<<13 July 1991>>
Final Taped Visit
Steve Richardson and Elizabeth and Kirk Jensen
E: ...You still have to go through Richardson.
S: Lizzie, by the way, is the family genealogist now. She's
the one that knows the most about it of anybody. She wanted
to ask you some questions about your grandmother and all the
different people that you knew that she's only read about.
E: Ah hah! There's not many Richardsons in the news. These
people, they read the news, but they didn't make it!
S: We brought a tape recorder, so we're going to tape what
you say.
E: Uh huh. I don't speak well.... You'll have to watch me
as I don't say anything right. You'll have to correct me as
I go along 'cause I'm used to doing it to myself.
S: This is the tape recorder. We just put it over here by
you.
E: Oh? Am I supposed to turn to it?
S: No. It works really good, she just tried it.
E: OK, I'll take it.
S: Well, go ahead. Start by asking her everything she
knows....
S: She says that you are Milt's sister--Shadrack Milton.
Your brother was Shadrack Milton, and she'd sort of like to
know more about him, because she came along long after he was
gone.
E: I didn't know him either. You see I was the eighth child
in our family. Therefore the others were all raised, and
Milton was one of the first ones. So I didn't know him,
either. The short time he was at home, I was just a little
kid. I didn't know him at all, he was part of the family, I
didn't know him. And then he left home early go off to work.
I heard Poppa say that Milt had said "Daddy, when I get old
enough to get a job, I want to get a job where I can make
some money, and get some jingle in my pockets when I walk
down Main Street and let you know that I'm grown. So he did
what he proposed, soon as he was old enough to work in the
mines up to Tintic. He went up there to work in them, and he
stayed there until he got too sick to work there, and had to
move out, and went home. I'll give you a little bit of
history right there. When he had to give it up, it was after
they had had two little boys, and, you know, we had a big
family, and so did the girl's [Maggie's] family. So she went
home with the youngest baby that she was feeding, and Milt
came on to our place with the other little boy, and he lived
with us for five years, until his dad was well enough to
work, to make a living. Then they had got a little home in
Spanish Fork and they set up there with the two parents they
helped them, and soon as he could, those boys, oh, they were
energetic kids, they got out, they did everything they
possibly could to make a penny. And they got out and worked,
and anyway, the family got along until he got gradually worse
and died from the disease. He wasn't old, but I will tell
you this, that he lived long enough, and they lived in that
little house 'til they had had four more children, and they
were all girls. That's what the young family was when he
died. The youngest one was only three months old. That was
Mildred, she's the one that lives there in Salt Lake--the
others live in Salt Lake. Margaret lives in Springville
yet....
Nurse: Hello! I have your pain medicine!
E: You do?! I have the pain, thank you! Please make it double
strength!....
S: I was reading in an old mining journal about the 192O's
when they broke the world's record for digging a shaft, and
Milt or Shadrack was on the team that did that, and it said
that Walter Fitch [the owner of the company] got a gold medal
for having broken the world's record. And everyone else on
the crew died. Dad told me about it.
E: Well, he would remember that. He was proud of his boys,
and he was proud of that boy! He told me a lot of that young
boy, how he worked along with his dad. Poppa said that it
seemed like when he went out to work he wanted to hold to his
hand all the way out to the field. Then if he'd quit work
during the day, he'd come up to hold his hand. He said he
always acted like he was afraid he'd be lost. He didn't know
what it was, there was never any attention built to it. He
just wanted to hold to his hand. But his was the only one.
He didn't bother the others. Oh, Poppa was proud of that
boy! In fact, I'll tell you something else about my father,
which is genealogy too, he loved all of his boys. He was a
very loving family man. They wanted them. That was what
they got married for, was to have a family, and a home, and a
ranch. And he got all of them. Poppa had eight children.
And I was eighth....
S: Lizzie just went down to Benjamin, and she actually went
through the old Richardson house.
E: Uh huh. That was my home for a long time. I will tell
you this about that home. I was left on the doorstep of it.
L: Really?
E: I wasn't born to that mother and father. They never did
find out who I belonged to. At that time, you see, it was
depression, everyone was without money, they said there was
an awful lot of transients going through at that time. And
there as a lot of unfathered children came to town. There
was a lot of babies that were left, so that was where I came
from. My father always said, he didn't know what I would
turn out to be. A--a what? Mexican--what's the other dark
one?.... By the way, I found out last year I do have Indian
blood, and I do have blood of this people that my father said
he thought I would come out and be that before I died, that I
would find out I belonged there. But there was nothing ever
come out of whatever they had to question, nothing ever came
out of it. I was dark, I was supposed to be dark, and all of
their family was dark. If they were all white with me, that
was all right with me, I'd go along with them....
