delivered our mail. That particular mailman Pixie LOATHED and he would come shooting around the corner from wherever he was at in the house to bark furiously at that mailman as soon as he heard him rounding the bend to drive or walk down our street! We always thought that Pixie had a sense of goodness…that mailman used to hold our mail up to the light and read as much as he could of it before
delivering it! He would check- to see how much money was coming to us in the cards or paychecks he was delivering! He was a man with a creepy feel and smell around him and Pixie was not the only one in the family who was not particularly fond of the man.

One night Pixie did not beg to come in as soon as he typically would do after going outside to relieve himself for the night. We waited and worried and called but to no avail. Eventually, we felt we would surely jump out of our skins with the agonized searching and not finding him and then worrying, hoping and waiting blessedly, when we felt we could not stand another second of worry, he made his presence known by whimpering on the porch. He had been shot! The poor little fellow was limping badly and bloodied from head to tail. He was blinded by blood, peppered with a thousand, thousand lead pellets, one eye had been shot, and we knew he would die within the hour without medical attention immediately. We felt he must have found his way home just by smell or by memory, somehow, because he could not see to find his way and come home.

We brought him into the house and the children called the veterinarian, but the vet was out of town and could not help us for several days. We placed some soft clean towels on top of the kitchen table, and then put the little dog carefully on the soft clean towels. I gave Pixie a quick examination, and decided that first of all we needed to clean off some of the blood so that I could see to do more to help him. He looked as though he had been shot by a shotgun. I needed to get those lead pellets out of his little body as quickly as possible. I found the scalpel I used for taxidermy was too rounded to be much help, but my pocketknife had a good sharp point. I sharpened it even more and then sterilized it and used that pocketknife to dig into the poor little fellow’s flesh so I could surgically extract as many of the lead pellets as possible. Even one of them of left in there would cause death, because lead would cause blood poisoning which would kill even if it were in a harmless spot on his body -and as tiny as these pellets were, they were very difficult to spot sometimes.

Little pixie seemed to understand that I was trying to help him. He quivered with agony, but neither a growl nor a snap did he make. He looked up at where I was with those big pleading, bloodied eyes full of trust. He lay there as still and quiet as the grave as I dug those pellets out of his poor, pain ridden little body. Once in a while I would hear a slight wince or whimper, but he never budged nor did he snap at me as I dug painfully at those deadly lead filled punctures. I dug out as many as I could get but I could not get anywhere near all of them, not by any stretch of imagination.

Our whole family was devastated and heartbroken! We loved him with all of our hearts, every one of us. We did not want to lose our dear Pixie and we knew, every one of us, that the possibility of him surviving even that night into the next morning was not very good. He was so badly injured that I do not think any of us believed we would ever see him alive again after we went to bed. Not as badly as he was injured. We could not help shedding tears and as we wept for the imminent loss of our dear pet, we felt we had to turn to the Master Healer in his behalf and share our feelings about him and the situation.

We gathered around our little patient on the table in a circle of love holding one another so as not to break the circle. I offered the prayer for our whole family. I thanked the Lord for sending Pixie to us to enrich our lives and share his love with us; I expressed our love for the little dog and told the Lord how dearly we loved it and how very much Pixie meant to us. I told the Lord that we knew He could do all things, that for Him NOTHING was impossible and I told Him that we had done all we could to save the life of our pet, that no other help was available to us here on Earth because the Veterinarian was out of town and there was no one else to turn to save the dog’s life -if it were possible to do so with such serious injury. I pleaded with him to have mercy upon our little dog and told Him we felt Pixie was a good dog and had done nothing wrong. I expressed to Him things that we all loved about our dog and admired about him, things we were grateful for about him. I left the life of our sweet little dog in the hands of our God and Great Physician and asked merely that if He was willing, would He please spare Pixie’s life, heal him, and let us enjoy his presence in our home in the future. Then I closed my prayer.

After that, we realized we could not help any more that night, so we found a box and filled it with still more clean, soft towels and carefully stretched our little friend out in the box, then carried the box to our back porch landing for him to rest for the night undisturbed. All of us went to bed that night with a prayer in our hearts and great fear about what we might find the next morning.

The next morning, Nancy was the first one up and she ran to check on him. Bonnie heard her, and bolted down the hallway to be there with her when she opened up that back porch landing door for the first time that morning. To their astonishment and wonder, Pixie bounded out of his box and danced ecstatically all around them in the kitchen squealing happily and trying for all the world to tell them what had happened to him that night!! He had been put to rest the night before covered in blood all over, still, for he was bleeding everywhere he had been shot as well as where I had been cutting to get shot out of him. There was not a trace of blood on him, though. There were no injuries at all! His skin was clean and glowing with health. He could see as well as ever, and his eyes were uninjured altogether! Astonishingly, there was no trace of shot anywhere on or in him, though we all knew there were still hundreds of deadly lead pellets still in him when we laid him down the night before. He was bouncing with sheer joy and full health and strength. God had healed him, UTTERLY and COMPLETELY! If we had not had the evidence of bloodied towels and surgical mess still on the table, we would have thought we dreamt the whole ordeal! It was a wondrous, miraculous testimony to us of the efficacy of prayer, the power of our merciful God and His love and compassion. None of us ever forgot it.

Pixie’s spirit came back to Nancy and to Bonnie after his death a year later and went first to Nancy in her room, where he licked her face and arms and hands lavishly and ecstatically and loved her thoroughly and then to Bonnie while Nancy dressed and then flew downstairs to tell her that she had just seen their dear departed pet. When Nancy came whooping into Bonnie’s room to tell her about the joyous experience of seeing and petting little Pixie again, Bonnie awoke with tears of joy and a smile on her face and announced that he had only just been there with HER and been licking her hand…and, showing Nancy the hand he had been licking, the girls both saw and then, touching, felt that Bonnie’s hand was still quite wet and sticky with what felt like saliva! They were thrilled to think that he had loved them enough to come after his death and show them he still loved them and bid them goodbye.

Our family enjoyed a large number of trips together over the years. We made it a point to take every opportunity to discover and explore together and we had some really wonderful times spent in one another’s company going places and seeing new things, experiencing new things. We visited EVERY national park and monument in Utah, delighting in the history as well as the beauty of them, but we also took trips outside of Utah; to places like Yellowstone National Park, Mesa Verde National Park, Canyonlands National Park, Disneyland and Disneyworld, Universal Studios, Sea World, Knott’s Berry Farm, numerous other places in the California area, we went to beaches here and there and to Lehman Caves in Nevada, Our family loved trips in one another’s company so much! As often as not, Mary’s sister Inez Cox went with us, too. She was probably with us as part of our family on nearly all those trips.

I remember a trip that Mary and I took together to Florida. We flew there on our first plane ride to see Dale and Joni and their children. Mary was afraid on the plane, fearful that if we did not crash, we would be highjacked to Cuba and never see our home and family again. On the way to Florida, we had to stop at Houston, Texas. We had to change planes there. As it happened our mutual friend, Marie Lyman, was living in Houston just a few blocks from the airport. She brought her 2 children and visited with us at the airport while we waited for our plane. She had been a Cox family favorite because she lived near the college and so did they for years. (Ray Lyman was agriculture teacher at the college and Esther, his wife, was a beautiful singer who became well acquainted with Mary, Reid, Inez, and Ted. Ray moved to Logan on a job transfer and the family surely missed the family after they had left.)

We had called Marie and told her we would be at the airport for an hour or so and we SO enjoyed seeing her again at long last, getting to visit at length with her and meeting her children!

When our new plane arrived, there were 216 of us on board and we flew over the Gulf of Mexico, where we could see from our 36,000 feet that the ships below us looked just tiny. We were thrilled being able to fly THROUGH the clouds and see them from above! While we flew through them, Mary quipped, “Well, Morris…this is ONE day when our heads are in the clouds!” and I quipped back, “Well, my head has been in the clouds since I first met you!”

During our visit in Florida, Dale took us for a boat ride along the Banana River, where we went to a little island in the river and saw dolphins and a Manatee and even a black and a green Mamba snake, deadly snakes. Dale had a pistol strapped to his belt and said that if one of them tipped over our boat he would use it to shoot it. That worried Mary a great deal as she was fearful of the boat tipping over the entire time we were in it. (Of course, she always WAS fearful of the whole “ordeal” of being in any boat on the water, whatever the circumstance we were in; she was always convinced we would die in the water as a result of boat rides)

Dale took us out for dinner and we ate Pompano, a very delicious type of fish. Mary and I had never tasted the many kinds of seafood that Dale ordered for us and it was a very delicious dinner and a fun experience to do that.

In the foothills around Cedar City, apparently there once were camping grounds for Indians. Mary and I and the children frequently took little hikes to hunt for arrowheads. The hills around Hamilton’s Fort were especially fruitful hunting grounds for finding arrowheads. We found a number of them there and in the hills around Parowan we also found rewarding areas for hunting them around Summit. I found some larger ones that I believe to be spear points on Pine Valley Mountain. They ranged from 5 to 6 1/2 inches for the spear points to perhaps just a ½ for the smaller ones. I imagine those were either ornamental ones or more probably used for birds and waterfowl. I’ve given my collection to Nancy.

