The Lauper Family

Life History of Serge J. Lauper

EARLY YEARS

I was born in Lehi, Utah on August 28, 1901, in the home of my parents Emma Wissing and Emile Louis Lauper. My father was away from home, and when he returned that evening, he was met by a neighbor who informed him that he had a baby son. My father was born February 13, 1869 at Pregny, Geneva, Switzerland. He was a convert to the Mormon Church from Switzerland, baptized a member November 22, 1892 in Lake Leman, Switzerland by Elder Serge F. Ballif, for whom I was named. He had been an active participant in the Temperance Union there and was conscripted, so to speak, from their group which was a fertile missionary field for the early missionaries. My father came to America, and to Utah at the age of 27 (May 16, 1896), and he had some difficulty in learning the language and in finding suitable work. He was employed at a dairy farm and also at a vineyard. He worked at logging, mining, and farming. While he was operating a small farm in Lehi, he met my mother, and they were married in the Salt Lake Temple.

My mother Emma Elizabeth Wissing was born November 17, 1881 at Vejle, Vejle, Denmark, the daughter of Jacob Bush Wissing and Maria Johanna Sorenson. She came to America at the age of four following the conversion of her grandparents to the Mormon Church. She spent her girlhood in Moroni, Sanpete County, Utah, and married my father on October 31, 1900.

I was the eldest child of ten, all of whom lived to adulthood except the sixth, my little sister Elsie, who died soon after birth. My earliest recollection is of living in Mercur, Tooele County, Utah, where we moved soon after my brother Ivan was born. (b. 28 Oct 1902, Lehi, Utah) I remember the wallpaper in our Mercur house, above the baby crib I had passed on to my brother Ivan who shared it with baby John. (b. 18 August 1904, Mercur)

My father, having no trade or special skills, had difficulty in providing for his family. His plans for large undertakings never materialized. He was speculative by nature and always thought another place would bring more success. He moved nine times in the first fifteen years of my life. During this time we lived with great economy by necessity. Most of my early years were spent in working at various jobs on the farms we rented.

While in Mercur, my father worked in the Mercur Mines, an operation long since vanished. Mercur is no longer remembered even as a ghost town. We moved, about 1905 or 1906, to Box Elder County where our first place was a small, frame, one room building, on the bank of the Malad River, nestled down close to the water line, where Felix was born. We were about two and a half miles west of the rural community of Bear River City, the name being used even though it was just a tiny settlement of houses with a store, a schoolhouse, and a church.

I was baptized in the Bear River on January 1, 1911 by Nels Buartensen and confirmed the same day by Jarole Hansen. We had moved around and my birthdays had passed. I was nine and a half year old and my brother Ivan was over eight too, when my mother became obsessed that her sons were not baptized, and arranged to have the home teachers take care of it. My father was away working in the Bingham Mines at the time. It was wintertime, New Year's Day, but mother was pretty strong minded, and we had postponed it for so long. We hadn't been in a place long enough to have it done. We were then living in a little shack right on the river's edge in the Bear River area.

My mother made arrangements with the home teachers, two elderly gentlemen, to baptize Ivan and me. My mother, brother and I drove first to their home where we had cakes and some milk and then down to the Bear River in a one-horse buggy. It was cold, cold. One of the brothers chopped a hole in the four inches of ice on top of the River and baptized both of us in the hole. Travelling back to their house in the buggy, just a few blocks, my clothes froze stiff. I was standing on the back of the axle. I think Ivan was being held by my mother on her lap in the one-seater buggy which was pretty crowded. When we got back to the brother's house, I found the warmest, nicest fire that I had ever seen. Both of these brethren were in their sixties, but they didn't seem to have any illness out of the experience. Neither did my brother Ivan or I. My baptism, however, was not a particularly happy memory.

I had a number of other rather dangerous experiences, all of which I survived. Before my time of remembrance, during my first year I think, I became very ill from drinking tainted milk. I lost weight and became so weak that my parents despaired of my life.

