When Uncle Ellsworth Scoville was still alive, I asked him to tell me some stories about my grandfather, Earl Hurst Scoville. In 1988 Ellsworth sent me the text that follows. Should you want a copy of this as a word document, please send me an email at ajohnson@ucalgary.ca with the words Earl Hurst Scoville in the subject line.
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April 25, 1988
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| Earl Hurst Scoville |
Then he would go down to Raymond, through Raymond and out to Greensplace. That was sugar company land. Green was the one that ran it. This big elevator was on the place. You drove up into the elevator. There was no way of dumping it because they had no hoist. He would open up the end gate, let as much run out as he could and then he would scoop as much out by hand as he could. Then he would go back and get another load. That was about the time that the ordinary ranchers got up.
One morning I went out with him for the second load and we met Andy Knowl, the foreman of the Kirkaldy Ranch. He said, “You are up pretty early, Earl.” Dad said, “Yes, this is my second time out.”
“Yes,” said Andy, “I thought that was you out there going around in circles.”
“Yes,” said dad. “I couldn’t find trail out.”
He worked so hard on that truck business that he almost killed himself. He just went and went and went. One day he was home playing with the kids. I was in the other room. All at once I heard him groaning. I walked in. He had two hands, clutching his knees and was rolling back and forth on the floor and groaning something terrible. He had knelt on a knee mouse. He had a little bump under the skin. He would let the kids touch it. As quick as we would touch it, it would jump somewhere else. We had a lot of fun doing that and we would giggle. He knelt on it and it jumped underneath his knee cap. He went to the Dr. and they couldn’t do anything for him. He called in a Hutterite doctor, old John Mandel. He was excellent with almost anything that you had. He was a bone doctor who had never had any education. He helped so many people around that country. He worked with dad for quite a while. Finally he said, “Earl, I can’t do it. It is under there. There is no way. If a doctor operators on that to get it out, mostly likely your leg will go stiff and you won’t be able to bend it.”
Well anyway, they found out where there was a doctor. Nobody that we knew, knew of anybody in Canada that could do that operation. There was one in Salt Lake. He went down there. He knew that there was only a fifty per cent chance that he would walk natural again. He was down there about six months. Somebody took him to conference one day. They were just a little bit late. They had just shut the doors. The fellow that took him ran up and banged on the door. He said, “We have a man in a wheel chair out here who would really like to come to conference.” They opened the door and wheeled him right down to the front underneath the pulpit. He sat and looked right up at the president of the church.
He came back. In the meantime he owed money on that truck. Not very much but they kept asking for money and asking for money. That was back in the ‘30’s and there wasn’t much money. The guy that he bought it from and another guy said, “Look, we have to take the truck.” Mother said, “It is just about payed for.” They said they would take it and put it in their garage until Earl comes home. But they took it home and sold it, so he lost the truck.
When he got back home he was on crutches and walked like that for a long time. At first the knee was quite stiff. Finally he learned to walk real good. He could even run and do everything just like he used to.
We had a big garden. Lots of times I would come out at 7 o’clock in the morning and here he was and had been working since 4 a.m.
On the ranch we had a lot of hay. We put up hay all of the time and we sold quite a lot. Usually, Saturday morning or afternoon we would go out and load up hay. If we did it in the morning then we would wait until all the work was done that had to be done and then we would go to town, stay overnight, go to Sunday School in the morning and sometimes we would stay until church at night at 7 – 8:30 or 9 and then we would go back to the ranch. We always took a blanket and laid it in the hay rack or whatever wagon we had. A lot of times we would just be riding along and he would start to sing to me, all of those old songs: Danny Boy. I just loved to hear him sing these songs. Now this was usually at night he would sing until I got real sleepy and would go to sleep. He would keep driving out to the ranch. Then we would get to bed. He was always up at 4 in the morning. He would go and turn the sheep out and let them run, watch them until 7 o’clock. Put them back in the corral and then wake me up and we would have breakfast.