My Father died October 23, 1963 and Mother died February 3, 1985. I recall being in the temple with Mary when both of them passed over. My father died just before my birthday in 1963 and it felt as though NOTHING could ease my grief over his death. My birthday was the most unhappy one I can remember having up to that time, because of his death and funeral being at the same general time. Dad was so weak before his passing that he could not even speak as loud as a small whisper. The hospital knew he was dying soon and gave him “physics” to clean him out before he died. That weakened him even more, bless his tired old heart. He was a good father to me and as good a man as ever lived, I believe.

Never heard a cross word from my father but once -when I had sassed my mother! To be honest, I do not even know if he said a cross word to me then, either, but he was surely displeased to think his son had been disrespectful to his mother. She could really chew a person out thoroughly when she wanted to, and that day she really wanted to chew me out…but I do not remember why. I remember feeling that mother was wrong. Dad never did lose his temper though…perhaps losing his temper with that bull that threatened my mother’s life was the only real time I can remember him being angry. He was a temperate, hard working, skilled man. He had a special talent for doing whatever he wanted to do. He expected a great deal of me, far more than most fathers would expect of a son no matter how intelligent or hardworking he might be. I always lived up to whatever he wanted of me, too, because I felt if he was depending on me and trusted me to accomplish a thing; -no matter how impossible it was for me- I could not bear to let him down. He never actually told me that he loved me, but I felt that he probably did genuinely love me. I wanted to hear it, of course, I needed to hear it…but I never did. It was a good thing that I could sense that he felt love for me. He never did tell me that he was proud of me, either, but I hoped and felt that he was.

My dear father was one of the gentlest, kindliest men imaginable. He was outside all night and day for a full week when the “Pink Cloud” of radioactive fallout from atomic testing passed over and several hundreds of sheep he was with died, overnight. He was in ill health ever after but did not succumb to cancer until at long last he died at 89 years of age and riddled with cancer. Good living and knowledge of herbs helped him live far longer than most fallout victims. He never went grey! He was about 80 years old in the photo of himself with my mother and my daughter Nancy, which is in this book. He was so close to the Spirit he could prophesy of things that were going to happen to our families. He was a remarkable man, and his intuition was uncanny. He would often tell of events that were going to happen before they did, sometimes as far before as 16 years before the events. He always carried a stone in his pocket that he called his seer stone. He was never without it. Its physical description perfectly fits that of another, more fabled, stone- which actually was a true seer’s stone, for if you read descriptions of the stone Joseph Smith had, it perfectly fits my father’s stone. I was given the stone as a personal effect to remember him by after he had passed away. It is still in my family, for I gave it to Nancy because she was intuitive, like him, and I thought she ought to have it.

Dad was a GOOD man. Incredibly well versed in the medicinal field; able to identify, and treat correctly, illnesses that even stumped doctors sometimes. He was also incredibly well versed in the properties of anything that fit the plant category and a number of other ingredients used for medicinal purposes. His "sticky gum salve" was legendary at our house. He had the hands of a healer. He was also a mineralogist; he really knew his rocks and minerals.

Mother was a hardworking woman. She did not waste time complimenting or praising any of her children, nor can I ever remember her telling me that she loved me. I cannot remember either of my parents telling me that they were proud of me or loved me, but I sure did work my heart out for them to support them and I loved them both with all of my heart. I suspect that in my mother’s case, there simply had been neither praise nor affection given to her and it was not part of her nature. She was much like my Grandfather Pendleton in her disposition. She could be very critical and scathing in her criticism. My mother was a wonderful cook! She could accomplish in a fraction of time what three other people would not be able to accomplish in the same amount of time. We grew up knowing our mother was an excellent cook and housekeeper. She loved parties and dances and was an especially good dancer. While I was still in my second year of college, Mother moved to Cedar City and worked in the school system as the head of the lunch workers. She ran a clean, scrumptious kitchen with food that everyone wanted seconds and thirds of because they loved it.

Nothing ever came up missing or disappeared from her kitchen, she kept it as organized as an army colonel might his troops.

She thought at one time that she wanted to buy a house in Cedar City and wanted me to help pay for it. I could not pay as much as I would have liked to be able to do and still maintain my family of a wife and several children, so that idea never came to pass.

My father taught me gardening when I was just a boy and I learned, firsthand, the principles of the law of the harvest; that you really do reap what you sow, and you reap according as you have cared for your stewardship. I learned a lot about gardening when I was in the sixth grade.

(That was the summer of the quantities of fruit and vegetables we were able to dry and preserve. There was a log cabin nearby and we put a heater in it and built shelves around the sides of the cabin’s walls. We put special shelves to dry fruit on because we had so much fruit and did not want to waste a single bit of it. We dried 44 candy buckets -14 inches deep by 14 inches diameter- of all kinds of dried fruits, prunes, apricots, peaches, apples, pears, cherries, plums etc. Cherries were not as successful as the other fruits were, particularly the prunes.)

I had extensive experience growing up and doing large scale gardening so when we had our own little plot of ground I immediately set about raising a garden for my family. Each fall I would loosen the soil by roto-tilling or tilling and I would always till the season’s leaves and other decomposable organic debris into the soil. It would lie there fallow over the winter months and in the spring I would again till the soil to loosen it and allow oxygen to permeate the soil, warm it up and provide easy loose soil for tender roots to penetrate. I fertilized and mulched using dung and autumn leaves, sometimes I would buy a commercial fertilizer, too. We got frost late in spring each year. My garden was generally planted in June, not earlier, and it inevitably would catch up to and surpass very quickly the gardens that my neighbors planted much earlier-to the chagrin and frustration of a few of them!

I felt that if I was always generous with my neighbors, Heavenly Father would be generous with me. It worked out that way. I was always blessed with abundant crops each year. The Lord was very good to me. I was able to feed not only my own dear family but also Inez, Mima, Reid and his family and most of my neighbors’ and friends’ families as well. That way I could share, and people liked that, and I had the pleasure of knowing that my garden produce would never go to waste. Ten families ate all winter from my garden each year. One year I remember I put up 256 pints of green beans. I found that onions, carrots, radishes and peas would take a lot of frost, so they were usually the first crops I planted.

I had such good luck with Asparagus and Sage that people from Alaska to Texas would ask me for sage and asparagus and the seeds for them from my garden. One year I had (this is truth, as God is my witness- ask my children!) several four inch circumference asparagus spears and there was even one asparagus spear that was a full six inches around in circumference! Unbelievably, they were just as wonderful and tender to eat as any tiny baby asparagus would be, too!
I tried to have a plentiful variety of vegetables in my garden; I grew parsnips, turnips, corn, beans, radishes, peas, tomatoes, swiss chard, brussels sprouts, carrots, beets, strawberries, raspberries, several varieties of winter and summer squash, onions, cabbage, cantaloupe, watermelon and broccoli.
I loved so much having the frequent company of my children and grandchildren as I was out working in the garden each summer. I taught each of them how to till, how to plant corn and peas, beans, carrots and beets, etc. and how to carefully tend the little plants as they were beginning to come up. I enjoyed seeing the delight in their faces as they would pick a fresh carrot, turnip or radish from the ground and taste it or try eating a tomato or a pod full of peas just freshly picked! Oh my, that was fun for them! It was fun for ME, too, seeing the joy expressed in their faces. I used to laugh at the way that they would eat most of the peas they were helping shell at a pea shelling “party” or gobble up the leftover corn on the cobs as we would freeze and can our garden produce! It was fun working with the grandchildren as we harvested the peas or beans or whatever we were doing. Mary would help me as I worked in the rose garden, but she did not help me in the garden much at all. She loved working together with me in the rose garden, though. We loved working together working at doing dishes or bottling or freezing fruit and vegetables. We had a lot of Iris plants and she loved working in those when I was out doing the vegetable gardening.

I felt that my children needed to see as many beauty spots in our great country as possible so I tried to take them to as many parks and national monuments in the west as possible. We did enjoy a great many of them. We took one outstanding trip to Yellowstone National Park which we all loved dearly, but which Phyllis was excluded from because of her employment with the National Parks System at Bryce Canyon as a Reservations Clerk. The rest of us had a glorious time at Yellowstone, and we all stayed in a log cabin there, where at nights we would gather around the beds and giggle as we all wrote letters full of laughs and adventure to Phyllis at Bryce.

We had fun when a quite large half grown black bear cub we nicknamed Lil’ Moocher came up to our car and coaxed us for treats. He charmed us all with his tricks and antics and the way he poked his head in our car…which Mary was MOST frantic about, and the rest of us delighted in. We later wrote that we had to peel her fingers out of the roof of the car, where she had clutched it in her panic. We saw a number of bears there, moose and elk and lots of other wildlife, which we all loved seeing, but Lil’ Moocher stole our hearts and we never forgot him. All of us loved the adventures with the geysers and mud pots and other wonderful natural wonders there. Yellowstone was one trip we loved above many others.
Another outstanding trip was one where Mary and I and our daughter Bonnie went with our daughter Nancy and her husband Daniel and our daughter Phyllis and her husband Dave and their children to Disneyland to compensate Bonnie for having to miss her senior class trip there, because she had contracted Diabetes Mellitus and could not go with her High School class. Mary and Nancy were so awed by the Main Street Electrical Parade there that they got teary-eyed as they stood there overwhelmed with wonder and delight.