I was about three years old when I fell head first through a trap door to a cellar below. I still have a scar on my lip from that fall.

I had my share of being dumped from ponies and saddle horses growing up on a farm. Of course there are frequent hazards and dangers in working with horses and machinery.

When I was about ten years old, I was plowing in the far end of our farm about a quarter of a mile from the house. I was driving a three horse team on a sulky plow which was equipped with a "colter," a sharp disc 12 or 14 inches in diameter fastened in front of the plow share to cut the sod or the weeds. The colter had become clogged. One of the younger horses, a shy animal, lunged forward. My food was trapped. The blade cut through my shoe into my foot. I was able to hold onto the reins and hollered and waved my hat until my little brother John came running. Following my instructions, he used a lever to free me. The ball of my foot still has a scar from that incident.

In my fourteenth year, I escaped the newly shod hoofs of my saddle horse Buckskin. We lived on a dry farm, and we hauled our water for drinking, cooking, and washing purposes. The stock had to be driven about a mile to water. One evening I drove our cows and horses to the canal, riding the 1,600 pound Buckskin. He was thirsty and gulped too much water. The cinches or saddle girths became too tight. The horse started jumping and bucking, breaking one of the cinches. I was thrown under the horse, and the sharp hoofs came down all around me, cutting my jacket, punching holes in my hat, making deep impressions in the ground. But I was not scratched.

Many years later when I was a salesman, I had an experience I will not forget. Driving on a narrow winding road in the south eastern part of the state of Oregon, with heavy snow banked on the side of the road, I was forced by another car too close to the edge of a 700 foot drop. The rear wheels swung over the cliff, spinning in empty air. The front wheels were locked on a rock hidden in the snow. The machine was swaying over the edge, ready to tip and fall at any moment. Just then a truck rounded the curve. The driver stopped and held up his hands motioning me not to move. He jumped down and within seconds he fastened a cable to my front axle and pulled me to safe ground.

Another time while visiting my friends Nelle and Clyde Curtis, I escaped another disaster. I had taken my family to Placerville. Clyde and a neighbor were taking me on a fishing trip. The plan was to take our wives and the children to picnic at a lumber town about halfway. Then the other two men and I rode a hand-car on the narrow gauge railroad up the canyon. We stopped, and went down the half mile to the American River below, over very rough country--loose dirt, rocks, and gravel all the way down.

It was summer time, it was hot. I was not used to the high altitude and was soon out of breath. The other two went on ahead. When I reached the water, I took off my shoes and cooled my feet in the shallow places. I started to follow my friends and came to a fork in the stream. I hollered, but I could not be heard, so I chose one side of the fork, and I chose wrong.

I should have waited, because I'm no fisherman. But I became anxious. I climbed over slippery rocks, waded where there was no room on the bank, and tromped through millions and millions of lady bugs. If you didn't see them, you could never believe it. They harvest the bugs commercially to spread in the orchards.

I knew I was lost. I knew I did not have the strength to get back the way I had come, so I started up the mountain side away from the river, slipping and sliding, holding on to small branches, falling back. I would stop to rest every few feet. I thought of the war in Europe and imagined that I was a prisoner trying to escape. Finally I was at the top. It was almost dark. I was about 500 feet from the railroad track when the hand-car went by. They were looking for me. But I was so weak I could not even call out loud enough to be heard. On their way back, they found me, about 100 feet from the rails. They said that every year or so someone got into serious trouble there.

Even as I have been working over these remembrances, I've had a few close calls. In 1986 I had a stroke. Then in 1990 my heart failed for a while. When I refused any consideration of open heart surgery to clear up the blockages in my arteries, the doctors decided to insert a heart pacer. I take a lot more medicine than I like, and I have some good days and some that aren't so good, but right now, I feel a lot better than could have been expected. But back to my early days.

