Duane Hiatt

Every person’s life is worthy of a book. I hope you are writing yours, or saving the material to one day write it. I am in the midst of mine. These stories are hot off the keyboard. I hope they will give you ideas and inspiration for your own book. For previous stories, please go to duanehiatt.com

The book is titled Live Long*, Learn a Little, Laugh a Lot.

Dad as Abraham Lincoln

Whatever dad’s stepmother Aunt Ethyl’s personality was then or now, it is probably significant that her stepsons  left home as soon as they got the chance. Delphin the oldest left first, the moment he felt he could provide for himself. Randall did the same. My father was about to, but then grandpa talked to him and said, “Bud, I really need your help. I know you would like to leave, but will you stay to help me?”

My father reluctantly agreed.

According to dad Grandpa sweetened the pot by saying, “If you stay I’ll give you a baby pig. You can raise it over the summer, sell it and buy yourself some good clothes to start school with.” Dad was about 16 at the time. My father reluctantly agreed, and he got his pig in the spring. He fattened it all summer then his father sold it. Grandpa took this money along with the cash from the crop he had raised that summer off to the bank. Apparently that’s where Grandpa’s income went first. I’m assuming this was to repay the debt he incurred when he lost his farm.

Grandpa returned and my dad met him at the door to get those dollars into his pocket. It never happened,

“Bud, when I got there I found out the payment was more than I had, so I had to use your money. But I’ll get it back to you.”

My dad looked down and saw his new fall outfit go into the bottomless pit of their debt. “I knew he’d never get it back to me. He did too.”

“But I did get you this outfit for school, this nice suit,” Grandpa said. “It’s made out of good strong material. It will last you a long time.” Grandpa unwrapped and rolled out the suit. He was right. It was good material. It was a fine looking suit if you happened to be starting school in the mid 1860′s. My father called it his “Abraham Lincoln suit.” It came even complete with button shoes. Some store keeper pegging grandpa for a sucker dragged it out of his back room and fobbed it off on him.

For whatever reason, dad put the suit on and went off to school. His worst fears were realized. He was a clown and a laughingstock among his peers. He particularly tried to hide the button shoes under his desk, but one of his hot shot classmates spotted them. He grabbed dad’s pant leg and pulled it up on to the desk saying “Look, he’s even got the button shoes to go with it.” Everybody laughed at “Ol Abe” born again in their classroom. Dad survived the day some way, went home, chucked the Abe Lincoln suit and never saw it or the pig money again.

My father wore glasses all his life. He said it was a result of his difficult birth where the doctor had to bring him out with forceps. These damaged his eyes. He loved to play sports, particularly baseball and softball. But his semi functional eyes never could get a fix on the fast pitch as a batter or a long fly or hot grounder as a fielder. So his sports career was as unsuccessful as his family life he said. With his athletic, social, and economic life such a struggle, fortunately my father could do one thing well. He could sing.

Ferron Hiatt could sing so well that sometimes he was featured at the Arrowhead indoor swimming pool and outside dance pavilion in the town of Benjamin three miles north of Payson. By comparison, Benjamin made Payson look like a metropolis, but on Saturday night it was one of the hot spots in the valley. Some nights, Ferron would approach the door with his date, and be ushered through without buying a ticket. He paid his admission by singing occasionally during the evening with the dance orchestra accompanying him. The free admission was a perk. He would have paid double the price to get in if he’d had the money just for the chance to stand on stage, and front the band of Ralph Migliaccio and his “Chicago Hotel Orchestra.” Actually Ralph came from Spanish Fork, a neighboring town up the road eight miles. But he had moved there from Chicago. I doubt the band came with him, and I’m not sure if he had ever really played the Chicago hotel of even if there was a Chicago Hotel. But in Utah Valley, at Arrowhead it was big time stuff.

For a kid who had so little going for him to step to the edge of the stage with a full moon shining down, Ralph Migliaccio on one side of the stage pointing his trombone to the sky, and Tommy Nelson on the other side doing the same with his trumpet, and Ferron Hiatt soloing the vocals, this life did not get any better than that.

One life changing night a young man had to leave early, so he asked Ferron if he would mind escorting the young man’s date home. Ferron agreed. Her name was Gladys Wride. Knowing my father, I would bet the farm that his first words to her were something such as, “This is quite an occasion. I’m going to give a Wride a ride. Pardon my stuttering.”

Knowing my mother, she smiled as though she hadn’t heard such lines for as long as she had been able to tell people her name.

Gladys lived in Benjamin which Ferron found inconveniently close because their ride together wasn’t long enough.

According to the old saying, many love songs, and a kazillion romance novels, true love never runs smooth however. The same dance music that brought them together threatened to pull them apart, at least that was Dad’s concern. Gladys cousin invited her to California and get employment in the upscale “city of roses”, Pasadena. The farm girl from the hamlet of Benjamin found herself as upstairs maid in a swanky home of a wealthy family. And if that wasn’t dazzling enough, instead of dancing on Saturday nights to Ralph Migliaccio’s band, she twirled the light fantastic to the biggest names of the big band era including Benny Goodman, The Dorsey Brothers, and Count Basie.