We all remembered the joy of that trip so much that about six years after Mary’s death, we went to Disneyworld in Florida together; myself, Nancy and Dan Bauer and daughter Bonnie Brooke, Bonnie and Brian Terry and their children, Shannon, Christian and Neil, and also Phyllis and Dave Topham. We went enmasse wearing matching blue/green shirts to help us locate one another in the crowds and found that the staff of Disneyworld were wonderful about working things so that our whole family group could stay together in all of the attractions even without us asking for special treatment. We went with a few wheelchairs and discovered that put us at the front of every queue automatically, too, so that was another bonus, and we got to see and experience a very great deal more than the average visitors to the park got to do.

We especially loved the marvelous experiences and things to learn about in the Epcot Center, there.

Two other marvelous trips were the Grand Canyon trip and one to Canyonlands National Park. The latter trip was such a terrifying adventure that we were on pins and needles the whole trip, but we could hardly wait to go back! All the time we were there we kept saying in a breathless voice, “Ohhhhh, I am so GLAD our children are not here, they could be KILLED!” and then it would be, “Ohhhhh, if ONLY our CHILDREN could be here, TOO!” because it was so wonderful and beautiful, very exciting! Reid had to back up at one place and I guided him with “a little this way, a little that way…” (pointing with my thumbs)…then I teased him and pointed with both thumbs at the same time, but both pointing in opposite directions, and he laughed! We slept on heart stopping cliffs and rocks and drove up steep cliffs where no roads had been made. We hiked the most dangerous country in the west…it was glorious and terrifying and incredibly wonderful.
1970 - 1980

Even careers we love come to a slow end, most of the time. I loved teaching, and had I taught school for 42 years when it happened that my retirement date loomed up. I was slated to retire in 1975. The district knew this and they were hunting for a good replacement for me. They could not find one and asked me to stay on for another two years past my 65th birthday and the scheduled retirement date. Because of that, I retired from teaching in 1977, two years after I ought to have retired. Because I had to teach longer, I was denied –by the IRS- any retirement money for the entire first year I was actually retired from teaching. This was a penalty against me for teaching longer than I strictly needed to and should have, according to them. I was thankful that I had been prudent with money before such a blow was dealt to me, because I had a little money we could live on despite their actions against me. I worked at odd jobs to keep a little money coming in, because you cannot live on next to nothing.

I retired along with Orma Wood and our respective room mothers made each of us a nice big cake that could be cut into 30-40 pieces and shared with our students, but the faculty and school board wanted to give us a banquet. They gave us a banquet and issued us a little school bell like those which called us in for our lessons when I was a boy.

That would not have been a problem, but the fact was that my good sister in law, Inez Cox, had passed away suddenly at that same time and her body was lying at the mortuary for the townspeople to view and bid a final farewell to before her funeral and, of course, both Mary and I were supposed to be there to be in the receiving line with the mourners; yet the school board was honoring me at that retirement banquet, and I had to be there, too. I went, but it was a frustration to me, for I felt I needed to be with the family at the mortuary.

The School Board gave a little tribute to me and some background about me and what people thought of me and various things I had accomplished etc., and then they presented me with that bell. They also gave me the lapidary setup that I had bought and given to the school for the children’s use out of my money and the popcorn money. I had to leave the banquet to go to the mortuary to be in the line of mourners, and I tried to leave them with a cheery sounding joke, so I quipped something like, “Well, now that my career has died, appropriately enough, I am heading to the mortuary to stand in the line of mourners….”

During 1983 or 1984 when the kids all came home for Thanksgiving Dinner with us, we noticed that Mary was moving very, VERY slowly on a video movie we had of her cutting pies for the dinner. She made the comment, when she saw herself on the televised videotape, that she was surprised to see she was so slow in reality when she had felt she was moving perfectly normally. It was not long after that when we had to take her to the hospital for another health concern and a doctor asked her how long she had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Mary was surprised at such a bald question and assured him that she did not have Parkinson’s Disease…and he said, “Oh, YES YOU DO.” …and, of course he was correct. Mary did have Parkinson’s disease. Each year Mary’s Parkinson’s disease grew worse and worse. Her abilities diminished week by week until, after three years, she was unable to do things for herself any longer and was soon bedfast.

During that time I was her sole caregiver.

She was probably the most sweet, loving and kind patient that ever existed. She never complained. The only time I ever heard Mary complain was when I bought some toddler food from Smith’s grocery store. I thought it would be a welcome change for her, rather than me grinding up or whipping up her food. I fed it to her, and she promptly said, “YUCK! No wonder kids won’t eat this stuff!” I tried it, then, to see what on earth was wrong with it, and it WAS yucky! After that, whenever I would try a new food with her, I would assure her, with a twinkle and a smile, “This is (whatever food it might be) -but it’s not ‘yucky!’”, and we both would laugh! It became a fun little game for us.

She was the sweetest invalid I have ever known. She never complained about her care. (Dad never gave her reason to complain, he was superhuman in her healthcare and nothing was too nice or too good for her, nothing was too hard for him, nothing was too much, nothing too unreasonable to expect of him. He loved her so much that he made every moment a special gift of love, just for her. He would make little games for her out of simple tasks or give her a dishtowel and then help her into the kitchen to sit comfortably so that she would feel she was still a valuable asset, still able to be useful and “help him” in those early years of her illness. Helping her up out of her chair to get in the walker and go to the restroom, -he had to take her there VERY often, and it was often too late when they got there- while she was still able to do that, he would say, “Come, Fair One!” and once on the way, knowing how difficult it was for her, he would quip “There we go! Now we are on the freeway we can really move! Watch that turn!”

He would often average only as much as 4 ½ hours of sleep in 5 days and nights, because her care was so strenuous and so demanding on his resources. I once suggested he call his friend Clemont Adams to come and give him a Priesthood blessing, because he was too ill and exhausted himself -with his bad heart problems- to keep up such a superhuman pace. He only asked that Clemont ask the Lord to bless him with more strength, so that he could take better care of his beloved Mary. The blessing helped him tremendously! From that time on, he really did have considerably more strength. He was so amazing that when we children would come home to help out, we found that it took three or four strong men and two good women to do what he had been doing all alone. AND, it always took the rest of us a good month after being back in our own homes to recuperate normal strength after helping out and doing only about half of his normal work down there! –Nancy Buhanan Bauer-)

It just about broke my heart every time I had to take her to the bathroom or something like that. I knew how embarrassing it was for HER, that this was a horrible thing for her to have to cope with. She was surely a good sport about it all, though.

She tried to make it as easy for me taking care of her constantly as she could, but bless her heart, she could really do very little that way. I tried to make it as pleasant for her as I possibly could, so I invented little games we could play that would make our days pass quicker and make the days easier and more happy for her. I would get her in the wheelchair and wheel her in to help dry breakfast dishes and she would dry one and put it on the counter. We would make a game out of emptying the light waste baskets and I did that by putting her into her wheelchair and wheeling her around to help her help me with the cleaning in the house. She felt good about herself even being able to help that much.

We took the Reader’s Digest and she always wanted me to read to her out of the scriptures and the Reader’s Digest magazines. She loved the jokes and the articles, the Book of Mormon and other precious scriptures, interesting newspaper articles, and other things of that nature. She was always interested in anything I would read to her. She had macular degeneration and had gone mostly blind, so she could not read those things for herself.

Sometimes she would want to watch a movie, and I would turn one on for her, but she usually would go to sleep after about five minutes and her interest span became quite short. She loved The Parent Trap, Pollyanna, Christmas in Connecticut, The Magnificent Obsession, Pride and Prejudice, Quality Street, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Naughty Marietta, New Moon, The Chocolate Soldier, Sound of Music, Carousel, South Pacific, …she loved musical comedies, romances and mysteries. IF they contained Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy or Deanna Durbin, then she enjoyed them even more.

On the Sabbath day, we would watch the BYU station on television and that way we could see and “be part of” Sacrament meetings on the air and other wonderful church programs. Our ward often sent the deacons to our home on the Sabbath for Mary and I to be able to partake of the Sacrament, because neither of us could attend our ward meetings with her as ill as she was and me giving her every second of my life for her care giving. She loved LDS Gospel stories and would often ask me to read the Ensign and the scriptures to her. She liked me to sing to her and she enjoyed singing duets with me when she was still able to do that.

I took the best care I could of her. For almost nine years she was really DOWN and needed total care, and I did the best that I could do. I loved her so very much! I still DO love her, with all of my heart and soul. We were blessed to be able to celebrate 50 Golden Years with one another as husband and wife! Our children and their families came from all over and we had a lovely banquet together then met at Bonnie’s and Brian’s house for a lovely program. The grandchildren sang “…There Is Someone Special In My Life, Someone I Will Love Eternally” to us.