I started school in Bear River City, in the beginners class. I could read early and so skipped and doubled classes, graduating from elementary school, having completed nine grades of studies, in six years at the age of twelve. We lived with great economy. For one lengthy period my lunch pail for school carried nothing but pop corn.

I had plenty of work on the farm as a boy, helping my dad in various crop ventures that he had. I didn't get any money for doing that kind of work. I never even thought about the possibility. The very first job that I had to make money I could call my own--because we had very little money--was selling cards and pictures. I was probably about seven or eight then. I talked my mother into ordering some pictures of the sort that people would hang on their walls, all kinds of religious scenes or landscapes. I sold valentines and Christmas cards house-to-house. That was my first money.

As a youngster, I had little recreation, but we had a house game called Mill. It was not checkers, but something you played with buttons on a board. I could still play it. The main thing that I did as a boy was to read. I read all the Alger books. I borrowed them and bought them when I could. I read Robinson Crusoe and Black Beauty. From the time I was ten years old I was busy reading all the time, whenever I got the chance. I remember enjoying Treasure Island and Kidnapped and The Last of the Mohicans.

When I was a little older, I did some hunting with a .22 and a bore gauge shotgun. I would hunt jackrabbits and ducks and sage hens. We lived on a dry farm, and in the wintertime, we could drag our sleighs up the hillside and coast down. There was a canal at the bottom, and if there was no snow, we could go skating. We would often go to a place in the community where more young people lived, and they would have Saturday night dances. My first experience of going to a dance was when I was about fourteen; we skated up to the dance. In the summertime, we were so busy working that we never could have any time off at all. Sundays we had to go to Church, and all the rest of the time we were working. In the wintertime we could have a little recreation.

I always liked animals and enjoyed working with them. If I had had any kind of encouragement I would have stayed on the farm because I loved horses. I had my own horse Prince. I had saved up some money for him. One time he was down with a spinal injury. I remember the neighbors said he would never get up, and I might just as well shoot him. But I didn't give up on him. I arranged an A frame and put that over him and arranged some support underneath him and managed to get him back on his feet. And he recovered. When he stood up, I could see how to take care of him. He lived and got over his disease. I loved horses. My best horse was a roan.

I liked dogs a great deal, in their place. We had a big ranch, and the dogs never went inside. We had many different dogs. I was able to have my own rabbits early on and had a great variety. I was raising them commercially to sell. I had all colors, just every color a rabbit could come in. Then, lo and behold, a couple of them dug out from under the wire netting, got mixed up with some of the wild rabbits, caught a disease, and started acting very strange. They began to die, and it was very unpleasant. I have never liked rabbits since. Cats I have never been interested in.

We moved to Box Elder County about 1907. Felix Louis (b. 17 Apr 1907, Bear River), Alice Marie (b. 25 Nov 1908, Elwood), Elsie Geneva (b. 7 Mar 1910, Bothwell, d. 4 April 1910), Marcel Franklin (b. 24 Sep 1911, Elwood), Viola Emma (b. 12 Apr 1913, Elwood), Dennis LaVerne (b. 2 Apr 1915, Penrose), and Ralph Julius (b. 26 Nov 1916, Penrose) were all born during this period.

We moved to a farm called the Bishop's place in Box Elder County and later made several moves within a radius of twenty miles. All these places were in the vicinity of Bear River City and Tremonton. We moved to Bothwell in 1909, to the School House in 1911, to the Barton House in 1912, and to Penrose in 1914. While we were living in Bothwell, a farming community about four miles west of Tremonton, where my little sister Elsie Geneva is buried, I remember people coming east. Wagons, buggies, men on horseback, and some cars came right through from San Francisco. Demoralized after the earthquake and fire in 1906, these people had gradually gotten a travelling outfit together and were going back east. Sometimes they would stay with us on their way through. California seemed too chancy to them.