S: Didn't they used to tell you that you looked like your
grandmother?
E: No, but they did tell me I had her disposition. They said
she had a very calm, sweet disposition. When I was a young
kid I'd get angry, I'd spur 'em, turn my back and walk away.
They'd say, 'You're just like your grandmother!'
L: Can you tell us about your mom and dad, and any of your
grandparents?
E: Well, um, what do you want to know? They were dark, both
of 'em were dark, and my Momma had coal black eyes.... They
penetrated, they looked through you when they came up to talk
to you, because they were so dark. And her hair was dark,
always was dark, and was 'til she died, which was just
recently, by the way, she had a long ordeal to die, she had
arthritis, so she was hospitalized for quite a while. She
just passed away, she'd been in the hospital better than a
year. And so when we get it we keep it!
L: Your mom, Eunice Lettie, and some of the Hickman family,
can you tell us some stories about them, maybe?
E: Yes, she was one of those. She was one of the older ones,
tried to stay all the rest of their lives. She was a very
good mother, a very good woman. From what I heard, she was
just exemplary in the community. She was a big woman, large
woman, well built, I never knew her but as a great big
healthy woman. And I asked her one day when it was that she
got heavy. She said 'I think I was born heavy, 'cause I was
heavy all my life!' During the last few years we had a set
of scales out in the grainery, that they measured the grain
and such as that on, and Momma's two brothers, J.E. and I
think it was France and J.E. that came, they went out in the
grainery to weigh, Momma went with them, and Momma weighed in
the same mark with the two boys! They weighed two hundred
and twenty-five pounds. Momma said she'd been that size all
her life. Momma was a very beautiful disposition. She was
very well liked. It always thrilled me the reception she'd
get when the older people would come up to talk to her, she
was such a lovely girl. They always had to mention it, and
she was the best girl in the neighborhood.... And she was
good with the people, everyone knew her as Grandma. After I
was married, and I got to go into Salt Lake when Lauralee
lived in Salt Lake, I got to go in there, her little friends
came around, I was Grandma Richardson to her, so I became
Grandma Richardson to all those children in that
neighborhood. But Grandma was a good woman. I think she
must have been a whole hearty woman. She was a good cook.
She loved to cook. She loved her children, she was a good
housekeeper, she did know how to sew, but we--there was the
three of us girls--but she learned how to make house dresses
and bloomers, that was all we needed. As far as
housekeeping, she could do any of it. And she could cook
beautifully. And at one time she went out as a cook before
she was married, with one of the road gangs. The men that
worked on the road had a room that they lived in, and ate in,
and all, and there was a woman that'd live in and do the
cooking in that shed, and she went out as cook on her own for
a little while. She thought it was a wonderful help, I would
too, a young girl out from the farm, go out with all those
men, wonderful! Get all the praises of everything she'd
made, sounds to me like it'd be wonderful. But the fact that
she was capable of doing that as a young girl was something
to me. I would like to tell you about grandma. Last winter,
when I went down home, Poppa was wound up about his mother.
And of course, he wanted to know what I was going to be, when
I grew up. I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to be one that
wrote good things about good people. And I wanted a kind
that they would have to read in order to get. It had to be
good. That was what I knew right from the beginning. If you
want good things, you seek for good. So I had to learn to
write well in order to get that kind that I felt like people
wanted. And that's why it took me so long. You see I was 9O
years old when I graduated from high school. I did graduate
from college, but I was a hundred ninety-nine years old when
I did. But in the last years, I visited colleges and took
special classes that I needed for my writing, and I'd go to
the schools where they advertised for those and get those
classes, take the class to get that. And that was how I got
those for it. I got a job while I was in high school in
Spanish Fork, I got a job part-time after school and on
Saturdays through the school. The school had asked for
someone to do the secretarial work, and they said that I was
able, that was my last year in the eighth grade. And they
said I was capable of doing it. So I went in and worked
there after school, and worked on Saturday. And I worked
during the holidays. Now we girls--all the girls worked then
on the farm. And I did very little on the farm, although we
lived on the farm, but I did very little on that, because I
was at the time out working. The work I was doing was much
more interesting to me. I got married in the meantime, and I
did make a life and a home, I enjoyed it, it was wonderful, I
had two husbands that died in the meantime, by the way, but I
was a good wife while they was doing it. That was my life,
but that was when I got my education. What I was doing was
as much towards the education as the books I read.
L: Sarah Richardson, your grandmother?