Nancy and Bonnie insisted Mary had to wear our daughter Bonnie’s bridal veil, which Nancy had sewn golden sequins on, and I had to wear a shining golden top hat she had bought for the occasion. I had to tell something about our life of fifty years together. I described all about our meeting, about my dreaming about her before meeting her, about our dating and our courtship, etc. and told how very much I loved her. Then Mary and I had to stand by the big fancy wedding cake and feed each other a piece of cake at the very same time! That was funny! We laughed as we attempted it. Then we cut the cake for everybody to have some.

We had the little program videotaped, which was nice, because we could watch it and delight in it all again and again, even years later! Each person present at that little program had to tell something that they remembered about me or Mary or Both of us. Ted recited a poem or two. Phyllis, Nancy and Bonnie also sang a beautiful song. We had a glorious time that night with all of the family gathered around together celebrating, with us, our fifty years of marriage! Wanda made a few remarks about her copying Mary’s idea of Piano Scarves and scarves on the piano bench. LaVerle’s comment was that she did not know how talented the Buhanan and Cox families were until Morris and Mary got married and then she found that they were quite original and quite talented. Christian told things that he remembered about his grandpa… The grandchildren did a little talent show, the twins played violin and piano for it. Dale was busy with his camera taking pictures of the group, so did Nancy and her husband Dan, who recorded it all on videotape for us to watch in the years to come.

One nightmarish day in about 1986, we got a visit from a man who said he had come to appraise our house for the college. Mary said, “Why would you be appraising OUR house for the COLLEGE?!” He replied, somewhat carelessly -or callously- that the college was taking over our whole area of homes to build a big parking lot where they were now standing. She told me, when I got home from Cedar Breaks, about the man’s shocking news and his visit and at first we were sure there must be some sort of mistake, -but we discovered to our horror after looking into the matter, that it was no mistake. The college had made plans to pave our whole area over as a parking lot! We both felt that manner of disclosing the news was the crummiest and most unprofessional, tactless way to notify a person that they were taking their home away from them we could even imagine.

We tried every single thing we could think of to save our beloved home from being yanked away from us and destroyed, so did Reid and all of our other neighbors, but we could not prevail, no matter what we attempted. At last we realized that we truly had no choice but to let them have our home and move to another place. We were not happy about it, because we loved our home and we had built it ourselves, it was a special and hallowed place for us. We had raised our family in it and lived and loved and made it a TRUE HOME for over forty years. We had planned to live there for the rest of our lives…and we did not want to lose it.

The college appraisal came in very low and we were stunned to hear our house was valued at the price he quoted us. I was not satisfied with the low appraisal of the first man, because it was such a low appraisal, so I hired another man to come and appraise the home. HE appraised it at a full $10,000.00 higher than the college’s man had done.

We knew we had to move and Mary was too frail in health by then to look constantly each day for a home, so I began to go looking for a home while she was at home sick. I looked at homes over and over again, every time a home would come up for sale, I would go see the place and try to imagine my wife and me living there. I looked daily and weekly and the weeks and months seemed to fly by as I still could not find a home that we could live in, and our deadline for eviction loomed ever closer. By then all of our children had long since married and most had homes of their own. Sometimes when my children came home to visit they would go house hunting with me. We looked at so very many houses, but still had no real conviction that any home we saw was one that we ought to buy.

I had looked at over 200 houses during that year I hunted for another home for Mary and myself. During that time I saw homes that looked awful but still somehow felt warm and nice, homes that looked fine, but which repelled us and some which gave us the collywobbles just by the bad “feeling” in the house. It did not seem to matter what a home looked like as to what the “feeling” of the house was, and it was that sense of “FEELING” which finally guided me to finding our new home.

At long last, I found one home that I thought might do for us to move into. It had belonged originally to the Forsythe family (and I had taught the father, Mead, and two of their children in school!) it was located on 27 North 1050 West in Cedar City. I found it through an acquaintance who had mentioned to me that the home was for sale. It was the best home I had found, so I took Mary to see it.

It was a five room, red brick home with a finished basement and a separate garage building and sheds. It was a peculiar thing, but when I walked into that house for the very first time, I felt welcomed and at peace in it. It was as though I had walked into my OWN HOME! I liked the way it looked inside and I liked the brick all around it outside, I liked many features of the house, but it was not so much that which sold me on the house as it was that “feeling” I’d had when I walked into it. I took Mary to see the house, we bundled her and her wheelchair into the car and drove there to visit it. I asked Mary, when we were still standing in the kitchen and had not even seen the rest of the house, “well, what do you think of it?” and she replied, “Why Morris, it feels like HOME to me!” We made our offer on the home that day and paid cash for it before moving in, so that, just as before, our home was paid for when we moved in.

We were moving from the 9th ward into the 6th ward and both wards sent people and pickups to help us to move from our house into the newer one. The new ward made us feel so welcomed and proclaimed that they were just thrilled to have such wonderful people move in…the 9th ward said they did not want to have us move out and felt awful about our moving, but they were kind and sent many people to help us move. They moved our household belongings and furniture out faster than we even knew where to put it! Mary’s brothers –especially Reid and Wanda- helped us move- and of course the drivers from the sixth and ninth wards helped us tremendously. With so much willing help, our dreaded move was soon accomplished.

Mary never did recover from the devastating blow of losing our lovely home on 900 West, though.
In the year 1976 England shipped some pretty blue and white Staffordshire English China to the United States to commemorate our Bicentennial year. My daughters all adored those beautiful dishes with their patterns of historical patriotic scenes from American history, and so did my wife and I. When Mary wanted to get some, I readily agreed that we should.

We got what we could find in Cedar City where we lived and then we drove to St. George to look for more of them, so that we could add to our own set and also to the sets of our children in their various homes. After picking and choosing from a wonderfully large selection of them at the Orton store in Saint George, I discovered to my horror that I did not have enough money with me to pay for all of those beautiful dishes and we would have to leave some behind while I drove the 102 miles drive to Cedar City and back to get more money for them.

While we were discussing the subject of my being short on the required cash, Mr. Rodney Orton, who owned the store and had once been a student of mine in the old North Elementary in Cedar City, came up behind me and said, “Mr. Buhanan, YOUR credit is good in this store for up to a half a million dollars. You just go ahead and buy anything that you want; buy them all, if you want to. I will personally finance the amount of your purchase because I know I can trust you. You’re a good man. You have always been an honorable man. I will be glad to cover the cost of anything you want, because I know you have always been a man of integrity and honor.

Well, that touched me deeply. We bought the dishes and then went home and got the rest of the money that would have been owed and drove straight back to the store that very hour with it. I felt so honored that a man would say such a thing of me. I was so glad I had striven to be a man of integrity all my life!
While I am on the subject, dear children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, great, great grandchildren and so on, as well as those who join our family group through marriage, adoption and so on…

I want to leave to you a very important message; I want all of you to live and keep the commandments of God for I have a strong, firm, fervent testimony of the truthfulness of the gospel of Jesus Christ and of the literal resurrection. It is a definite reality that there IS life after death. And that Jesus Christ is our Savior and Redeemer.

It is well that we know these things and I want every one to keep and live the commandments of God. For through Him, through His teachings, through the counsel of our modern prophets, we can be led to Life Eternal. We can find happiness in the Celestial Kingdom, and that’s where we want to be in the end, while all’s said and done.

It is very important that we pray OFTEN to the Heavenly Father to give sincere thanks and gratitude for the many blessings He gives to us every day; including the great gift of Free Agency. He has blessed us abundantly and we should show our thanks and gratitude to Him, and keep our body and mind and spirit clean, and in tune with Him, as much as possible.

Because of many spiritual experiences which I have shared with my family –and there are many others I have not shared- I feel strongly, fervently that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is, indeed, TRUE. And I admonish you, my fellow beings, my dearly beloved posterity; I admonish all of you to think in terms of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ as being true. They ARE true. You might want to do something that is a little off color; try NOT to do it; because you want to face your Maker, face Jesus Christ with a true conscience, with a love that He can inspire in your life, and it will lead you into Heavenly Father’s Holy Kingdom, even the Sacred Kingdom of God.

Be sure to repent of all sins you might have committed, or even thought about committing; repent of them and ask for forgiveness and pray for the guidance and the help of Heavenly Father, who will lead you into the Celestial Kingdom. Be sure to keep in mind, my dear posterity, that GOD TRULY LOVES YOU. I have learned that He truly does. He WANTS you to be able to come back into His Holy Presence, and He’ll do what He can to help you; but you must do some of the work yourselves and you must pray to Him often, ask for forgiveness for your sins, repent of them and ask for His forgiveness, and I’m sure you’ll find that He will forgive you and give you a very clean look, a very clean feeling within yourself and the gratitude in your heart that you did have the courage to ask for His blessings.