After living in Elwood, we moved to a dry farm in Penrose, where we took over the homesteading requirements to acquire ownership of 160 acres, a quarter of a section, of land. We lived in a small shack and a twenty foot tent for a bedroom, on the property. Growing up on the dry farm in Penrose, we had the same routine, day after day. So it can be understood that the Regional Rabbit Hunt was a special occasion. It was actually a massacre.

The jack rabbits in our area would multiply in great numbers some years. The ranchers' wheat crops would suffer, and the sheep men hated the rabbits who ate the growing leaves from the small bushes and sage brush, leaving the sheep range barren.

Arrangements were made periodically for hunters from Salt Lake City and Ogden to meet with local farmers. My mother did not want us to go, but we managed to get a partial permission. Ivan was about thirteen, and I was fourteen or fifteen years old. We were able to get our gear ready and join the group.

We met at a place called Rosele or something similar, but I can't find it on any current map. The place was on the railroad because the group which was to do the shooting, maybe thirty-five or forty men, were in sleeping cars. They were a pretty wild bunch with plenty of liquor and some women. That was my very first exposure to the immoral and dissipated practices of the world. I have a clear memory of the night before the hunt--of the singing, yelling, and salty stories that were told, both by the men and some of the women.

The weather was cold with more than a foot of snow. We had a huge fire of tar-soaked railroad ties which had been replaced by new ones. The railroad siding where we met was a day's trip, about thirty miles away, on the edge of a valley some ten miles across. The rancher side of the group was about twenty teamsters with wagon boxes mounted on bob sleighs. There were were about thirty of us, mostly in our early teens, on saddle horses. The hunters split into two groups and rode in the bob sleighs to each side of the valley, with an even number of teams and boys on horses.

Then the hunt began, with the hunters picking off the rabbits they saw. Sometimes a blast from a shotgun would hit more than one rabbit because groups would be running together in deep trails in the snow. My job was to pick up the rabbits that were shot, put them in the sack that was attached to the saddle, and when the bag was full, locate the box sleigh and dump them in. Then I'd return for another bunch. Every rabbit that was only disabled had to be finished off with a blow at the back of his head. It was very tiring and very bloody.

About noon the two groups met, and there were thousands and thousands of rabbits running everywhere. All the hunters were shooting away at them. I'm still surprised that no person got shot.

That night the box sleighs were emptied into a boxcar to be taken by train to the Salvation Army in Salt Lake. There was a five cent bounty for rabbit ears. The money earned by our huge take of rabbits was to be divided up among the local group, and each hunter was to get a share. But what I remember was Ivan's and my disappointment that never, never did we get any money.

While we were in Penrose, a friend who had a son one year older than I arranged for us to go to the Brigham Young High School at Brigham City. We lived together in a rented room where we cooked for ourselves. We had some disagreements, and, after the middle of the year, we moved to separate quarters. (I attended Box Elder High School for six months.) The last four months I lived with the Borquist family. This episode ended my schooling, of which I never had a complete year. At a later time, I took some night courses in Los Angeles and then a correspondence course which I did not finish.

During this period I had some consecutive Church training. I was ordained a deacon on November 19, 1913 by P. M. Pierce and made president of the deacons' quorum. I was ordained a teacher on August 3, 1919 by N. S. Anderson, and a priest on May 7, 1922 by A. G. Shields. I did a little speaking and reciting in Church.

Everyone else in Penrose was better off financially than we were, but the really big operation in our area was the Conner Springs Ranch which people called the Lindsay Land and Livestock Ranch. Located at the foot of the mountain, the place had plenty of water from running springs. In an average year, twenty-five or thirty cowboys would take care of three or four thousand cattle and about twelve thousand sheep. There were also five to six thousand pigs, and, of course, a good many horses. I don't know how many acres there were in the spread, but they harvested enough alfalfa, grain, and beet pulp to feed the stock. This was only one of the operations of Walter J. Lindsay. He had other ranches and properties. Twelve ranches were named in a little book written by his son Clyde Lindsay.

