Thomas Mower Life History

Interview July 24, 1994 by Jerry Mower

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I was born in Fairview, Utah, August 21, 1923. I was born at my Grandmother Larsen's home. She lived right on Main Street in Fairview. That's where she and Grandpa lived all of their lives. They had quite a large rock home that they had built there. They had quarried the rock out of the west hills. In Fairview they had a rock quarry that the people of the town built a lot of homes from.

Grandpa John Mower died in May of 1923, so I never knew him. But I knew my other grandparents-my Grandmother Amelia Anderson and my Grandmother Geneva Tucker Larsen, and James Peter Larsen. I knew him well. I was named after a man named Thomas Moore and he married Dad's older sister, Aunt Edna Mower and they lived out at Magna. He worked the copper mines and was really a fine gentleman. He always had a new car that he kept beautifully polished and he always brought it down. He was always shining that car. That was back in the days when automobiles were just becoming popular, so Dad and Mother liked him, so they decided to name me after him.

My middle name is spelled Moreland. I believe that's how it is on my birth certificate. But I believe it should be spelled Mooreland.

I spent most of the time in Oak Creek when I was young. We had a big farm-maybe 2000 or 3000 acres-300 acres of it farming ground. We had lots of horses. All the farming, plowing, and haying was done with horses. We didn't have any tractors in those days.

What do you remember about your Grandma Anderson?

She was really an outstanding woman. I always liked her. She was strong-willed and had a beautiful face. She was a quite large bodied woman. She was very strong. I can remember she would carry two milk cans ( I imagine they were 5 and 10 gallons)-one in each hand from the corral across the field to the separating house. She and Dad ran the farm after Grandpa had died. They always milked a herd of cows and they always had a herd of range cattle.

Did she ever tell you much about Sweden?

She told me that the place where she lived was very beautiful. They used to go down to the ocean to gather cranberries in the marshes. I think she left Sweden when she was 12 years old, so she probably wouldn't have remembered too much about it. I didn't know her parents. I knew her sister, Aunt Albertine Anderson and her brother, Chris Anderson. When they came over from Sweden, they'd been converted by the missionaries and they decided to come to America. But when they got out to Utah, and saw the terrain and how desolate it was, they didn't want to stay, but they'd spent all their money and they couldn't go back. So they stayed in Utah and they settled down in Sanpete County.

What do you remember about your Grandpa Larsen?

He was always a good natured man, had a great sense of humor and was always very religious. He always attended his church. He was the clerk and he was meticulous about keeping books. He had penmanship that was outstandingly beautiful, so they had him keep all the birth and death records of the city of Fairview, almost as long as he lived as long as he could write. People would come from all over and want to know birth dates and death dates and he would have that information available to anyone that wanted it. He farmed most of his life, but he also worked in the mines over at Huntington. Sometimes he would walk to the mines and work and then walk home. I believe the distance of that is 40 miles. I know that he would go one way in one day. I don't know if he would work a day or two and then come back, but I know that he walked over the top of the mountain and down into Huntington to work the coal mines. He was a powder man. When we built the road up Dry Creek Canyon (east of Millburn and Oak Creek that is about 14 miles to the top), the ranger, Seth Allerton, came to Dad and said, "Win, can you build a road up Dry Creek Canyon?" Dad says, "Why sure". So he hired all of his relatives. It was during the depression, and there wasn't any money available, and they paid them three and four dollars a day depending on what they could do. Those that had horses and a scraper could make more money. So we started to build the road up Dry Creek Canyon, and Grandpa Larsen was the powder man. He would blow all the big rocks out of the mountain and down into the side of the canyon, so we could push the road through. One day, it was kind of funny, the ranger came to Dad and he said, "Win, you've got to hire somebody besides your own relatives." So I remember Dad went out and hired one other man. We built the road up the mountain, through the slides and through really rough terrain. Those men were capable of doing a lot of hard work and accomplishing things that you wouldn't believe that they could with the meager equipment that was available to them then. They used the road to trail sheep and cattle onto the range. People from Fountain Green and Mt. Pleasant would trail their herds up into the mountains for the summer range. When we finished it, you could drive a car up it. It was just a dirt road but it was packed so that a vehicle could go up and down. Today it's back to basically a trail because they have never kept it up.

What do you remember about your Grandma Geneva Tucker?