Again, my beloved posterity, may I state that I have a strong, firm testimony of the truthfulness of the gospel of Jesus Christ. I testify of our literal resurrection into the Kingdom of God. It is my hope and prayer that we may all keep God’s commandments and live righteously and do His will, that we may be worthy to enter in to his rest and glory in the Celestial Kingdom. It is my hope and prayer that we may all so live the principles of the Gospel and keep God’s commandments so that we may all attain unto the glorious Celestial Kingdom, and that we may all be able to be there in the due time of the Lord and renew our love for one another and for our Heavenly Father….
With that in mind, I guess I had better get back to telling about some personal history….

1980 - 1995

One time after the kids had long since been grown up and married, living elsewhere; Mary and I drove out to Panacca and hunted for a good place on the Panacca summit to hunt for pinenuts together. We had a fun time wandering about together wearing ourselves out in the heat of the day under that merciless sun and gathering up pound after delicious pound of pinenuts side by side. When it was almost dark, we began emptying our aprons into sacks in the back of the car, in the trunk.

I do not remember who it was that closed the trunk lid, but one of us closed the lid for the trunk before I had retrieved the car keys from it. We were unable to get into our car to sit down and we could not drive it, because the keys were locked in our trunk! There we were, elderly by most standards, all alone, stranded out there in the Panacca desert hills with night falling fast all around us.

We tried and tried to pry the trunk open, we tried to pry our car door open, and we could not do it. One car passed by us and I tried to flag it down, but the driver would not stop. It was dark, now. We prayed for help, for we knew that on that particular road traffic was scarce enough that it might be a day or two or even more before even one car might drive by us.

We had no food and only just a little canteen of water that was already partially consumed. Just minutes after our prayer, I heard another vehicle coming down the road. I went out in the road and tried to stop the pickup that was coming and it stopped. There were three men riding in the truck and they had three powerful looking motorcycles anchored in the back of the truck, which made us feel a little anxious and wonder if we could even trust them, because it could be that they were Hell’s Angels who might harm us that night or it could be that they were really Heaven sent, to aid us!

I explained what had happened to us and asked if we could thumb a ride with them. Mary had to sit on my lap. They turned out to be LDS men going home to Brigham or to Bingham and they had a long way to travel that night before morning arrived. They had to hurry, because one of them taught Priesthood lessons each Sunday morning. On the way to Cedar City the young man driving asked me, “Mr. Buhanan, wouldn’t it be better just to BUY the pinenuts?!” I chuckled and said it might be wiser, but it sure would not be as much fun.
They confided to us as we rode away together that they had all been very worried about stopping for us, because they had heard so many horror stories about people stopping to help “stranded motorists” and then being murdered or robbed and assaulted by the ones they had stopped to help. They said they had prayed before stopping to know if they ought to stop.

When we at last arrived in Cedar City, they let us off at the 7-11 grocery store that our son-in-law, Brian V. Terry, worked at, as a manager. We walked from there to our home, where I had an extra set of keys, and then Mary’s brother, Reid, drove me out to Panacca where I could pick up our car out at the Panacca Summit and drive it back home. It was a bad experience, but a good lesson for us! …and on top of it all, we had nearly 40 pounds of pinenuts we could enjoy along with sharing the story of our adventure all that coming winter!

I had wanted to do a flower book for Cedar Breaks for years because I wanted the visitors to be able to know the names and a little bit about the flowers up there just a little better than they did, to know the seasons they would bloom and what their uses were in our environment. Sometimes it was quite interesting to know what the Indians used them for and thought about them. I put that information in, also.

I learned that JL Crawford wanted to do one of Bryce, too. The Zion Natural History association had already pledged their support to a Ruth Nelson, who was a botanist wanting to do a book about Zion. (She worked on it for some time, but to my knowledge even to this day it has never been done and published) JL Crawford and I decided we would join together; with my information and pictures and his, combined together.

We combined our considerable knowledge and slides and Hale Buchanan worked together with us to put the book together. He was a botanist, teaching at Ricks’ College in Idaho. He was interested in doing something special with the flowers in both Cedar Breaks and Bryce, so we had him use our information and our colored slides and compile our book on flowers, which we called, “Living Color.”

We were pleased with the book, for the most part, though some of my best slides were credited, by mistake, to JL Crawford, instead of to me in it. I did not mind that, very much, as most of the book was just what I had hoped for, as far as being of value to visitors wanting to learn a little about the flowers that could be seen at Cedar Breaks and the areas around it.

We contracted for 20,000 copies and they were sold out in two years, so we revised the book and added new flowers to it and ordered another 20,000 copies printed for sales. It turned out to be a most outstanding publication and was so very well received by the public and professionals that it won an award as “The Most Valuable, Outstanding Book that the National Parks System had published in five years.”

As a result of the publication, I was asked to be on the Board of Directors of the Bryce Natural History Association. That entailed being on the Board of Directors for Bryce and Cedar Breaks for the next 12 years. We had to sanction all important decisions, indeed, all activities for Bryce and Cedar Breaks. I had to drop out of the Board of Directors after 12 years, because my wife Mary had grown so ill near the end of that 12 year tenure. She needed so much constant care that I simply had to give all of my time and resources to her. I could not manage to squeeze out any time whatsoever for being part of the Board anymore, and I knew I would miss it dreadfully.

Naturally, I had to give up all other pursuits I had once had, as well. I had no time to enjoy things like photography and film developing, lapidary work, temple work, trips, deer hunting, visiting friends or neighbors, church jobs that had to be done outside of the home rather than being able to be done inside the home -calling for temple assignments would be inside of our home, for instance-

We, as a family, had visited all of the National Parks and Monuments in Utah and the Western United States. We made little weekend jaunts out of each one for the most part, and we loved every single moment of those pleasant trips together. We would sing together in harmony in the car as we drove along and we would tell jokes and make one another laugh and laugh…We usually would allow each person in the car to choose a drink and a snack to piece on as we rode and sometimes we would share a package of chewing gum, as well.

We were always treated with graciousness and respect as we would arrive at and visit in the Parks, because I was the Ranger/Chief Naturalist at Cedar Breaks. Where others would have to pay to get into a park we never did have to because of my being employed at Cedar Breaks. To this day, I can show my Golden Age Pass and get into any National Park or Monument free of charge just as I used to during the years I was working for the Breaks.

We had been attending the temple every week on Wednesdays for many, many years and wished with all of our hearts that we might have the privilege and blessing of being called as Ordinance Workers there. At long last we were called to be interviewed by the Temple President.

We met with him and then were asked to accept a call to do sealings at the St. George temple for about 3 ½ years. We loved that! After that, we were called to be Ordinance Workers in that temple and when we opened up the letter calling us to be Ordinance Workers and read its contents, we wept over it in joy together.

Oh, my …we LOVED that calling! We worked in that calling for just over 8 years. We would have remained there, joyously doing that work, but unhappily while we were there as ordinance workers Mary’s health failed. Her Parkinson’s disease had gotten so bad that she needed help just to function normally getting through a day and she could not do her job at the temple, any longer. I could not do mine, either, because I had to be helping and taking care of her.

The temple presidency offered us a leave of absence for a year but would not release us yet, because they wanted us to be able to come back to them as ordinance workers. At the end of that year, they came to our home and visited with us for about 45 minutes. Before they left, they said, “Morris, I know where your priority must be; I will release you from your temple callings, because you need to be here to take care of her.” Mary and I both cried over that. We did not want to be released! It was necessary, though. There just was no other way around it; we had to be released. We had been going to the temple on Wednesday’s for eight years and that was a terrible blow to us both.

Auras around Reid Hales and me

When my niece Lyona’s son, Reid Hales, had been called on a mission for the LDS church, I wanted to go and hear him speak with Mary and Lyona’s sister Nellie, in Phoenix Arizona. We rode down to be at his farewell. (Testimonial)

He had brought an invalid to hear him speak, the man could not sit up or walk; essentially he was paralyzed. He wanted to hear Reid as well, and I was so pleased that Reid had cared enough about that man to see that he could be there for it.

When Reid got up to speak, we saw a magnificent aura all around his head and his body! It was just as real as could be, and it was a beautiful aura that extended all around him! It was a yellow/orange color and I would say that it extended about 9 inches or so out from around his body. I had never seen a person with an aura before, but his was beautiful! We were not the only ones who saw it; others, also, saw the aura and were very much impressed. I know that Nellie said she saw it, Mary saw it, a little girl sitting by me and also someone over by Nellie saw it, that we know of.

Reid was the only one there who got up to speak who had an aura; not even Boyd or Lyona had an aura that anyone could see, only Reid. I had never seen anyone in my life with an aura before, and this one was just beautiful; such a wonderful, glorious looking thing! I thought that Reid must be a really righteous boy, and that the Lord must be REALLY pleased with him.

I felt the veil was very thin and the Spirit of the Lord very strong every time I was in the temple and loved being there for that reason, but it was a very special thing to be able to be an ordinance worker and feel the Holy Spirit working through me as I would work there. I knew that the Lord had selected certain individuals to take special parts in the sessions for each and every session as I could feel Him prompting me whom to select and so forth…I felt His spirit with me so closely one very spiritual night at the temple.