The only part of our little farm of 160 acres that was productive was a thirty-five acre strip in a little valley past the top of the hillside. On occasion some of the Lindsay cattle would get loose and into our wheat field. We had had trouble with the Lindsay cattle before, but this time my father rounded up about ten head and put them in our corral. When the two cowboys came for their cattle, my dad, with a shotgun over his arm, told them that they would have to pay for the trampled wheat field first.

The next day after the cowboys had been turned away, the cattle were pretty hungry and thirsty. It was then that a rider appeared coming up the hill. It was Walter J. Lindsay riding a beautiful roan stallion. He was a handsome man, then about fifty-five years old and in his prime. He just happened to be visiting the Conner Springs Ranch, and he had decided to come over and get his cattle.

What a scene. Lindsay on his horse. Dad with his shotgun in front of our cabin. Me standing there, aged fifteen, looking uneasily from one to another. I remember that Mr. Lindsay called to me, "Son, come here." Then he pulled out a roll of bills, peeled some off and gave them to me saying, "Take these to your father. This should be enough." When I took them to Dad, he nodded his head. I took down the fence bars, and Walter J. Lindsay drove his stock away.

None of us on that rocky hillside, no one with the wildest imagination would have guessed that twenty-five years later I would be this wealthy, arrogant man's bishop and later his stake president in San Francisco. After the first World War, a severe depression hit the live stock business. Lindsay's bankers saw a chance to squeeze him out. Later the Federal Government stepped in to prevent these wholesale foreclosures by setting up the Federal Land Bank, but it was too late for Walter J. Lindsay. He had been cheated out of an empire. The vast holdings still bear the name of Lindsay Land and Livestock Company, and current owners say that he was truly a man of vision when he set up that ideal livestock empire.

The real test of Lindsay's greatness came after he lost the livestock business. He rallied his family, the Lindsay clan, and moved to California into the construction business. The success that followed was a fabulous story of its own. On the occasions that we talked of his early days, I remember him saying, "Yes, it was a good thing that I lost my money. It gave me time for the church. I sent my boys on missions. I learned to pray and be humble."

Later, in 1954, it was my assignment to preach his funeral sermon. I told the family and the congregation much of the above story.

Our family's next big move was to Sugarville near Delta, Utah in Millard County, the Pahant Valley in 1917. My father sold the homestead in Penrose to make the small down payment on an eighty acre farm near Delta. My mother was not strong, having gone through a serious illness after Ralph, her tenth child, was born. He had been placed in the home of the Bechtold family for nearly a year, and I was given the assignment to bring him home. The Bechtolds had several other children, but they were attached to Ralph and very sorry to give him up. It was quite an experience for a boy in his early teens to be followed by the entire family as I carried my brother to the buggy, all of them crying, even the father.

We had high hopes for our Sugarville place. The country was growing, and some of the families and farms were very productive. For two years that farm looked like a promising place to raise alfalfa and sugar beets. An irrigation system was being installed which promised to make the whole area fertile.

Unfortunately the irrigation system, which was to improve farming in Delta, completely destroyed it. A hardpan beneath the surface prevented absorption of the water and completely waterlogged the land. The alkali and salt rose and killed off all the crops.

To save the land at all, an extensive and expensive drainage system was put in. I got a job on a new major project to drain the water from the valley. This was my first experience working away from home. I visited from time to time while I worked with the contracting firm and continually sent money home to help out. Our family was still living very modestly, and with my first pay check, I bought my mother a gasoline powered Maytag washer to cut down on her hard labor. These machines were new in our area. My mother learned to start and keep in operation this mechanical marvel, having come a long way from the washboard and the hand operated washer. I also bought the first curtains that we had ever had in a house. I was seventeen and worked for two years on the project.