She was a very, very, very, loving mother who adored her children, and she thought that they could do anything. The whole family was artistic. They were either musicians and they could play piano and all kinds of instruments and could draw and paint. These were things that they liked to do. She was one of the best seamstresses that I had ever known. In those times, material was cheap and you could go to the store and buy a bolt of material and then you could make a lot of dresses. Grandma would go by the store window and see a dress that she liked and then she'd come home and sit down to her sewing machine and she could make that dress, and it looked exactly like the one in the store. She had a keen eye and a great ability. She used to make overcoats for her kids in the winter and all kinds of clothing for people. She also used to dress the dead. When the people would die in the town, Grandma would sew the clothing for the burial. Grandpa Larsen was Justice of the Peace in Fairview. He used to hold a little court on those people that broke the law. He had what was called the stray pen down in his corral, where any strays that came along the streets, that weren't being taken care of, could be picked up and put in the stray pen. If you got your cattle or horses put in the stray pen it cost you 25 cents to get them out. That was to keep the streets cleared of cattle and strays of all kinds. He kept that most of his life. Most of the old barn where the stray pen was, was a fort, and that's how the people of Fairview, which was called I believe, North Bend, and they had holes through the walls where they could shoot at the Indians. When the Indians would come in and try to take the livestock and try to attack the people there, they would fight the Indians off from that fort. The Indians would sweep down from the hills and try to get between the herders and the cattle in those very early days. They would try to separate the cattle. One time they came down and they separated out a bunch of cattle and headed north with them toward Indianola. My Great Grandfather Tucker, Grandma's father, got a group of men and started after the Indians. They followed them up to Thistle Junction, then up across the top of the mountain down to Soldier Summit, and down into what is now Helper and Price. They followed them down clear into Southern Utah. They had been gone ten days. They never caught sight of the Indians and they never saw the cattle. So the Indians were pretty clever. They never did get the cattle back.

The first winter they down in that country they used to scrape the snow off to try to keep the cattle that they had alive. When they couldn't get enough feed and a critter would die and drop over in the winter, the Indians would pounce on it and take that for their own, and they would eat that. My Great Grandfather Tucker was the Bishop in Fairview for 27 years. He always had a big table in his house and he would set it and the Indians would always come in, in the evening and eat with the family that were there. We always had a place set for some of the Indians. The Indians lived out at Indianola, and there were twelve lodges out there, or teepees.

The first horse that my Dad bought was a buckskin from the Indians. He gave the Indians twelve silver dollars for this little buckskin. The Indians had hunted out the country down there so the game was very scarce. They had trails all over in the mountains.

What is the earliest memory you have of your life?

I can remember back before I went to school. We had a type of a school bus we used to call "The Old Hack". It was a covered wagon that would come down the valley, pick up all the kids at their homes and take them down to the Fairview schools. In the winter the wagon wheels were replaced with bobs so it could go in the snow. It had a stove in it and a chimney that went up through the canvas with a piece of metal around it. You could see it coming for quite a ways, because the smoke would be poring out of the chimney and the horses would be plodding along. The kids would be running behind it. Before I went to school I used to run out and jump on the back and ride on the old hack. My dad used to go down to the west side of the valley where there was a power plant. We had a dynamo down there that provided electricity for the community. It was built by John Christenson, who was a sheep man. Dad was the tender of the plant-he was the one that kept the dynamo running. It was kind of an interesting set up. They had brought the water along the side of the mountain in a ditch. Then they brought it out in a flume in an iron pipe down the side of the mountain, and then they narrowed it down to a spigot that hit a great big cast iron water wheel that was in a building. This cast iron water wheel had cups molded in it as it was built. It sat on two great chunks of concrete in there. Then they had a belt from the pulley on the water wheel up to the dynamo. The water would hit the water wheel and start the dynamo up and the electricity would be generated. Then they had all their switch boxes and everything up on the wall. They'd throw the switch and the lights would come on and electricity would be generated to homes up in Oak Creek. I wasn't big enough to be able to get across the creek by myself, so Dad would always carry me across the creek on his back. In the spring when it was flooding we would sometimes have a hard time getting across, but we always made it.

Tell us a little bit about growing up on the farm in Oak Creek, and your brothers and sisters and what you all used to do.

We used to spend most of our time on the farm doing what farmers do. We were haying and putting up the grain. We would haul hay all summer long because we had so much of it to do. In the fall we would haul grain. We used to put the grain in great round stacks because we used what was called a binder to cut the grain and it would put them out in shocks, and these shocks were bundles of grain. The binder would cut it and tie it and kick the shock out on to the ground and we would stack them in cone shaped piles all over the field. Then we would come along with pitch forks and load them on to hay racks. Then we'd take them up to the stack yard where we did all our threshing. We'd take the bundles off and put them in great round stacks. We'd have maybe five or six great stacks of grain out there all ready to be thrashed. Then in the fall when the hay was all up, the cattle came off the mountain, and we would put the cattle in the fields because we would have cleared all the fields of hay and grain. Then we would thresh. It took a week of steady threshing to thresh out our grain. While the thrasher ran all day long we would haul grain over to the granaries and dump into the bins. By the time we finished we had enough grain for the winter for all the livestock and all the chickens and everything that we fed. We had enough for our own flour too. A lot of times at the mill we had our own flour ground. We'd take wheat to the mill, have it ground into flour and then we'd bring the flour home for baking and so on.