It was my assignment to conduct a session. I was to be the officiator at the session. When the audience was seated and we were ready to begin the session I stood up to take charge and most of the audience drew in a deep breath like a gasp! I did not know why, until after the session was over. One of the sisters who had been present told me that when I stood up to take charge of the session, I had a glorious bright aura that stood out from around me around 8 or 9 inches from my body, all around my head and body. She said it was a golden yellow/orange color. I was very grateful to my Heavenly Father and very humbled for such a beautiful manifestation from him given to me. Auras are seldom seen, and to think that He had blessed me with such a thing humbled me greatly.

1995 - 2005

I had gone to SLC to visit my three daughters and their families who lived there, and knowing my interest in birds, my three daughters took me to the Tracy Aviary in Liberty Park to see the birds there. We took a chicken picnic lunch with us and enjoyed sitting in the shade on the grass in the park to eat it together. While I was helping clean up plates and papers after our luncheon, a little black wasp stung the end of the index finger of my left hand. Within seconds, my vision had gone blurry enough I could only see two white blobs…they were white cars in the parking lot near by, but I could not tell that because my vision was too bad.

My heart either went too fast or nearly stopped, by now I forget which it was, but my heart acted up so badly that I was nearly to pass out. I could not breathe well, my chest was so tight and my breathing suddenly constricted. I was shaky and nauseous, confused and sweaty and I could not see.

It was a frightening situation and I felt it might very well be my last moment on this earth among the living. Quickly thinking, my daughter Bonnie thrust my stung hand into her cup of ice with a trifle of water in the bottom of it to slow up the blood coming into the sting area and leaving it; my daughter Nancy had me lie down and elevated my feet above my heart level, then put pressure on the artery of the arm to restrict the blood flow from that stung area, so my heart would not be pumping too much of the deadly venom into me.

While she did that, either Phyllis or her daughter Lori gave me a dose of Benadryl, an antihistamine, which they had in their purse to help with their allergies. The Benadryl would help prevent my body’s immune system from kicking in dramatically and stop my going into anaphylactic shock, we all hoped.

My son in law, Brian Terry, gave me a Priesthood Blessing using consecrated oil that he had in a special little phial on his key ring and then everyone there rushed me to the car -in a wheelchair that Lori had run to acquire for me, so I did not have to walk to the car and cause faster blood flow and heart stress.

Once at the car, we drove at once to the closest drug store we could find, (the hospitals were all too far away for any safety margin) bought a bee sting kit, and used the contents of it on me at once. I really believe that I would be dead now, if my children had not acted so promptly and wisely –and working together, as one- to save my life.

I am unsure where to place this following information, so I guess I will just write it here! There were a number of General Authorities of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints that I met because they came to Cedar City and stayed or because I met them elsewhere in other circumstances. (Bold type indicates Prophets)
Among them were:
Henry D. Moyle (came Feb. 23 to set R. Reid Cox apart.)

Eldred G. Smith,
Alma Sonne,
S. Dilworth Young,
Bruce R. McConkie,
ElRay L. Christiansen,
Delbert L. Stapley,
Harold B. Lee
Spencer W. Kimball
George Q. Morris,
Joseph F. Smith,
John Longden,
Mark E. Petersen
LeGrand Richards,

And lastly, Joseph F. Merrill (he ordained me and set me apart as the President of the Seventies in our stake. I was later ordained and set apart as a High Priest by Morris Shirts)

A Time to Live, a Time to Die…

Mary and I both got a particularly lethal strain of influenza in March of 1995, after Paul had gotten it. We were both terribly ill. My anxious daughters wanted to know if I wanted them to come home and help me, but I flatly refused their offers and assured them I did not need it and did not want them to come, just then. We were not as well off as I had indicated to them, though, and I knew it.

I asked a home health care nurse to take us to the hospital, for I realized I was just too sick myself to be giving Mary good enough care and I thought that we had Pneumonia. We did not have Pneumonia, but I was sent home alone, because they kept Mary in their care in a nursing home for two or three days while I was at home trying to regain my health and wits, so I could care for my sweetheart again. When we brought Mary back home after that two or three days, Nancy planned to come help, but Phyllis could come at that time and could not come a week later, which Nancy would still have been able to do, so Phyllis came down to help out. Both Phyllis and I had the flu (she got it after arriving there) but between us we were able to care for my dear Mary.

Nancy and her family and Bonnie and her husband came down, as well, all of us were deeply anxious about Mary, because that particular flu was such a dangerous one, and her health was so frail before she had gotten it. I know that it nearly killed ME. Nancy had gotten it previous to that, and with a fever of 104 and 105 for days, it nearly killed her, as well, but she got well and came down to help. Then Bonnie came down and all three daughters were with us and caring for us.

Mary only wanted a little Gatorade and a little vanilla ice cream with maraschino cherries in it to eat. We indulged her appetite, because we realized that she was quite possibly dying, and we wanted her last time of life to be as pleasant as we could make it.

Our entire family gathered around her bedside and sang in harmony to her for a very long time and she loved it. We sang mostly the sweet, religious songs we sang in church, but we also sang a number of lovely old melodies together and we harmonized, because singing and harmonizing together was a thing that our family had always done together, and she had often said how much she loved it, and how much it meant to her. I held her dear hands in mine and told her, “Oh, Mary…I love you, with all of my heart and soul!” and she looked me in the eyes and smiled a little and assured me, “I LOVE YOU, too!” We all told her how much we loved her during those last few hours she was conscious.

After our singing etc., she improved/recovered so dramatically about three days before her actual passing, that, feeling hopeful but extremely anxious and reluctant to leave “just in case”, Nancy went home with her family to make arrangements for Mary to go to their home to live, where Nancy would be her new caregiver.

When they had arrived at their home in SLC, she passed away at between 7:30 and 8:00 PM. Phyllis and Bonnie and I were in eating our evening meal together and Bonnie went in to check on Mary before the rest of us, because she’d finished her meal before we finished ours. She found that Mary had quietly passed over when we had finally left her alone that few moments.

When I went in there and discovered she had died, I felt that my whole world had come to an end….

I did not see how I could possibly continue on. I appreciated, more than I can say, the support of my children; because their love meant a great deal to me, and their love for their mother was sincere; as was mine. I do not know whom it was that called Home Health, probably Bonnie, but Marie Prince came and spent a little while with our grieving family. The Coroner came at about 8 PM and then left. After that, the funeral home sent someone to take my cherished companion’s precious body to the funeral home.

I can‘t remember exactly what we did that evening. We grieved together. It was a painful blur to me. I suppose we notified the other children and others about her passing. I do not know how I kept living after discovering my beloved Mary was dead, but somehow I was still alive and desperately heartbroken when we made arrangements for her viewing, funeral and interment over the next few days.

We laid her to rest for the last time on March 25th, 1995. There was wind and deadly snow and ice everywhere, people afraid to come out of their homes because the roads were so lethal and the air so bitter cold. I think the deathly cold that had crept into me because of grief was far more intense than the bitter cold around us. Watching them close the casket on the body of my beloved wife and shut me away from her nearly killed me. Watching them lay her to rest for the last time was even more final and terrible. I think that most of me died with her that day, but somehow or other I am still here and nearly ten
years have now passed away since that grim event in my life.

(“Oh, Nancy…” Dad said, just a moment ago, “How can a man LIVE with that much sadness?!)

I have tried to use every day since then to live my life as she would want me to, to please her, to be worthy of that place together in the Celestial Kingdom with my Eternal Companion, with our Heavenly Parents and our Savior.

The Morris Buhanan Family 8 1/2 years after Mary’s Passing

I go quite often to her grave and take flowers there. I want her to know that I still love her with all of my heart and soul after nine years of loneliness. I am sure I always will. She was a wonderful companion, a precious wife. I love and miss her more deeply than any man ever loved or missed his cherished sweetheart.
****

The Testimony Of Hyrum Morris Buhanan,
Written To His Posterity;

My Dear Children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, great great-grandchildren and so on, as well as those who join our family group through marriage, adoption and so on;

I want to leave to you a very important message; I want all of you to live and keep the commandments of God for I have a strong, firm, fervent testimony of the truthfulness of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and of the literal resurrection. It is a definite reality that there IS life after death. And that Jesus Christ is our Savior and Redeemer.

It is well that we know these things, and I want every one of you to keep and live the commandments of God. For through Him, through His teachings, through the counsel of our modern prophets, we can be led to Life Eternal. We can find happiness in the Celestial Kingdom, and that’s where we want to be in the end, while all’s said and done.

It is very important that we pray –OFTEN- to the Heavenly Father, to give sincere thanks and gratitude for the many blessings He gives to us every day; including the great gift of Free Agency. He has blessed us, abundantly; and we should show our thanks and gratitude to Him, and keep our body and mind and spirit clean, and in tune with Him, as much as possible.

My firm testimony did not occur all at once. It grew from things that happened to me in which I felt gratitude to Heavenly Father. It started as I knelt at my mother’s or father’s knee and gave thanks and gratitude to Him for the blessings of a small child. It grew by leaps and bounds when I was badly burned when I was four years old.