Ferron, like most young men of that day was about a dollar short of having seventy five cents, so, again typical of his time; he hopped a freight car, rode the rails, and hitched rides to get to Pasadena. He convinced a suspicious policeman that he was just an honest country boy pursuing his lost love, and no menace to the community. He charmed Gladys’ employer/landlady by sprucing up her yard for free. To Gladys he must have given one of the most heartfelt love songs he ever delivered; and it worked. He convinced her that he and Payson were a better life than Pasadena and the big bands.

As befitting their new status as seasoned travelers of some means, Ferron and Gladys did not hop freight cars home. They rode in the more luxurious accommodations of a Greyhound bus.

Also, also, feel free to forward this material to anyone you want to.

For those of you who just tuned in, this is the next installment of my memoirs currently in production. The previous installments are available on my web page duanehiatt.com I hope you find it interesting.

The book is titled Live Long*, Learn a Little, Laugh a Lot.

My grandpa’s hectic home

My father grew up in an unhappy family bordering on dysfunctional as he described it. His stepmother “Aunt Ethyl” was a poor housekeeper, and an inept financial manager, not that there was much finance to manage. His six half sisters were born so close together that he remembers most of his growing years in a home filled with clutter, dirt, and the aroma of stinky diapers in the day and bed bugs swarming over his mattress at night.

My father’s father bought a farm just in time to welcome in the financial crash of 1929. He bought it one day, lost it the next essentially. The rest of his life grandpa would share crop and hire out as a farm worker—not the road to riches. Often he would work for his sons Randall and Delphin who both had farms. The peace of the gospel did not grace my father’s home growing up. My grandfather enjoyed his pipe, and did not enjoy activity in the church. I think it was tied to his feelings of failure as a provider. He hated the idea of paying tithing to the church. He said, “My argument is not with my God. It is with those who want to take my wallet.”

He also seemed to withdraw from a leadership role in the family. Partly this was a communication problem. My grandfather was hard of hearing. The family story was that once when he was working in the field he got tired and lay down for a nap on a ditch bank. A bug crawled inside his ear and ate a hole in his eardrum. I accepted that story long into adulthood. One day my brother Gordon said, “Does that make sense? A bug would eat your ear drum, and even more strange, two bugs would eat both ear drums in one sitting?”

The only way to get a message into grandpa was to shout into his ear. The neighbors probably knew as much of what went on in the Hiatt household as the people inside the house did.

Grandpa never recovered from the loss of his farm or from his most crushing loss; the death of his young wife. She died of heart problems leaving him with three small sons. As my dad related the story, in his grief and insecurity grandpa fell into the arms, or the clutches of a school teacher named Ethyl Tanner. Grandpa and Aunt Ethyl must have had something going for them. She bore him six daughters in fairly quick succession. To her daughters, of course, she was Mom, and to their children grandma. But to her stepsons and their children she was known as Aunt Ethyl.

To me as a child Aunt Ethyl was scary. She had a shrill voice that could peel the wall paper off the walls. She would shriek “Ves” which was short for Sylvester which was short for Franklin Sylvester which was grandpa’s full name. Then announce her message, and grandpa would nod, amble off to perform some duty or just escape.   Aunt Ethyl’s signature laugh completed the caricature; a high pitched cackle that made me afraid to look in her oven to see who might be in there.

But my father had no refuge of deafness to run to. He had to hear every word. Most of those words were harsh criticisms of him “She always told me, ‘You can’t do anything. You’ll never amount to anything,’” he told me

According to dad, she was light on her daughters, but heavy on the boys and most heavy on him.

In some defense or explanation of Aunt Ethyl, her designated title itself indicates the problem. When my first wife Diane died, and Sharon and I were married, I asked all our children to call her Mom. Diane and I had talked about this before she died, and agreed on it. All of our children call their stepmother mom, and all of our grandchildren call her grandma. It took awhile to get some of them to do it. But we worked it out.

Aunt Ethyl never achieved the rank of mother with her sons or grandma with their children. Surely this sent her a message about their lack of acceptance of her as a mother..

Beyond this, apparently grandpa never quite got over mourning the passing of his first wife Adella. He kept her picture also containing a lock of her hair hanging above their bed. I can believe this was no comfort to his second wife. Certainly my father longed for his lost mother. Probably insecurity and the lack of acceptance that Aunt Ethyl lived with contributed to her harsh manner with her step sons.

Whether it was as bad as my father described it, and whether most of the problem came from their poverty and lack of social standing rather than from their stepmother and their ineffective father, no one will know this side of the veil.

We had to cut Aunt Ethyl a little slack a few years ago when we read an article in the church Ensign magazine. It was from a `woman in Payson, She said when she was newly married and a young mother she often felt overwhelmed and discouraged. Her two angelic visiting teachers were older women of long experience and great compassion. They helped her negotiate these difficult years. One of these saintly women was Ethyl Hiatt. My brother Gordon and I were stunned. We thought surely it was a typographical error. Maybe there was another elderly lady in Payson named Ethyl Hiatt (not likely in our little town.) Maybe Aunt Ethyl changed in her older years. Maybe she never was as scary as we had been led to believe. Maybe we will owe her an apology when we see her again. I am ready to apologize. I hope it makes her happy. I just hope it doesn’t make her so happy that she laughs.