We had a lot of things to do as kids. We always had swimming pools that we built ourselves. We would dam off the creek. Mother was upset at us one time because she had taken a rug out of the upstairs and had put it out on the line to be cleaned by having the dust beaten out of it. We came along and we took this rug. We took it down to the creek and made a dam out of it. We put it across a big pole and we sandbagged the bottom and we tied it to the top and sandbagged the sides and we backed up the water so far in the creek that the farmers came down and complained that we were flooding the grain fields. So we found an ideal spot to build a swimming pool. After we'd worked in the hay, we'd go down there and swim. We'd get a great big board and put a rock under it at the edge of the bank, then we'd put some big rocks on it at the back to make a diving board. We'd come running off the side of the hill and hit this board and dive out into the swimming hole that we'd made. Then after we'd get through swimming we'd fish right in the same place. There were always fish in there.

For recreation too we used to chase goats. Prince Anderson and Uncle Johnny had a lot of domestic goats. They ran in the hills. There was a sort of big limestone shale mountain that had soft dirt in it, but at the top it was all cliffs. These goats ran through these cliffs and then go up and feed over the top of the mountain. We used to get together as a bunch of kids and try to catch these goats. They were running wild and were pretty hard to catch but we knew how to do it. We would go up there and we'd run them up to the north end of the last cliffs and then head them out and send them across the hill. They'd start running across the hill and we'd be hiding behind the bushes and when the goats would come out we'd run and tackle them, and roll down the mountain with this goat. That's the way we caught our goats. Then we would take them home and tie them up and feed them and make harnesses for them. We'd have these carts we'd use and we'd drive these goats around. All the neighbor kids had a goat, so we'd have our own little transportation.

Of course we used to have saddle horses all the time. Everybody had a saddle horse. We would race horses and spent quite a bit of time running horses. We knew who had the fastest horses. We had a desert horse we called our filly. She was a pretty sorrel that had a great big white stripe down her face. She could really run, but you couldn't stop her once she got started. So we'd go down and get the filly down there and she could outrun the horses, but then to get her stopped was something else. So one day this kid that was always hanging around and kind of bothering me, Eldon Mower was his name, I decided to give him a good ride on this horse. So we got him up on Old Filly and slipped up behind her with a club and whacked her in the behind. She took off and away he went on a wild ride. Then she came up and she decided to stop running so she ran right over to the fence and stopped dead and he flew over into the pasture.

We would take our horses up into the mountains and we would pick choke cherries and all kinds of things like that. We always had something going on. We built water wheels too in the creeks. We could turn things with water wheels because we had water power. Water would come down the ditches and we could build these water wheels and turn them with the power of the stream. We built tree houses. We had a great big cottonwood tree out west of my dad's barn. This was were we did all our mischief work. We had a rope that would climb up to a platform way high in the tree. Then we would pull the rope up. We'd get rotten eggs we would take up there and store up on the platform. We'd hide and when somebody would come down the road we'd rotten egg 'em. They couldn't get us up in the tree because we'd pull the rope up.