My father kept sixty hives of bees, and it was necessary to occasionally extract the honey from those hives; and in order to do so, we had to take a hot knife and lop off the tops of the honey cells. This was done with what we called “the capping knife”. We had to keep it in hot water over a fire to keep it warm, so that the beeswax would not stick to it and create a problem. We were extracting honey from the hives of bees one day when I was four years old, and father had started for the house with a five gallon can of honey and mother had taken off her bee bonnet which was made partly of cloth, and laid it in a convenient place, so that she could prepare a lunch for Daddy. Well, being a curious four year old, I got mother’s bee bonnet, put it on, then leaned over the fire to look at and take the capping knife out of the hot water and put it back in; while I was doing that, the bee bonnet caught on fire. I started to scream and run for the house for Daddy or Mother to take the bee bonnet off, since I was being engulfed in hot flames and breathing the hot, poison gasses from the burning cloth. I was just falling from pain, exhaustion and smoke inhalation when Daddy jerked the bee bonnet off, taking with it a good deal of the skin from my forehead and all over the scalp –most of the scalp, at least- but I was very, VERRRRRY badly burned. I fought those flames until my hands were badly burned, I’d breathed those hot fumes until my throat and mouth were badly burned…I couldn’t swallow a thing except a little cool watermelon juice for a matter of six weeks. At that time, Bishop Meeks from Loa came down to our place to visit with Daddy just a little bit because Daddy was the Presiding Elder in that section of the country.

They talked just briefly and then Bishop Meeks said, “Well, Brother Behunin, you have him in your arms now, but I fear you won’t keep him there.” And Daddy said, “If you’ll help me administer to him, I‘ll keep him! I’m SURE I’ll keep him.”

Well, Bishop Meeks happened to have some consecrated oil and they administered to me. The relief was so intense, so pronounced and so sudden that I said, “Daddy, I think I’m dying, now.” But, of course, I wasn’t, it was just relief from part of the pain. It didn’t’ take it all down, it didn’t disappear entirely, I still had a lot of pain, and I was so badly burned that it took quite some time for the burns to heal; but it did help; the administration helped tremendously, and I recognized the hand of God in that sacred ordinance. I feel that the blessing miraculously prevented as severe of scarring as I should have had. (note from Morris’ daughter Nancy; “You cannot tell Dad has been scarred at all, unless you are shown his hands and can see that he has not got a thick thumb muscle circling the base of his thumb near his wrist, like people generally have”)

Another interesting thing happened when I got older… I was going to high school at Beaver High School. I was playing on the high school football team and my tonsils were becoming infected badly; they were causing a heart problem. The doctor said I needed to have my tonsils out. The doctor examined me and he said, “Boy, this boy doesn’t have much left of his tonsils, how can they be a danger to his health?” but my throat had been so badly burned that the tonsils were almost entirely burned away; they were very, very small and what was left was so deep down in my throat. The doctor took them out and it was such a terrible operation that I almost bled to death. He had to cut so deep that he cut some of the veins in my neck. On the fourteenth day I almost bled to death, because the tonsillectomy was not healing properly. In fact I bled so badly that it seemed like there was a snowstorm in the room. In fact I asked mother, “How come it is snowing in here??” but it was not…I was so weak from loss of blood, I could not even turn over. I was just bleeding to death and cold and seeing white spots that I thought were snowflakes. Mother called the doctor and he came to our home. They put cold packs on my throat and gave me coagulants that would help stop the bleeding. I lost fourteen pounds in fourteen days but it finally began to heal after Daddy administered to me. I began to heal fast after that. That helped to strengthen my testimony a great deal. That was the second time that administration and blessings from my Heavenly Father had saved my life, I feel. When I got back to school the coach told me that he had me picked to play the right guard on the basketball team, but I was so emaciated, weak and white that he could not put me in after all, so I missed that opportunity.

There have been two other faith promoting incidents in my life, one of them occurred when I was in High School and the other when I was in the Branch Agricultural College of Cedar City, Utah, or the B.A.C. back then. The lightning struck trees that were very tall trees and followed down through the trunks; I was getting an armful of wood for mother to prepare lunch and the lightning struck so close to me that it knocked me unconscious. I was laying flat on the ground when mother discovered me, -she was wondering what happened to the wood, I guess- anyway she discovered that I was unconscious, and she dragged me up to the front porch of the home and sent for the doctor. He came, and together they got me into the house; then, after a while, I started to come to. I couldn’t remember who I was, where I was, who Mother was, who the doctor was, I just couldn’t remember anything…and ohhhhhhhhh, what a terrible headache!!! But, eventually, again through the power of the priesthood I got over that electric shock and lived a fairly normal life until I got into college at Cedar City, Utah. When I was taking care of the campus that summer and the storm came up, lightning struck a Southwestern locust tree and knocked me unconscious. When I came to, partially, I was covered with limbs and leaves and debris and didn’t remember who I was, where I was or why I was there. It took quite some time for me to come to and regain my mental faculties. Through the power of the priesthood my life was again spared. The Lord has truly been good to me; and He has strengthened my testimony through incidences such as those that happened where the power of the priesthood helped greatly.

A very sacred thing happened when I was just getting ready to go to college at Southern Utah. I had gone through High School and had never had a date with a girl, because I‘d stayed out of school to work and support my family. I was about 21 years old and I‘d never had a date with a girl. I began to feel rather lonely, and one night while my brother Wane and I were working on the Forest Service fence upon the South Creek, I made it a matter of prayer to know if there was a girl intended for me. I would like to know what she looked like and, if possible, where I could find her. Well, that night I had a dream; it was a beautiful dream. I dreamed that a beautiful girl dressed in a white dress with red polka-dots came to me and put her arms around me. I looked at her closely, because she seemed such an angel.
It wasn’t very long before I went to college in Cedar City at the B.A.C. (Branch Agricultural College, an offshoot branch of Utah State University). I had also to find a way that I could pay my tuition and buy my books, so that I could go to college. I found a job with the superintendent of grounds and with a teacher, Ben Cooley, who was also involved in student employment. I got a job with them and began working to earn my way through school. One day as I was standing with my friend Wallace Dean on the sidewalk that led from the library building where we were coming from to the science building where a group of students were coming toward the library building. In the lead, talking and laughing with a young man, was the girl -the very girl!- that I had dreamed about. She had on the white dress with red polka-dots and she looked exactly like the girl that I had dreamed about. I told Wallace that I had to find out who she was. Since he worked in the library, he saved a library card for me that she had signed out asking for a German dictionary. Well, I’d found out who she was and then I went to the registrar and found out all I could about her from the registrar; that her name was Mary Cox and that she was a senior in High School. Then I began watching the classrooms and the halls and the campus to see if I could find her and make an acquaintance with her. I couldn’t find anybody who knew her and who knew me, for quite some time.

At last the day came when I had a chance to meet her. There was a Music Arts number –it was free to all students, where two women were putting on a musical show- I went to it, alone, and Mary happened to go to the same Music Arts number with a girlfriend named Marie Froyd. Well, I knew Marie Froyd, because I had danced with her at the Freshman Dance. She introduced Mary and me, and I walked both of them home that night. Well, I was on Cloud Nine; I not only knew who she was, I had met her and to me she was a dearly beloved friend. I hoped I would be able to talk with her and become acquainted with her; -I DID!

Well, we got along very well and finally I asked her if she’d go steady with me and she said yes, she would; and our courtship lasted for 3 ½ years, because we couldn’t marry on no wage, no salary… and so we were to finish our schooling before we got married. She was my dream girl, and is still my beautiful, adorable dream girl. (Small pause, sniffing...eyes filling tearfully with remembrance and sadness, because she passed away seven* years ago) She’s also my Sweetheart; …my companion…my dearly beloved, gorgeous wife. (* it is now 9 ½ years since her passing, as of the writing of this book)

That was certainly a wonderful, testimony building event in my life. Another incident was rather faith promoting; our nephew Douglas Cox, Ted Cox’s son, woke up one morning and he couldn’t talk. He had a wild look in his eyes, a wild look on his face…it looked as if he was not even the same boy. He could eat, but he couldn’t talk. This went on for a matter of three days, and finally we decided that through prayer we might be able to help him. We had a family prayer. We formed a circle as we would in the temple, and united our faith and prayers in his behalf. Within hours he looked normal; his eyes looked good and he could talk. He was completely well. HE couldn’t imagine why we were so concerned with how he looked and how he acted, because it seemed as if he was almost completely unconscious of life that had gone on around him during that strange time before the blessing.

Another incident or two involved his father, Ted Cox. Ted was working with the power company; in fact, he was manager of the power company. So he was responsible for a great number of keys. He lost his bunch of keys while visiting a pump well and he had to walk half a mile or something to get to the pump well from the road and when he got back to the office he found that his keys were gone. He searched the car, his pockets, everywhere; but he couldn’t find the keys, they were just lost. Well, he made it a matter of prayer that night, and then went to bed. During the night, he had a dream in which he saw the exact location of his lost keys. About four or five o’clock in the morning he woke his wife up and told her he knew where his keys were, they were under a sagebrush between the road and the pump well. The next day he retraced his steps to the particular sagebrush that he had seen in his dream and there the keys were. He found them just immediately.