Sometimes we had porridge. We had 7 cows out there and milked them all the time. We didn’t separate for cream. We would leave the milk in pans, skim it off and take cream to town on the weekend for mother to make butter out of it with a big churn. Maybe she sold some of it. I don’t know. After we had breakfast we would go turn the sheep out, take them up in the field. I was supposed to herd them while he went and done something else. I wasn’t a very good sheepherder. I would get tired and go someplace else to play. The sheep would go out into the grain. Then my dad would be pretty angry. Anyway, we would get them out. When we were going to take the sheep in he would holler like a coyote. The sheep would spread out all over this big valley. As quick as he hollered like a coyote those sheep would come down into the valley right together. That seemed like fun. So during the day when I wanted some excitement I would holler like a coyote and they would come back into the middle. When my dad caught me doing that, I don’t know if I ever did it again. I probably did, a few times. I am not embellishing this. This is exactly how it happened.
He would be going out to the ranch in the daytime. There would be cattle out in this big field. I would get him to beller like a calf. He would say alright and then he would do it. The cows would come trotting up to the fence, a whole herd of them. He would beller again and they would follow him. When they would stop he would beller again and they would come as far as they could, right up to the fence.
We had a little yellow dog that was a real good sheep dog. She would run ahead of the team. Betty would go up a hundred yards and then turn around and run back to us. She would go up a hundred yards again and then run back to us. We used her so much that she would get tender footed. And so we would sometimes pick her up and carry her in the wagon. Betty didn’t really like to ride in the wagon. She was so full of fun. She wanted to go out there and go. Lots of times she would be trotting along side of us or a little ahead. She would see a gopher that would be about a foot from the hole. Sometimes right on the edge of the hole. She knew just how far she could run up. Fifteen feet away she would slow down and then start creeping really slowly. The gopher would stay there. When she got ten feet away from the hole then swoosh, she was right there after the gopher. The gopher would go down the hole but she would go into the hole with her nose and grab by its rear end and in the middle of its body and then she shook it to death. She very seldom ever missed getting that gopher. There was the odd time but she got most of them.
The Hutterites offered $50 for that dog and that was in the ‘30’s. He wouldn’t sell her because she was such a good sheep dog. We would just say Betty go around them and that dog would run all around those sheep and bunch them. That dog knew right what to do. You just had to wave your hand at her and she knew what to do. We never sold her. We were out on that ranch for six years, planted a crop every year. The sixth year we got 200 bushels of grain and that was the first grain we got off it in six years. It was so dry during the dirty thirties. We went out there in 1929. He worked his head off all the time on that place. In 1937 he got hurt in the sugar factory and died. When he got hurt he got up at 4 in the morning, got breakfast, woke me up, brought me in and he made my lunch. He did this every morning. That particular morning he walked out to the gate with me and kissed me good-bye and I just started to walk down the lane. He went back to the house. I all at once turned around and went back, walked into the house and I walked over and hugged him and said good-bye and I left. I was working for Bruce and Garth Galbraith. Garth went to town. Then he went down to the sugar factory to get some old belting that they would throw out of the sugar factory. When he got there he found out that dad had fell. When he come back to the combine I was shoveling grain into the back of the truck box. He got out of his truck and he said, “Ellsworth,” and I looked up. I said, “What has happened to my dad?” He come over and he said he fell from the top of the inside of the sugar factory and lit on his back on a valve about three feet high. It broke his back. The man that was supposed to be with him had gone to coffee time and he had been gone pretty near an hour. And so dad started to work on his own and that is why it happened.