We were fishing down in the beaver dams down in Lewis Mower's place and Fritz's place. It was just the creek that came winding along and the beavers had built dams every fifty, or hundred feet, and there were nice fishing holes in there. Ross Mower, Wendell Mower and me were fishing, and I had Jimmy who was nine years younger than I. I was maybe 13 or 14 yrs. Old. We just happened to look up and there standing in the grain field to the east of us was this great big critter. I didn't pay much attention to it because I was busy fishing. Ross had a dog with him that he'd named Ponto. Ross said "Go get him Ponto", so the dog started running off after the critter. When he raised his head we could see that it was a big Holstein bull that Tim Fouls owned. We knew that he was mean. As soon as the dog started after him the bull just whipped that dog aside and came for us just as hard as he could run. I had my brother there and I didn't know what to do because there were no trees to climb and all there were was some birch and some other willows there in bunches. I thought, "Well, that's no good, I can't get up there with him", so I grabbed him and jumped into the beaver dam and swam across the beaver dam with Jimmy. When I got to the other side there was a solid wall of briars, and they were probably as big as my thumb. I went through those briars and I didn't even feel it-I just went through with my bare hands. I went right on through and came to where the creek curved around with another beaver dam and I went right through that, and I went on right over toward the hill where I thought it was safe, and climbed up the hill with Jimmy. Then I looked back and there was Ross pinned up in this bunch of birch hanging on with his arms and legs and the bull was right under him, bellowing and trying to hit him with his head. He was just a little bit higher than the bull could reach. Wendell was in the willows and the bull was after him too and he had them pinned. I saw a kid come down through the field that was naked, and his name was Clin Rigby. So Clin was coming down and he didn't have any clothes on because he'd been swimming in the old gravel pit with about 15 other kids. He yelled, "What's the matter?" and just as he yelled that bull looked up and saw him and took after him. There he was running up through that field just as hard as he could naked as a jaybird. He yelled to the kids in the swimming pool, "Run for your lives, Tim's bulls coming!" So all these kids piled out of the swimming pool and climbed up the bank just as hard as they could run and they were running for a grove of cottonwood trees that was about a block away. The bull was gaining on them and they were all flying and they were all naked. When they hit these cottonwood trees, they didn't care whether the bark was rough or not, they went right up 'em. So the bull kept them pinned there quite a while. I went on home-I didn't want anything more to do with that situation. Finally the man came down and got his bull. But that was quite an exciting day.

Tell us a little bit about your mother.

Mother and Dad were just about as opposite as day and night. Dad couldn't do anything that required anything tedious or delicate or intricate or complicated. He could do things that required great effort or big projects, like building a road or highway, or saw down trees and get a bunch of lumber out. He loved to do things with men, and he was always kind of a leader of men when anyone would come in and want to know the details of what was going on. Dad could remember anything because he had almost a photographic memory. He could remember everybody's water turn and when people died and all kinds of details about lives that most people couldn't remember.

Mother was just the opposite. She couldn't remember very well. But she was exceptionally talented. She could sing and she could write a book. She could write music and she could paint. She could set a table and it was the most beautiful thing you've ever seen. And boy could she ever cook. She could make pies, or lemon pies, or chocolate cake and everything was just superb. We would always have a lot of family members come in on holidays and on special occasions we would get together as a family. Mother would always prepare a wonderful meal. And she was good natured, always pleasant and quite happy. She didn't do so well with Dad because he was so headstrong and so determined. He was hard to work with. He was a man's man. He didn't like any trivia. The fact is Dad couldn't stand to listen to music much or anything. I only heard him sing one song in my life-"When the moon came over the mountain." He used to sing that, but Mother was really a fine person with lots of abilities. She decorated wedding cakes for years. People would come from all around and have her make a wedding cake for them and they were beautiful. She sold a lot of her painting to people all over the country.

I remember she had scars on her arms. Can you tell us about that?

Jimmy had just been born and I was nine years old. I came down the road, down our street, and mother came running out of the house. She was screaming and when I saw her she was holding both arms out like this and the flesh was hanging down about a foot from her arms. She had been burned. We had a coal stove and that was a Friday afternoon. We were going on a picnic the next day, Saturday. There were two cans we had in the corner of the house. One had kerosene in for kerosene lamps and the other had gasoline in for a gasoline type lamp. She was in a hurry to start a fire because she wanted to get dinner for us that evening and she had picked up the wrong can, gasoline instead of kerosene, and poured it on the wood stacked in the stove. There were hot coals down there and it exploded into her face. It burned her all over on her breasts and arms and she was scarred very badly. She must have turned her face. My older brother Berkeley, was there and he grabbed a rug and threw it around her and smothered the flames, which probably saved her life. Then I came in and I can remember looking and seeing Jimmy who was just a baby, and the whole kitchen was on fire. I ran in and took him out. Mother was a long time healing. We took her down to Grandma Larsen's and the doctor came in and he said, "Well, Thell, you'll never be able to use your hands again, they're burned closed." They'd been rubbing all kinds of ointments on them and doing everything they possibly could. So they decided to get some Melchizedek priesthood holders in to give Thelma a blessing. I don't remember who those men were. I was quite young and quite anxious because I didn't think my mother would live. They came in and they gave her a blessing and after they had finished, her hands started to open. She recovered the use of her hands, but she was scarred all of her life. She did all of her painting after that had taken place, so she was really a capable person.

Her artistic ability seemed to be all natural. She didn't seem to have to learn. She had an eye for beauty. I can remember riding along with her in a car and she would say, "Oh, isn't that beautiful?" I would say "What do you mean?" She would say, "All of those lights and those beautiful hills." She saw beauty in everything.