Another time, Ted and his friend Truman Blake and their two sons were at Navajo Lake fishing. They got so interested in fishing and catching a few trout that they neglected coming home before it got dark. Well, there was no moonlight that night, and when they loaded their fishing gear in the car and were ready to get in the car and come home, they didn’t have the keys. The keys were gone. Ted had them in his pocket when they got there, I guess he could have had them all the time they were fishing, but somehow the keys got lost. They had searched all around the car, they searched everywhere they had been, -except, of course, out in the boat- but they found no keys at all; finally they became quite desperate. Richard was –is- Ted’s youngest son. He was with his daddy and pretty soon he came up to his daddy and said “Daddy, it’s gonna be alright, I have prayed to Heavenly Father to help us find the keys, so we’ll find them!” They began searching again. They went as far down as the shore of the lake, even out into the water, which was about 12 to 18 inches deep at that point, and they found the keys. That happened through prayer, and so they were able to come home.

There have been other incidences in my life that have strengthened my testimony, made it grow bigger. One of them, we had our youngest daughter in the hospital with an operation and during the night after the operation a blood clot formed and centered up under the clavicle or up under the collar bone. The doctor who was taking care of her said if the blood clot was not dissolved by morning, he would have to operate and it would be a very serious operation, because it would be near the heart. We called the family and fasted together and made it a matter of prayer. We didn’t have a prayer circle, but we did set a time at which each family offered prayer. Some of them even lived out of town. At that particular time, we united our faith and prayers and hoped that Heavenly Father would cure the problem facing us. The next morning the doctor examined and took X-rays of Bonnie and the blood clot had completely disappeared. He would not have to operate. We knew it was the result of our family prayer.

Another incident happened in our family, which strengthened my testimony and that of the children too. As children grow up they want pets; it’s a good thing to have pets in the family. We had a darling little dog, called Pixie. He was a sweet, loyal little dog. We let him out for just a few minutes before going to bed and somebody shot him. He was shot with birdshot, shotgun pellets or pellets from a 22 rifle. He came limping in hardly able to move or even to see with his injuries, whimpering to us, his family. We called the vet, but he was out of town that night. I sharpened my knife-I didn’t have a needle but I sterilized (I had a very sharp scalpel, but it was so rounded it was not as good for digging out the pellets as a pocket knife) so I sterilized my pocket knife and dug out as many shot pellets as I could before we formed a small family circle around Pixie, held hands in a circle of prayer, united in fervent faith and need; and I blessed him and put him to bed. We found a good place for him to sleep, it was warm and pleasant; we left him to sleep there in the bed and the next morning, far from the bloody little dog that we had put to bed and I knew I hadn’t got all the pellets out of, he came bounding joyously in to meet us when we opened the door to where he was sleeping; wagging his tail and just as happy as could be! When I examined him, I could not find any trace of any pellets, I couldn’t find any trace of where I’d dug them out, and he was not bloody; and that, again, that was a testimony builder for me and our children.

It was necessary because I was a teacher in public schools that I gain some additional credit to renew my teaching certificate. I went to Logan and registered for classes, and part way through the course, I got a letter from my sister in law, Inez Cox, that Mary and our baby (Dale, who was just months old) were both sick with flu or something. According to her letter they were very desperately sick. I’d read the letter that day and I was kind of discouraged. I had about decided to come home and help take care of my baby and wife. When I was walking from the college to my boarding place after reading that letter, I was pretty low in spirits. A short, rather heavyset man approached to speak to me. He was shorter than I was, (shorter than 5’9”) but he would weigh as much or more. He had a Roman nose and very, very dark eyes, very much like a Jew…in fact he not only looked like a Jew, he dressed like a Jew; I had met many Jews and he not only looked like one, but dressed like one and talked like one when he laid his hand on my shoulder and said, “Don’t worry brother, your wife and son will be well soon, they’re doing well, you won’t need to quit school and go home, take comfort in the fact that they are doing fine.” Well, he was so quietly certain, so peaceful and compassionate that it was wonderful! I started on my way, took two or three steps and turned, to thank him –and he was gone! There was nobody there! I looked all around; up and down the street, but there was nobody there. That was a very strong testimony builder, because as I live, I am telling the truth when I tell you he had completely disappeared. He was talking to me, I knew he was there; I think it was one of the three Nephites or John the Beloved, who had found my trouble, who knew my trouble and who had given me the hope he did -and the counsel that he did. That strengthened my testimony tremendously.

I have another faith promoting incident in my life. My mother had rather poor health during all of my living at the same address with her. I loved her so much and was so dependent on her that every time she’d get sick I’d really have a rough time of it. I loved my mother so much. She’d put her arm around me and say “Don’t worry Morris, don’t worry! I’ve had an experience….” and then she told me her experience; she was afraid of death, very afraid of death; and when she was about seven or eight years old she got very, very sick; maybe between eight and nine, but she got very, very sick. When she became cognizant so she could remember anything she was up in the corner of the room; looking down at her body on the bed. There was a man who came and put his arms around her, took her in his arms and said “Don’t worry Vera, Don’t worry. You’ll live to be about 93 years old before you die, so don’t worry. You’ll live a long life, you’ll have a husband and a family to raise and you’ll live to be almost 93 years old.” And that is what she would tell me when I would get so worried, “Don’t worry Morris, I’ll live to be almost 93 before I die, so you won’t need to worry.” And as it was, she raised a family, one girl and three boys and died just three days before she would have been 93 years old.

These are just a few of the many incidences that have built and strengthened my testimony of the truthfulness of the gospel of Jesus Christ. I’ve had the wonderful experience of administering to several people, before the administration I had in mind what I thought I would like to say, but when I laid my hands on the patient’s head and addressed the Heavenly Being, addressed my Heavenly Father, I found that HE directed what I was going to say and what I did say. There have been twice in my life when I administered to people, times when I desperately wanted to tell them they’d get well; I wanted to very much…but Heavenly Father didn’t put those words in my mouth. I blessed them that they would find peace and love and comfort and find there would be many blessings in the Kingdom of Heavenly Father.

My wife Mary at one time lay at death’s door. The doctor offered to make her as comfortable as possible until she died or, he said, he could try to operate; but he told us there would only be a 20% chance that she could survive the surgery. She chose the surgery. My son-in-law Brian Terry and I administered to her after a united family prayer and fasting of all our family members everywhere they were living. We fasted until after the surgery was completed. During that administration, we both had the amazing feeling of power going from our hands into her like a charge of warm electricity is the best analogy we could think of to describe it. She felt that amazing warm power flowing into her, as well. We felt she would live and she DID survive for several years more and was a blessing to our whole family.

Because of these experiences which I have told –and there are many others- I feel strongly, fervently that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is, indeed, TRUE. And I admonish you, my fellow beings, my dearly beloved posterity; I admonish all of you to think in terms of it being true. You might want to do something that is a little off color; try NOT to do it; because you want to face your maker, face Jesus Christ with a true conscience, with a love that He can inspire in your life and it will lead you into Heavenly Father’s Holy Kingdom, even the Sacred Kingdom of God.

Be sure to repent of all sins you might have committed, or even thought about committing; repent of them and ask for forgiveness and pray for the guidance and the help of Heavenly Father, who will lead you into the Celestial Kingdom. Be sure to keep in mind, my dear posterity, that GOD TRULY LOVES YOU. He WANTS you to be able to come back into His Holy Presence, and He’ll do what He can to help you; but you must do some of the work yourselves and you must pray to Him often, ask for forgiveness for your sins, repent of them and ask for His forgiveness, and I’m sure you’ll find that He will forgive you and give you a very clean look, a very clean feeling within yourself, and the gratitude in your heart that you did have the courage to ask for His blessings.

Again, my beloved posterity, may I state that I have a strong, firm testimony of the truthfulness of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And, in a real way, a literal resurrection into the Kingdom of God. It is my hope and prayer that we may all keep God’s commandments and live righteously and do His will, that we may be worthy to enter in to his rest and glory in the Celestial Kingdom. It is my hope and prayer that we may all so live the principles of the Gospel and keep God’s commandments so that we may all attain unto the glorious Celestial Kingdom, and that we may all be able to be there in the due time of the Lord and renew our love for one another and for our Heavenly Father….

I would very much like to add, my dear posterity, that my dearly beloved wife and partner, Mary Cox Buhanan, also had a firm testimony of the gospel of Jesus Christ and of the literal resurrection into the Spirit World. And if ever an angel was born and lived on this Earth, she is it. She knew in her heart that every bit of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is true, and bore a strong, fervent testimony to that fact.

God Bless You, My Dearly Beloved Parents (wherever you are now serving in our Father’s Kingdom) and also My Dearly Beloved Posterity. May the Lord bless you, forever.

-Hyrum Morris Buhanan- May 3rd, 2002