He was standing on a pipe. He had been up on a plank that he had across the pipes. He got off and stood on this pipe because he had to move over further. He pushed down on this end of the plant, maybe he was three feet from the pipe the plank was laying on. He pushed down and moved the plank over too far. It missed the pipe on the other side. It went down. That threw him over the top. He went down part way. He grabbed another pipe on the way down. He was going so fast that he couldn’t hold on. It tore part of the meat off of his forearm and he continued down and lit on that valve. He rolled off of it and hit on the floor. I don’t suppose you can imagine how much pain that was. He was on the floor. He laid there for quite a while. Then he crawled out from behind the vats out into the alley way when Jack Kenney came along and saw him. They called the Dr. The Dr. came out. He laid there from 10 o’clock in the morning until noon until they finally got an ambulance there and took him to the hospital in Lethbridge.
He was in the hospital for six days. Sunday afternoon I had an old 33 Plymouth car. After Sunday School I took mom and the kids over to Lethbridge to see him in the hospital. We visited for an hour or so. When we left the hospital I was the last one out of the room. I was just going out of the door. He called me back. He said, “Ellsworth, you are the man of the house now. Take care of your mother.” I just thought he meant until he got better and came home. After church that night I went out with a bunch of kids. We were just having fund downtown and I guess about 9 o’clock Aunt Lucia came down and she found me and she said, “Ellsworth, you get home as fast as you can. The hospital has just phoned and asked you people to come over to the hospital. It doesn’t look like your dad is going to live very long.” I remember Mother went with me to the hospital, but he had already passed away.
I don’t know just when I realized it, but that night or the next day I realized that when he said I was the man of the house now, that he knew that he was going to go. That is the way I felt about it, anyway.
He was a friend to everybody. Up until that time he had the largest funeral that was ever held in Raymond. There were a lot of Hungarian people who in the last 3 or 4 years had come out from Hungary. They would go down to the Post Office at night. The wide sidewalks would be crowded with them and people walking by would have to walk out on the street to get by them. When dad would come by they all knew him, wanted to talk to him and say hello. He was saying Hi to all of these people. It would make mom real mad. She used to call them Hunkies.
Our house was on the corner of a three corner lot. Raymond was built like a wagon wheel. Everything came to the center of town. They still had square blocks and then they had the angle roads. There were three corner lots all over town. Finally they realized it was costing too much to keep up the roads so they did away with the angle streets.
There were some people who lived – the back of our house was even with the lane. We could look down the lane and a block away. There was a family of unusual looking people. They were all short. I think it was the Sands. I know that my dad would take potatoes and carrots and things out of his garden to them. Once in a while their dad would get work for someone for a day and that is all the work they had. About at that time you got one dollar a day. They thought my dad was really something when my dad would take them down vegetables. One day they had to ask him the name of the vegetable. He told them to peel it, cook it, salt and pepper it and it would be real good.
One time we had some mangles. They are like a sugar beet. They grow about a foot and a half long, bigger than a sugar beet. They are six to eight inches through. We grew them to feed our chickens. We never ate them. This fellow saw them one day and said, “Oh, I love those things.” All they were was chicken feed for us.
Papa was like that to everybody. When that song came out, “Oh Mine Papa”, I just loved that song.
He rented some land. He was working in the sugar factory. We still had the ranch. He rented land up passed the sugar factory. He would take me out there. We had a big garden. He would say, now you hoe so many potatoes today. Now there was a big lake on that place. That was the place all the kids from school would come out to go swimming. Of course none of them had swimming suits. That was called Shaeffer’s Lake. Of course the kids would come out. I would go swimming with them and we would swim all day. A half hour before dad would come back I would be working like heck to try to get these potatoes done that he had told me to do. I would be about one-third done, usually. We had a lot of pigs out there. We built pig pens that would be about eight feet across and eight feet wide. They were all in a big line, just right after each other. We had little two feet wide gates that we just had boards shoved through and that would keep them in, you see. I had watched my dad work with those pigs and do the things that had to be done and all of the little boars had to be cut. We had one boar. That was all that we needed. After I saw him do it for a while, we had the end pen. It was empty. I would go and feed the pigs. Of course, all of the little pigs would come up and eat with the sow. Then I would run down to the end pen. I would get in there in case the sow got out. There were 8 or 10 sows. They all had pigs, just the right size to cut. I did all of the little boars out of each pen until I got to the end one. The sow in the end one was very mean. As quick as you even try to get into the pen she would roar - make a lot of noise. If you got in she would take a leg off of you. I fed her. She was in there eating. I reached down and took a little pig. She roared. I ran down there, with this little pig just squealing like the dickens. I jumped into the end pen with the little pig.