We got the fire out. I think when I came in the exploding gas was burning in the air and looked like everything was on fire. When Mother got burned, Dad was up in the field, and did he ever come running. He was leaping fences as he came. It was a bad time for us. It was during the great depression and a time of drought too. We didn't have much water. We'd turn the water down to the garden and sometimes it would never reach the garden on our turn. That year we took all our cattle out of Sanpete Valley and took them over to the Uinta basin. We trailed them over through Indianola and over the mountain into Colton, and down into Helper, up Indian Canyon and down into Duchene and then out into the Roosevelt area and out into the Indian lands. The Indians let us winter our cattle and horses over there. We left some of them there all winter or our livestock wouldn't have survived. The next year we got more moisture and we brought them back.

Tell us about what you remember about elementary school and high school.

We went to Fairview elementary school. My first teacher was a woman by the name of Gladys Graham. She was a nice teacher. We rode the bus by the time I went to school. I can remember the first book I ever read. It was called "Waggin Puss" It was about cats and dogs. I must have learned to read in a hurry because I can remember being able to take that book home and read it. My second grade teacher was named Mrs. Rigby. She was kind of a different type personality. She liked art. When I was a kid, I was pretty good at art and good draw. She always used to bring my work up and show it to the class. We used to have a lot of games and things. We played soccer. We had a soccer field. We played soccer constantly at recesses, at noon and until the bus came.

I got interested in sports early in my life. I didn't know that I had any athletic ability. At one time they took all the kids out of the elementary school and had us all race down the length of the soccer field. When I got down to the end, there was nobody there and when I looked back they were still all coming. So the school started to send me to the athletic competitions at the University of Utah and around. I'd compete in what we called the pentathlon. We'd compete in seven states. We would have the dash, the broad jump, the high jump, the basketball throw and the shot put and things like that. I had a lot of fun doing that. It kind of kept me interested in school too. Plus the fact that I could almost always take the broad jump, and the dash and the shot put and the basketball throw. I wasn't a very good high jumper-I never did win that one. We had six grades. Fairview was fairly large. We had about 1500 people there. Oak Creek, Millburn, and Indianola also came. At that time there were about 100 families in Oak Creek. I imagine Millburn had about the same, and Indianola probably had some less. I graduated from high school in 1941.

I wasn't too interested in school in high school. Mother (Maurine) was quite a scholar. She was really into it. All I wanted to do was play ball. I wanted to play football and track and basketball and that's what I lived for. I could do some classes pretty well like geometry and chemistry and sciences, but I didn't ever work at it. I remember I came into class one day and a girl said we were having a test that day. It was all on the elements. So I borrowed her book and in the few minutes before the test started I memorized about all the elements. I think there were about 96 and I got most of them right. By the time I was a senior I started to get interested in educational things. I started to compete with the students and get serious about it.

I decided to go up to Utah State College. Mother and Dad didn't have any money and they really didn't have any interest in education to see me go on either. I decided to go ahead in those days in what was called a rehabilitation type of program-kind of a government sponsored program where you could go into a college and go into some of these specialized fields like aircraft engineering and drafting and different things like that for college courses. So I decided to go up there to Utah State and get an education. When I left home I had $11.00 that Aunt Ardith had gathered up for me and an extra pair of trousers. Aunt Ardith went around to all the members of the family and asked them to contribute. She said. "Tommy's going away to school and I'd like you to chip in." I had a pair of Levi's that were about worn out and a pair of trousers that were my brother's. I hadn't been up to school very long and he came up and got those so it left me with one pair of trousers. To pay for my schooling I had to work out on projects, like building buildings and digging trenches. We dug a trench in Logan that was 16 feet deep from the mountain clear down through the valley. We did it all with shovels. Then we laid the pipe in it. It was so deep it was all you could do when you got to the bottom to throw it out over the lip and make it stay. We worked on that in the winter and went to school too. Of course we had supervision. Then the war came along and we were up in the engineering building in Logan and they came along and said, "Civil service has a test that they give. If you can pass the test, you can get a job down at Hill Field." We went in to take this test and the room was filled up with people because everybody wanted a job. They probably wanted a job more than they wanted to go to school. We took the test and I thought I never could have passed it. But as it turned out I was one of 9 who passed the test, so that gave me a civil service appointment. Then I got married, because I had a job. I earned $75.00 a month. That's what we lived on. Our apartment was $22.50, and that was furnished.