I was no stranger to hard work. My father had always looked on his sons as his hope for building up his financial condition. My brother Ivan and I started working in the sugar beet fields for pay at the ages of five and six. I was kept out of school to plant and harvest. I have no regrets that early in life I learned to work hard. It cost me my schooling, but taught me many valuable lessons.

The drainage project was successful in some areas, but our own farm was too far out on the edge and was not adequately drained. We had the original land costs plus the added cost of the drainage and only poor crops as a result. I could see little future from this farm.

I met men from all over the world. They were strong, able men, but pretty rough. I saw a lot of immorality at an early age. I was lucky to escape, having had enough good early training to keep me away from the worst. But I made some good friends and heard about other ways of making a living. Never again was I content at the prospect of working on my father's farm, which I rightly concluded would never be successful. My new friends told me of the great world outside Utah and particularly of the easy wealth in California.

On Christmas Day, 1921, when I was twenty years old, my brother Ivan and I set off for the big city of Los Angeles to seek our fortune. We travelled with two neighbor boys in their little Ford. My mother, with tear-stained eyes begged us not to go, but we were determined. We had a hard journey, patching up our tires, and finally pulled into San Bernardino. There we saw an incredible sight: rows and rows of galvanized bucketfuls of fresh oranges on both sides of the street. Brilliant gold and yellow. They looked beautiful to us. They sold very cheaply, and we bought bucket after bucket of them.

Paul Baker, who was a newcomer to Utah and sort of a soldier of fortune, had told us that Los Angeles was a mecca for workers. Inexperienced men were getting $10 and $12 a day in construction. We stayed with his family while we found out that the real situation in California was very different. Workers were streaming in from all over the world looking for employment. There were no jobs to be had. The two neighbor boys went home, leaving Ivan and me. After a week of looking, when our funds were exhausted, Ivan managed to get a job as a dishwasher in a restaurant, and I landed one in a lumber yard. This job was the most grueling and difficult of my life, carrying timbers, stacking them, putting them on trucks, in the unaccustomed heat. I had strong muscles and was used to labor, but this job was awful.

I began to canvass the places already open on my way to work. Oswald Brothers Paving Contractors opened at 7, and every time I passed there I tried to get acquainted with someone and ask for a job. That company put in quite a few of the streets in Los Angeles. After a week of doing this, I met Orson Taylor, a carpenter doing odd jobs there. He was a member of the Church and took an interest in me. He told the yardmaster that I should be hired.

I went to work as a swamper for the huge, gas-driven "shovel" which unloaded the sand and gravel from the box cars. My assignment was to oil and grease the rig and to keep the rock and sand level when the shovel moved from car to car. It was not a hard job, but there were times when I had to work pretty fast. The machine operator, though proficient, was of a sadistic nature. He enjoyed tormenting his workers and had difficulty in keeping a man as a regular worker. I tried hard, but I could not please him. Whatever I did, he objected.

One day I had heard too much cursing and profanity from him and decided that I would not work for him any longer. But I made the judgment that I could not just quit and walk away. I had to face up to him. If I didn't, I would have no self-respect because of what I had already taken from him. He told me to get out and leave.

I changed my clothes, searching my mind about how I could face up to him. I walked back to the gravel pile. He was taking off his coveralls, standing on the platform of the mechanical shovel, at an even height with me. I walked up on the gravel pile. We were standing about thirty or forty feet apart. He turned to me, cursed me, and told me to get out. All I could think of to do was to tell him that he was a liar, a dirty liar. Those were words that I had been brought up to believe a man had to fight for. The words didn't seem to make any difference to him, but he was angry that I was still there.

By this time a group of company people had gathered. With a sort of a scream, he jumped off the platform and started racing up the rock pile toward me. I had the advantage, and I hit him with all the strength I could muster, and then we grappled and rolled down the gravel pile. I ended up on top, and was pounding him on the head with handfuls of rock when they pulled us apart.

