This was found after my mom died

Glenna Lucille Pearson Autobiography to High School Graduation

     I was born on January 13, 1918, the 14^th child in a family of 17 children.  I was the first child born after the family moved from Wallsburg, Utah.  Our family circumstances were very humble.  My parents had moved into a log cabin with a road on either side, so I rather fit the  “Old log cabin in the Lane” image.  The cabin was very small, in fact too small to accommodate our family, so there was a second small cabin where the boys slept.

    My older sisters, Beatrice, Margaret, and Maud returned to Utah and were able to finish high school.  Bea was called to serve a mission in the Northwest Mission and Margaret and Maud managed to receive teaching certificates by going to summer school at Ricks College in Rexburg, Idaho.

     My mother had all of her seventeen children with only the aid of a midwife, something one would scarcely attempt today.  Mother told me that when I was only three or four months old the family had the whooping cough and they really feared for my life due to my age. 

     Dad had been the Bishop in Wallsburg and had run a store there.  ( ask Bea, Albert and Howard why he left)

     After their arrival in Lost River, Dad farmed, ran a band of sheep, and had a saw mill.   This saw mill was the cause of a very bad injury to Dad.  He caught his hand in some pulleys and before he was able to stop the machine, his hand was badly mangled.  To my knowledge he never went to the doctor or had any kind of pain killers.  I remember he walked the floor for hours day and night for months.  It was the duty of my older brothers Ross, Albert, Howard, and perhaps Norris to spend the summer in the hills with the sheep.  Ross was always there and developed a lifelong love for sheep at that time and was never without sheep up to the day of his death in December 1975.

     Soon after my birth, Dad started a larger home.  It was three bedrooms, a large dining and living area and a large kitchen.  There was a full upstairs that Dad had intended to finish into bedrooms, but this was never accomplished.  Even after we moved from that home, my brother Ross lived there and he had no need to finish it as he had no children of his own.  The living room was used as a bedroom of necessity and each bedroom had two double beds in them.  Mother made the ticks for the bed which we filled with fresh straw.  Then she made feather ticks.  She spent many hours caring for her family.  She baked eight loaves of bread every other day.  On Monday, water was carried into the house and heated on the stove and mom spent all day Monday scrubbing clothing on the scrub board, rinsing and then ringing them out by hand.   Then out doors to freeze dry in the winter or blow dry in the summer.

I remember the first washing machine.  The motor was hand driven and one of us stood and pulled a stick back and forth to rotate the clothes in the washer.      

     I am not certain which was the first doctor’s bill in our family.  It was either Carol, who jumped into a pile of carpet rags Mother was working on and drove a needle into her foot to the bone, or else it was my broken left arm,  I fell off a horse in January 1923 at age five.  Since we had no car, Tot Wells from Leslie came in his car and drove the fourteen miles to Mackey.  This was quite a journey in a model A ford with no heater and missing glass sides and roads full of snow drifts.  I had the chicken pox at the time of the hard cast on my arm.

     There were three children born after me in the new home: Carol, Melba and Vern.  I only remember Vern’s birth.  It was on April 1, 1923.  It was a very cold Easter Sunday.  I remember how ill Mother was and she was forty-five years old.  Her first child, Beatrice, was born when she was ninteen.  Vern was delivered by a midwife named Stella Evans.  I believe Lizzie Lemmons delivered me.

     I attended school at the Pass Creek School.  In the first grade a Miss Gwendolyn King was my teacher and I thought she was most beautiful.  My sister Margaret taught me in the second grade. [*It is interesting that my dad, in Lincoln, ID, was also taught the second grade by his sister Clara.]  She also had grades one to eight.  Rather a handful for one so young.  She had taught a year or two before this.  Margaret married Newell Barlow the next summer.

     A Mrs. ? came to teach and she decide since I was the only 3^rd grader, she would place me with the 4^th grade as there were three others in the 4^th grade.  This made teaching easier for her, but I do remember it was harder for me as we moved to Menan before the year was over.  I am sure the effect of that special promotion did hinder me in school until I was in college at which time I “caught up” so to speak.

     Our move to Menan took place in 1926.  The purpose of this move (as I remember it)   was to get us near enough to high school so those of us young enough could graduate.  We went by sleigh and wagon to grade school, finally truck and  a Mr. Raymond drove the truck.  When we entered high school there was no transportation provided for the  three and a half miles.  I do remember Mr. Raymond often picked me up in the school truck and took me part way.  One year Mack and I rode in a small cart pulled by one horse.  Dad’s move to Menan did result in all the girls and one son, still at home,  graduating from high school.  Norris, Willa, Carol, Melba and I graduated.

     There were nine of us at home for mother to care for.  Plus the fact that my sister Maude had divorced her husband and sent her three young sons to live with us.  This made twelve  children from the ages of three to twenty two for mother to care for.   Dad died in 1933 at the age of sixty one.  Mother was only fifty-five at the time with nine of her children and three grandchildren. 

     When Maude finally decided to take her children home to California, she insisted that mother let me go with them.  Mother did allow this, so I spent my senior year in high school in Berkley, California.    Maude worked an evening shift.  She kept Laddie until noon and then dropped him off at kindergarten.  After I got out of school I would walk to the kindergarten, pick up Lad, then fix supper for Len, Bob, and Lad and get them to bed.  This was an interesting experience for one who had lived on a farm in Idaho up to age sixteen.