Maurine: We lived in Logan. We just had a little apartment with a bedroom and a front room, but we thought it was quite nice, because we were used to living in old farm houses. We got married in February of 1942. And then we moved down to Salt Lake. Tom: Then I started working at Hill Field in aircraft. That was a specialty. Back in those days, air craft was different than it was today. When we were working on bombers at the beginning, the cylinder head temperature gauge, and the oil pressure gauge, were out on the cell of the engine. They were outside, so to see them, the pilot would have to stick his head out the window and look outside to see what his oil pressure was, and to see whether his engine was hot enough to take off. So it was pretty basic.

I was working at Hill Field and I was drafted into the army. I went down to Fort Douglas because I was going to go in the army. I didn't know what branch I would be in. As I went down there they had given me my mustering in, all my gear and everything. I got a phone call from Hill Field, and they wanted me back. So they mustered me out of the army and so actually I was honorably discharged from the army just after I got in. And I went back to Hill Field. I was there for awhile and again they called up the draft for more men and I decided at that time that I would go into the navy, and so I went down to Ogden and was sworn in to the US Navy. I went to the San Diego Naval Air Station. They put us on a train at Ogden, and we went to San Diego and received our basic training. I stayed there about 8 weeks and then they had us ready to ship out. I got word that I was going to be shipped out overseas. Actually, I had received a petty officer rating while I was in boot camp, so that took me away from a lot of things I didn't have to do, because I was a petty officer. Then I found out I was going to leave so I called Maurine and told her, "I'm going to be shipped out, so why don't you come down." So she took the bus and came down to see me before I went overseas. We had one night before I left and I didn't have a pass. Around this shipping out base, people were coming and going, but to get out you had to have a pass, and when you had shipping orders you couldn't get out. I decided I was going to see Maurine anyway, so I said to the guy that was patrolling the fence, "My wife's coming down and I want to see her before I go overseas because I don't know when I'll ever be back or if I'll ever be back. What would happen if you were walking that way and I went over the fence this way? He said, "I wouldn't see you." So as he walked on down this way and I made a run and went over the top of that fence. It was about 20 feet high and I remember I dropped about 15 feet on the other side. I went over and met Maurine. Then the problem was, she left and came back to Utah, and after we had spent the night together, I didn't have a way to get back in the base. That was a pretty good problem, because I would have been AWOL (absent without leave), so I was walking along, thinking of ways to get back in the base. I looked down on the street and there was a pass-somebody had dropped their pass. I remember it was this green card to the naval air station base-submarine base. I picked it up and just walked right through the gate, hands on that card, and I was back on the base. When I got back in there, I had a friend by the name of Black, and he like me quite well. I was supposed to go to Alameda Air Station in San Francisco, and when I got back he said, "Hurry up-They've called muster, and mustered twice, once for myself and once for you. I volunteered you for overseas." I said, "Why you dirty rat!" So the USS Franklin, Air Craft Carrier, was sitting out in the harbor and that was the ship that we were to leave on. The next day we were on that ship. We didn't know where we were going, but we were sailing for Hawaii. When we got out to Hawaii we docked right at Pearl Harbor. The bands were playing, and they had hula girls out there and the laies and everything to welcome the service men in-the traditional things they did over there. They said my orders read that I was stationed at Pearl Harbor. I was assigned to Carrier Air Craft service unit #1. So that meant that I was to be tied right in. Of course I had quite a bit of specialized air craft experience, because I'd been to school on air craft back in Detroit, and I'd had the engineering training up at Logan, and I knew quite a bit about air craft, especially about some technical parts. So they put me right there and it was just like I was a civilian without leave. But then we got in to the air base routine and we found out that we could have weekend passes to go over to Hawaii.

I kind of started to get interested in the church. I hadn't been interested in the church at all. I hadn't ever really ever gone to church. Of course I was a grown man by then. As I was stationed there, they were holding some MIA meetings, and some LDS people were meeting in there, and I decided to go to one. I got acquainted with some of the fellows there, and then I started to get interested in the church. I started to do quite a bit of reading of the gospel, and scriptures and special books by general authorities and so on. That's how my real interest in the church developed, is right there at Pearl Harbor.

Tell us about your boxing on the air craft carrier.

That was on the island. I was pretty handy and I got into a few competitions with people. I was a pretty good boxer, and could have been up to the top if I'd wanted to pursue it, but I'd developed other interests. I'd met a fellow by the name of Lloyd Richardson, from Cal Tech. He was quite a wizard with math, and he happened to be LDS. I met him on the ship as I was going to Hawaii. He kept coming around by the bunk and I didn't want to be bothered with him because he was just kind of an over friendly guy. I didn't want to rack up any friendships-I had a lot on my mind. He got put off at Pearl Harbor too, and we struck up a friendship. He was a machinist, but he also had a strong educational background and was good LDS. He said, "Let's get together and study. I've got a study room up in the top of a hanger." He had built himself a little complex right up in the very top of the hanger. We'd go up the catwalk up there and he'd moved an electric stove up there, and we were having steaks. We'd go up there and study at night. We'd study English and Math and all kinds of things-a little church. Whatever we wanted to do we had a little room all to ourselves. Down in the housing complex all we had was just a bunk in a big room with other navy personnel. That's where my interest turned away from the athletics and the boxing.