The pen was eight foot square. The top at the back was about 2½ feet high. There was a top that angled up – a slant roof. The roof was made of corrugated metal. We had laid boards across and nailed the tin down through the boards. So there were nails sticking down all over. I was in that pen and I heard that sow coming down through each pen. She would hit the little boards, bang, bang, bang. Of course I was kneeling down on this little pig and I didn’t think she would ever get there. She was as high as the back of the pen. She had tusks in her mouth about an inch and a half long. Those stuck right out the side of her mouth. When she came through the last door into my pen I was down in the corner. I threw the pig at her. She hit the pig and it went about 10 feet in the air and out of the pen. I dove over her with the nails scraping my back. She tossed her head and hooked the side of my leg with one of her tusks. I imagine she had her mouth open because she had been roaring. I don’t remember if I every cut any of her pigs after that.
We had a bunch of cattle that we had fed all winter. It got springtime and this was a Sunday. I got a couple of kids to come out to the farm with me. We decided that we would take these cattle that we had fattened all winter, down to the Stampede grounds and ride them. Dad was working at the sugar factory. I think the sugar factory was ¾ of a mile from that road. We drove the cattle down the road to the Stampede grounds and then we rode them. Then we took them back. We really had a lot of fun. That night when dad came home he said, “Where did you take the cattle?” I was about as shocked as I could be. I said, “How did you know.” He said, “Because I was sitting in the window when you drove by. Do you realize we have been fattening those cattle all winter and you took them down there and rode them?” That was the day we had one big old fat cow. We had ridden everything but that cow. Grant Heggie, whose son is our bishop now, was there and he hadn’t ridden a cow. Come on Grant, it is your turn. No sir, I’m not riding that thing. You have got to ride one or you will go and tell on us. I said, “Look there is that old roan cow. She won’t do a dang thing.” So he decided he would ride her. We got in the shuttle and put a surcingle on her. Or perhaps it was a rope with a loop on it. Then you take the other end of the rope and put it through the loop. You put the little loop underneath the cow and the other end over the cow and down her side through the loop and then you pull that up real tight and put it across the guy’s hand, so that when you get bucked off the cow, the rope comes off the cow.
He got on that old cow and she he was he was ready we turned her out. She bucked harder than any cow we had that day. She bucked him off but he hung on and he went out in a circle going back and forth. Finally he lit with his legs right across her neck and he locked his legs, one toe over the other one. The cow went down and kneeled right over him and he held on so tight with his loop that she couldn’t get up because he was holding her down. He wouldn’t let go. We had to literally pull his feet apart to get him to let her up.
We almost always had home evening once a week. I don’t remember what night we had it. They weren’t like they are now. President Grant was the President of the Church. It was called Family Night. He told us at that time if you would hold family time and not miss that none of our children would go out of the church and leave it. He said they might get wayward but they would come back. My dad was good at having Family Night. Everyone did something different usually. The thing that was the best was when you had the party part of the party. Dad would usually have a dime and a buy a dimes worth of candy. Or maybe they would make ice-cream sometimes. We had a lot of fun. The kids would do different things and sometimes it was funny so everyone would laugh. Before we had treats the kids like to play Button, Button, Whose Got the Button, especially when the little kids would go around. If the little kids had it and someone would point at them they would giggle. What made it funny was everybody knew where it was anyway.