E: I didn't know her! Only what Grandpa told me, and was he
said last year. The information that his mother had told him
for his daughter who wanted to be the writer, all the
information that she gave him, for me, he'd have to see that
I got it. And I hadn't heard it, only as he talked. He was
a self-made educated man, by the way. And he got it not in
schools but on his own. But he was insisting that you had to
do what you had to do, but do it well. Don't do it if you
don't do it well. Just get right away from it. If I was
reading anything that I didn't particularly like, put it
down. Shut up the book. Give it back to the man it belonged
to. We had books for school, if we had read anything outside
of that, it was a borrowed book. And we always borrowed
other people's books and give them back. There was a reading
course that went through the school that we got, could get
and read that way, but it was somebody else's book. If you
didn't like it, if it didn't appeal to you, don't spend time
reading it. You could be sure if it wasn't good for you, it
wasn't for other people. So forget it, shut up the book. As
you heard things connected with that story later on in your
life, add to it, and keep adding all your life. And that was
one of the main things that that grandma had left for me, was
how to get the good things out of life, was by hunting for
them, and working for them. But that was for that girl that
was going to be a writer. Course, she didn't think I'd do
it, my father didn't think I'd do it, but no one was more
proud than he was when I accomplished what I said I was going
to. He didn't like the way I had to study, well I had to
study in order to get it. He didn't like that, he didn't
think that'd be necessary for a woman to know. But by the
time I'd accomplished what I was after, he saw the depth of
what I had written, where it had gone, and what I'd been able
to accomplish with it, he was very....
[Gap in tape, there must have followed a discussion of the
Richardson home, now a ruin in Benjamin.] E: Now I can
remember there was a cellar there, I can remember the stairs,
we used the upstairs all the time. It's where the bedroom
was when I come along, I don't know when that was built.
S: Where was your bedroom?
E: Upstairs, covered over the living room. That was it.
S: What was the room that was off to the side of the
kitchen? It was kind of a long room, were there stairs
there?
E: It was a long room, but part of that was taken off of the
other end, the north end of it was a small bedroom in there.
But the end of the other bedroom from upstairs, the hallway
went upstairs off of that other bedroom. From the little
bedroom up to the side of the big bedroom upstairs.
S: With all the kids they had, it seems like a very small
house for that size of a family.
E: It was big. Let me tell you, that was a big family, that
was a big house. Very few people had that big a home, they
had one room. I know when I was married my friends had all
been married to someone that could move them into a one room
house. If there was any kind of a home that they could go
into, it was a one room.... That was what I moved into, when
I was married, a house with two rooms in it. And I was so
proud of that, so thrilled, I was the only one of my friends
that had moved into a house with two rooms in it.... When I
moved into that house...they said I had two rooms and a
lean-to.... Mother said when she went down to go into her
new home--they had been married for two years, and they lived
up with her father--that was in the understanding when she
got married, that they would go ahead with their own family
'til it was time for them to get a home of their own. And
Grandpa would help them build their home, and she would stay
and take care of the home and the place, and Grandpa (that
was Grandpa's home). Uncle Rich didn't go to
work...evidently he wasn't well--I don't know when he wasn't.
But he didn't go to work. And he was at home, Mother took
care of him, but said when she went down to see her new home,
she got out, went over to it, and to greet her in her new
home was her husband, her father-in-law, and Uncle Rich. All
of them there in the door to welcome her into her new home.
And she was so thrilled about it, two rooms! She couldn't
believe it. She was pregnant with her second baby. He came
after they got into the new home. That was Milt.
S: Can you name all the kids in the family, from the oldest
to the youngest?
E: Les, and then it was Milt, and then it was Stirl, but I
don't know if he was third or not. There was a third boy
right there, but whether it was before Stirl or after, and
then that one died...I think he was two, just a baby. I
think it was from [sounds like caulveraulvrus]. Momma said
he got out in the orchard...and ate green apricots, so that
was what caused it.... That was the only one they lost of
theirs. There's one thing about reading the histories of the
early families, they must've all died young, all the
families. You go through the families, and one and two and
three passed away. In all the histories that I had to take
care of, of course that was my job there for a long long
time, to try to interpret those old histories, after one of
the old people died, in the Bible, as they looked through it,
there'd be a history written by the dad, kept in the Bible,
that was where most of the histories that came out of those
early families came from the little extra slip of paper that
was in the Bible that they found after Poppa died. That was
when it come to light. Couldn't make it out--rotton
writing! ...they came to see if I could make out and write
it up as it was, which I had to learn how to decipher some of
those words. They just didn't know how to spell 'em or write
'em or use 'em.... Without a loss, in each family there was,
it seems like a great array of them in the early familes.
E: (To Lizzie) What's your mother doing now?
L: Well, my mom has six kids, she has two twins, and she's
really interested in family history. I think she's met you
before, although you probably don't remember her. She looks
just like Vern.... But we have a big family and we're very
interested in learning about our ancestors and my mother
keeps some of the family traditions she knows about alive and
tells us stories, and I'm just coming to collect some more
from you to share with my family.