We met quite a few other LDS while we were there and started to have regular weekly meetings. We made a requisition from the administration at the base and asked them if we could have a place where we could meet for religious services. They gave us a room down the basement of the theater. We would go down there and hold meeting. That's when I started getting interested in the church. Mother was sending me a lot of books about the church. She sent me a book by John Taylor that really impressed me. I thought, "You know, this must be the truth, there must be something to this. I'd never read anything that interesting that made as much sense to me as that writing. I don't think I still have that book-I wish I did. That's the first book I read on the LDS church. It got to be where I had a whole library of books. On my bunk bed I built a cabinet with a little lock on it and I had it full of books. I had my own little library.

I stayed right there in Pearl Harbor-never went out. A friend and I volunteered to go south with the fleet and go down in the battle zone. They didn't want us down there. They said they needed us right in Pearl Harbor, so they kept us there. It was nice, very nice. It was just like being in Hawaii. We were there about 1 1/2 years. We would go over to this place called Malona Koa, over by Waikiki ward. I was grown up when I started to pass the sacrament, right there in Waikiki ward.

We did a lot of swimming in the ocean. We had a friend that had a lot of pull in the naval base and he could get us a jeep. On weekends we would get a jeep and go over to Laiia- that's over by the temple. Over there they have what they call "coral gardens". It's a beautiful place over there. The ocean comes in on that north and east shore and boy it does come in beautifully. There are these great coves over there where you can go in and you can do a lot of underwater fishing. We would go over in the coves and swim and fish and go up into the pineapple fields and get pineapple and it was just a real nice place to be. We spent a lot of time spear fishing and swimming and enjoying ourselves. It really wasn't like we were in the war. The only time we felt like we were in the war was when we got back to the naval base. We would go to church on Sunday and then we would go over to the beach at Waikiki and surf board, or we would go out and go across the island to Laie and do some underwater fishing and exploring the ocean. I got so I could swim out there for 6 or 8 hours and never come in-swim all day. Fact is, I got to be a professional swimmer by being out there. The Hawaiian boys had their fish traps out there, and they would swim out in the ocean to where their fish traps were and then they would dive down and bring up their trap and take the fish out and reset traps. A lot of those families just lived off the ocean. You see why the islanders wouldn't have to worry very much about food because there is such a plentiful food supply there all the time.

Tell us what you did after the war.

I came home and tried to do a number of things. When I got back from Hawaii we landed at Alameda Naval Air Station at Oakland, California. We were mustered out one morning on the air craft matt. There were probably 200-300 men mustered out and they would come and look over the lines of men. They said, "We want 10 men" They came over to me and looked at me for a moment and said, "We want you. We want you over to fleet headquarters." So they took us over there and assigned us to train patrol. We were in charge of the train from one station to the next. Our job was to oversee that train and the servicemen that are coming home. We were the shore patrol on that and we worked with an MP. They said I was going to Ogden, Utah, and would be patrolling the train from Ogden to Cheyenne, Wyoming. I asked where a phone was and I called Maurine and told her what was happening, and that I was going to be stationed in Ogden and we would have to get us a place to live. I worked with a Lt. McMillan. I was on a run 36 hours to Cheyenne and back and then I was off 36 hours.

One night I went in to the restroom near the vestibule, where there was a black man drinking whiskey. He was getting mean and I said to him, "You'll have to get rid of that." He had a glass of whiskey sitting on the sink. He said, "That don't mean nothin'. I won't do it." He came up to me and I had an SP on my arm for Shore Patrol. He came up to me and said, "That doesn't mean shit." As he did that, he reached in his back pocket, and as he brought his hand out, he had a knife that was palmed and the blade was sticking up. I wouldn't have seen it, but there was a little light on the ceiling there, and it just glinted on that blade. And when it glinted on that blade I hit him as hard as I could and knocked him down by the sink. I had a night stick that was hickory and I said, "Now if you get up, I'll split your head open with this. We're going to put you off this train at Rock Springs." So we took him off the train at Rock Springs and put him in jail. Of course, he threatened my life after that too.