I presented myself at the paymaster's office, sobbing and half-coherent, to get my time or be paid off. By then quite a few fellows were talking about how Hulse had finally been faced up to and chuckling and I found myself somewhat of a hero. One big black fellow in the yard was telling everyone that I was quite a man.

I thought that I was through there, but the headman told me that I didn't have to quit. They gave me a job as assistant commissary agent. Later on, this machine operator had to come to me to get supplies. He later became quite friendly. The incident turned into a victory for me.

I was there for a three and a half years, ending as commissary clerk. Ivan and I lived with Orson Taylor and found that this arrangement worked very well. We joined the Matthews Ward, the first in the area and one of the early wards in Los Angeles, but our recommends were not transferred from the Sugarville Ward in Utah.

In the early part of 1924, Los Angeles was growing fast. Thousands of people from everywhere were moving to Los Angeles or the nearby areas, and land was being bought and sold fast. Sometimes the price would double or triple in a few months, depending on whether a shopping area was built near to it.

Every night there would be huge displays of search lights flashing in big sweeps in different parts of the city sky: a new market or group of stores was opening. On Sundays the big real estate companies would fight for buyers, promoting their different projects with newspaper ads and flyer distribution. On appointed days, they would bring in busloads of potential buyers for free food and drinks and entertainment with big bands.

I was part of the crowd of six or seven hundred people the day they opened the Playa Del Rey tract. Among the attractions was a grand opera singer, Tito Schipa. The selling line that won me was, "There is land back to Kansas City, but only so much of it is on the beach." This plot was not actually waterfront property, but you could see the ocean. People had come from the east and some from the central states. I was among those who signed up for a lot which then cost $2,200. Playa Del Rey did not become a hot real estate market. Looking back, I can see that the land was priced years ahead of its time.

I had big plans for making money. I had a good job with the company and now I was a property holder. I thought that I would eventually build a nice house for my family. I was attending church sporadically, going to the Matthews Ward, mostly to MIA or Mutual Improvement Association work, participating in plays, dances, and public speaking. I joined the debating group and became the winner in my ward; I was later beaten by Robert Gordon, a cousin of Jean Gordon who was to become my wife. I did not consider myself a particular stalwart of the Church, which was primitive there. The first stake of the Church in California was organized in Los Angeles while I was there in 1923.

After about a year and a half in Los Angeles, rather critical situations developed with my family in Delta, Utah, and it was agreed that my brother Ivan would go home to help out while I stayed in Los Angeles. During that time I regularly sent money to my mother because I knew she needed it. I later learned she turned it all in to the bishop as my tithing, because she made the correct assumption that I was not paying my tithing in California. My tithing record was impressive.

I mention this to support the unexpected letter I got from Heber J. Grant, the president of the church, dated September 18, 1925. The letter read as follows:

They don't make mission calls like this now. From the standpoint of later years, this is a most unusual procedure. Having been a bishop and stake president who recommended young men and women for missions, I know they are now painstakingly interviewed and questioned before being called. But my case was different, and I was completely surprised.

My immediate reaction to that call was completely negative. I felt that the Church leaders didn't know me or my circumstances at all and that the whole thing was crazy. Certainly I had no ambition and no desire to go. I was 24 at the time. It was exactly opposite of any plans that I had made. But I could not put the request aside nor forget the idea that I had been called and that they wanted me to go. Finally I couldn't sleep or eat. I debated the matter for thirteen days. But I knew that if I should build my mother the finest house in Beverly Hills, it would mean nothing to her if I didn't go on this mission. My brother Ivan, who was with me in Los Angeles, kept telling me that I should go. I finally made up my mind and told my company the surprising news that I was going on a mission for my church.

I was able to borrow $1,200 on my lot in Playa Del Rey when I went on my mission. Actually I should have closed the book then, rather than paying it off, along with all the taxes. I finally sold the land in 1933.