He would take me out on that Ridge country if we just went to Sunday School, had dinner and then went back. He would get back to the ranch at 4 in the afternoon. It was hot. We would turn those sheep out and then go sit on a hill. He would tell stories, or read the Book of Mormon or something out of the Era. I will never forget the things I learned from him out there. Mother wouldn’t go out there and live on that ranch. Things weren’t very good. We just had a big dug out in the side of the hill. That is where we lived. It was a hole dug back in the ground. It was pretty close to the top of the hill, maybe about ten feet from the top. They put two by fours or studs up along the dirt and stuck them in the ground a little ways. Then they put a plate on the top. Then they nailed boards up on the two by fours. The direst would fall against it, but it seemed to be strong enough that it didn’t cave in. In the front they put two windows, one on each side of the door. That is the only light we had. We would cook in it and it was warm in the winter. There was no insulation. We would walk out the door. There was a spring at the bottom of the hill. We had a stove in the centre of it about half way back in the building. It was a little stove and that is what we cooked on. There was a great big rock at the bottom of the hill and water came out from under the rock, cool and clean. There was a coolie and below the stream [plants]. That is where the cattle and horses walked in the mud. They would make holes and then there would be these lumps, and a couple or three acres of [plants]. The spring wouldn’t dry up but it would get pretty dry near the end of the summer.
Making butter one time, I said to dad, “Can’t we make some butter out here?” He said Oh yeah, do you want to make it. I said yes. So he got a jam can and filled it about 2/3 full of cream. I shook and shook and it got tiresome. I went outside and sat in the shade behind a granary. All at once it expanded and the top blew off and it blew cream all over me. I was so mad. I thought he had done that on purpose and he really laughed when he saw cream all over me. And that made me ever madder.
I used to love to go to Waterton Lakes on a father and son's outing with my dad. I can’t tell you anything about it, except that I just thoroughly enjoyed it.
Del Ellison and Tay Fisher Ellison lived in Waterton. He had a pool hall, a garage, a store and a swimming pool. I used to go up there and stay with them a few days and sometimes quite a few days. Wallace was my cousin and I had another cousin named Delton. Wallace became a scientist. He worked on Apollo 13. This was most interesting to me because when Apollo 13 went up it was a wonderful thing. They were talking to them all the time by radio. They lost contact. Everyone was sick. Half an hour later they got in contact with them and everyone was relived and happy. When Uncle Lee Brewerton died Wallace was there with Steele and me and Wallace was telling us how when they lost contact with those people, he said, “Well, we made some fasteners so that when they brought something around to the side of the Apollo that it had two doors on it. So that when they opened this door, then the pressure in the Apollo stayed the same. Then they would shut it. This mechanism had about 12 fasteners. They had to come together and every one of them had to hit at the same time. If one didn’t fasten they wouldn’t go out. He built fasteners so they could run through the one that didn’t close so they could pull it through and fasten it. He said he had two geniuses working for him and they organized it and got it going. The last thing they told the astronauts was to try those fasteners out to see if they worked. So when they went to see if this worked, that is what the astronauts were doing when they couldn’t get in touch with them.
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This is all of the text I have from Uncle Ellsworth. Memoirs are what they are. For me, they are a fascinating glimpse of the past.
Arta
did you type while he talked? These are great stories!
ReplyDeleteHello,
ReplyDeleteNo. I didn't type while he talked. I asked for the stories and they were delivered to me in an envelope on the front of which says "take these stories about my father to Arta". I love hearing Elsworth's voice and getting his tone about Earl.
I did type up some from Lenore, which I must find again.
I am willing to send the word document to anyone, which has its own interest because it doesn't contain a few of the edits I had to make. But anyone is welcome to that.
What vivid stories. The sow's tusks are terrifying to think of. And his father falling on the pipe. Horrific. Then, of course, the gentleness of saying how he loved the father and son's outings, even though he can't recall what they did. The love and respect comes through.
ReplyDeleteWhat a treat! Lucky us that you asked for those stories.
xo Bonnie