Also, also, feel free to forward this material to anyone you want to.

Your next installment is:  My Dad as Abraham Lincoln and big band singer

For those of you who just tuned in, this is the next installment of my memoirs currently in production. The previous installments are available on my web page duanehiatt.com I hope you find it interesting.

Also, also, feel free to forward this material to anyone you want to.

Your next installment is: 

In order to avoid the rush, I am sending my 2014 Mothers’ Day message a little early. Actually, this is a talk I gave in church. Several people asked for a copy, so I thought you might find it interesting.

Duane

Three mothers and others

I would like to introduce you to three mothers.

The first is a mother who is in a rest home awaiting the close of her life. It probably will not be long. She is mentally and socially challenged according to medical and psychological definitions. But in her faith in God and her desire to serve him and his children, she makes most of us look retarded by comparison.

She never married, but recently she had a dream in which her Heavenly Father introduced her to her eternal husband. She is excited about that.

Twenty six years ago when her sister died of cancer, she became a mother for several months to her sister’s children. Their home would not have received the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. Their family organization was sketchy, the schedule haphazard, but she nurtured the little ones and served the older ones with all the dedication you could ask of a mother.

The second mother is a righteous, beautiful, and gifted woman who was promised in her patriarchal blessing that she would meet a worthy young man and have a large family. But the years past and the promised blessing did not unfold as she assumed they would. And so she became the favorite auntie of her nieces and nephews. She bonded with them, taught them, and became an example of noble womanhood to them. She did the same for her students in the schools and private teaching that became her career. Her talent and skill inspired and instructed young musicians. Her teaching and patient nurturing lifted the mentally challenged young people to whom she had dedicated her career.

Then one day the patriarchal promise came to pass. To fulfill her new calling as a mother, she changed her associations and activities to focus on her husband and children.

The third mother gave most of her adult years to the process of bearing and rearing children. She liked to quote a noble Roman woman of antiquity who was asked by visitors if they could see her jewels. The woman happily agreed. She had her children brought forth and said, “These are my jewels.”

This mother and her husband practiced family planning. Their plan was to welcome all the babies the Lord would choose to send to them. He chose to send a fair number, and he blessed this mother with the capacity to carry and give birth to these babies with few complications. She did suffer one miscarriage of what would have been their fourth child.

In her mid forties she felt sharp pains in her stomach. Emergency room doctors correctly diagnosed the problem as a tubule pregnancy and said they could not save the developing fetus. They added, “With fifteen children already, would you like us to remove your reproductive organs to avoid any future complications?”

She and her husband asked for time alone to consider. This mother said, “Tell them to take only what they have to. I have not come this far to back out now. If the Lord wants to send us more children, I want to be able to receive them.”

The doctors agreed, but when they operated, they found advanced ovarian cancer. It took her life.

These three mothers were my first wife’s sister Lynette, my second wife Sharon, and my first wife, Diane.

I have seen mothers in many other situations; women who mothered as teachers, neighbors, friends, counselors, healers, business and government officials, and virtually all walks of life. Some had children of their own, some did not yet. Many were limited by cultural customs, ignorance, or personal imperfections, but they sincerely tried.

The best definition of a mother I know is, “A woman who loves the Lord and wants to serve him by caring for his children whenever and wherever she has the opportunity.” For such women the Lord will, in his own wisdom and time, open the way and sustain them in their righteous desires.

Such women will be blessed to become queens and priestesses in the kingdom of God. They will share with their husbands the greatest glories of the celestial kingdom. There are neither bachelors nor single sisters in the most exalted realm of God’s kingdom.

He has said, “In the celestial glory there are three heavens or degrees; And in order to obtain the highest, a man must enter into this order of the priesthood [meaning the new and everlasting covenant of marriage]; And if he does not, he cannot obtain it.” (Doctrine and Covenants: 131)

Every person who chooses to be a husband or wife, father or mother shall have that opportunity. And unto them the Lord has promised:

“Ye shall come forth in the first resurrection; …  and shall inherit thrones, kingdoms, principalities, and powers, dominions, all heights and depths—… (they are they who) shall pass by the angels, and the gods, which are set there, to their exaltation and glory in all things, as hath been sealed upon their heads, which glory shall be a fullness and a continuation of the seeds forever and ever.

“Then shall they be gods, because they have no end; therefore shall they be from everlasting to everlasting, because they continue; then shall they be above all, because all things are subject unto them. Then shall they be gods, because they have all power, and the angels are subject unto them. (Doctrine and Covenants: 132)

“These are they whose bodies are celestial, whose glory is that of the sun, even the glory of God, the highest of all, whose glory the sun of the firmament is written of as being typical.” (Doctrine and Covenants: 76)

The women, who choose to, will beget eternal lives and nurture eternal families, worlds without end they will be mothers.

For those of you who just tuned in, this is the next installment of my memoirs currently in production. The previous installments are available on my web page duanehiatt.com I hope you find this and them interesting.