We had tough people coming back out of the war, and we had to have some authority. One night we had a whole train car load of homosexuals that were dishonorably discharged. I'll never forget the weirdness of the appearances of those people as we went into that car. I had to take charge of those people. That was a bad situation. I was on train patrol with a man by the name of Kelly Alverson. He was an Irishman from New York. He was one of New York's police officers, and he was well trained. We were walking along one night and walked into this train car. You had to keep all the drunks under control. We had different ways of doing that, even to the point of disconnecting the cars and putting the car on the siding. They started to break the windows out. Sometimes because they'd been in the service, they'd get completely out of control. Putting the car on the siding would 'freeze 'em up'. Anyway as we walked into this one car, this big navy guy jumped down in front of me and he says, "If I can't whip either one of you guys, I'll eat that sea bag over there. Kelly said to me, "Just back up slow into this passage way and tell them to come on." So we backed up slow into the passage way and said, "All right, come on." They didn't have the nerve to do it.

One night I was on with this MP who was always telling me that he was a judo expert. I happened to walk around, just turning to go from one car to the other, and right as I made the turn, there was a great big army sergeant that had him and was choking him to death. His face was blue, and he had him up against the wall of the car, choking him. I grabbed a hold of this sergeant and we went the rounds and I finally got him under control and we had to take care of him. We ran into some of those situations.

We didn't have a home and homes were really tough to find. They had these little government housing projects like Bonneville Park. They had these cinder brick houses at Bonneville Park. I thought I would try to get one of those. I walked in the office and as I walked in the office, this woman said to me, "Tommy, are you back from the service?" I said, "Yup, and I'm looking for a house." She said, "I'll get you one." So she got us a home and we were able to bring our family there. We lived there until I finished out my time in the service.

So when did you decide to go back to the University of Utah to go to school?

After I'd worked with Lloyd Richardson and we did all that studying together, it just kind of whetted my appetite for learning. I just decided I wanted to get an education. So after I came back, I went out to Hill Field. I had a permanent job out there if I'd wanted to stay. It was kind of a make work situation. There wasn't really enough to do all the time, so I decided I would go down and register at the university and go to school. I worked out at Hill Field at night, and went to school during the day on the GI bill. That helped us through. Tuition was really modest at that time-only $90.00.

How did you first get your testimony of the gospel?

That's probably the one thing that's kept me in the church, because even though I'd done a lot of studying and started to get interested in the gospel, and had attended classes over in Hawaii and had met a lot of good LDS people, it's easy to drift back the other way. After I started to go to the University of Utah, I studied a lot of different subjects, as you do when you attend a university. I had become curious about the Book of Mormon. One time I read in the 10th Chapter of Moroni, and you know what it says there. "And after you receive these things, (in other words, after you've read the book,) something about, "I would that you would ask God in the name of Jesus Christ if they are not true. And if you ask with a sincere heart, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it to you through the power of the Holy Ghost." I don't think I'm quoting that exactly right, but I remember reading that. And so I decided that I would pray and ask if the Book of Mormon was true, because I really didn't know that it was, and I'd studied a lot of subjects, and I'd even studied a little anthropology and that, which didn't impress me at all. Neither did the biology classes that I'd taken up there. They didn't impress me much. But anyway, I decided to pray that it was true, and I remember going in by the bed and kneeling down and asking the Lord if the Book of Mormon is true, because I wanted to know. I didn't know of any other way to find out, except what I'd read, like Joseph Smith. Maurine was working in the stake as the Laurel leader. She asked me one afternoon to go to a meeting with her up at the stake. I said, "I don't want to go." She said, "Why not?" I said, "Because I'm not interested." She said, "Well, will you go just for me?" I thought that over for a minute and I thought I'd go for her. So we went up to this meeting. I imagine there were 40 to 50 people in the room. They had a record on about Apostle Cowley down among the Maori people. It was a very spiritual meeting. They were telling about this man that was brought back from the dead through the power of the priesthood. I remember that room was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop. It was so quiet-not a sound in there except what the speaker was saying and this record. And then suddenly I began to feel a different feeling-a burning that came all over in my chest-warm feeling, strange feeling, different than anything I'd ever felt before. And it stayed for maybe 15 or 20 minutes. And then a voice spoke to me into this ear and said to me, "THIS IS A TESTIMONY THAT THE BOOK OF MORMON IS TRUE!" And I knew it wasn't anybody from this world that had spoken those words to me. So I had received the answer to the prayer that I had offered-the Lord had told me that it was the truth. It took quite a while for that to take hold, but I kept going back to it and thinking about it, and it began to change my life.

The first job in the church that I held was to work with Cloid Hofhines in the MIA. We were in the 6th ward in Bountiful. That was before this (testimony) happened.