E: How many did you say you had?
L: Well, I don't have any yet, but I have seven siblings, and
two are dead now, so we have six right now.
E: Oh? That's good enough! I've been away from your family
so long--all her life! Just didn't get acquainted with them
like I should of done. Well, I wasn't acquainted with the
others, too well, either. You know, they'd get married, and
they'd start having a family, they start living with their
family, and they're broken from that first family. That's
when the break comes, after they get children, they step in
between....
I heard stories, and I heard people talking about them, most
of the time there was no repeating ever done for me, on the
family history. It was other stories that they'd bring back
to me, symbolize for them, but not on my family. They just
let that go. They had to die, and I had to keep track of
them. As they'd come to the house to see their mother, my
mother and I would be left with the family, 'til they were
all strangers to me. But your family were all older and
farther away from home, while the others all lived back in
town there, so I could grow up as they did, and keep track of
them. Your family I didn't keep up with at the time they
were coming along. They were young, those little girls, I
did, and I kept up with them. Since then, they have been so
good to come and see me. And I have been able to keep track
of them a little more. Now I had never met Mildred until
just the other day. She came in, I was really sick, I had an
upset stomach and all, and I was sick in bed, and one of the
girls had told her that I was sick. She came in, and that
was the first time that I had met her, been in her company,
or knew her since she was a little teeny girl, when they used
to come. In all that time I had forgotten. But the other
kids' family were all right there close, so I kept up with
them. They came home to Momma's every Sunday to see
Momma and Poppa....
S: My dad and Uncle Vern used to sing a lot of songs when I
was a kid. But I don't remember any of them. Did the
Richardsons ever sit around and sing songs instead of watch
television and whatever people do now?
E: No. They used to talk politics. S: What party did they
belong to?
E: Oh, Democrat. If you weren't a Democrat, you weren't on
this world. You didn't belong. Since I grew up, as I got
old enough to be interested in politics, I haven't heard much
about it. I did before then, being around Poppa I had to.
At voting time, you had to keep in touch with all those
voters. But I didn't after I was married, I married a
Republican, you see, he was from a Republican family. So in
our family, politics wasn't talked. If it was, we could talk
about the news. That's what it was, the news and the
newspaper. We got nothing but that, and that's what divided
us, we didn't have the family topic like that. We didn't
have a family-religious type. But in my husband's family, he
wasn't a religious man at heart, but he had been raised by
his parents to live in a religious family where they talked
religion and talked it together. But in their home they got
up, the mother fixed breakfast, and they would all be ready
for breakfast, but while momma fixed breakfast the boys would
get the chores done and their part of the morning work done,
by the time they got through, momma had breakfast ready,
they'd come and sit down. But first thing the table was set,
the chairs all around it, and they would come in and the
first thing they did, of course, they sat away from the
table, but then they would have family prayer. They knelt at
their chairs and had the prayer by one of them. They had
that, then they got up and they talked about some religious
subject. Then they read out of the Bible or the Book of
Mormon or the church works for a few minutes, then they could
eat their breakfast. Then, after breakfast, there was no
more religion until along towards night. Then they had
another reading, when they read out of the Bible, and then,
if there was any questions, then they asked their own
question, and they talked it back and forth in the family.
Now that what was when our religion came in, was in that
family night, then they could all talk it over, you got an
idea of how the others believed, how they saw things. And it
was interesting, wonderful. I wanted it in my home, but it
never happened that way, 'cause it wasn't that way with the
father. It wasn't the way he was trained. He didn't want to
sit down and talk religion. That was mother's job. If they
got religioned, it was momma's job to teach them.
And I wasn't a good church leader, I worked in the church, but not to teach it, in the church. I worked in all the
classes, that's how I learned my religion.
S: Well, we better go, I guess, and let you get back to your
nap, but we'll be back and see you.
E: Oh, I'm glad you did, and I hope you come again, and I
want you to, 'cause I look forward to meeting those of the
family because I've kept away from them so long now, and I
hear such a little bit about them. And I told you there was
a couple come in from California and came in and told me so
many good things about Milt and Vern, and there it goes,
'cause they're in California, and how well they got along
there in their work, and in the church, and with the people,
I had all that from them. They were good people.
S: Well, they were Richardsons.
E: That makes the difference!....
And this is your husband!
L: Right here, yeah! Yeah, he's sitting next to me.
E: Good enough. Aren't we fortunate!
K: My name is Kirk Jensen....
<<<END OF TAPE>>>
To read Eunice's obituary, click here.
To return to Eunice's index page, click here.
To return to the Richardson Family index page, click here.
.
