Feb. 2022 my grandparents:

Grandpa Fryer at top, then Grandma Fryer followed by Grandpa and Grandma Bowen with their family in the bottom picture.

Talking about grandparents and what they were like is so subjective. Ask any of my siblings or cousins, and I am sure you would get different answers than mine. I didn’t spend much time with any of them except for my Grandma Fryer. Born on Mar. 22, 1898, she and her family immigrated to the United States from Cumberland, England in 1913 aboard the Mauritania ship. They landed in New York and took the train to Utah, where she lived the rest of her life. She was a very kind and loving lady who I never bad-mouthed anyone. My ex-husband adored her because she openly loved and respected him. She never once said anything bad about his drinking or smoking.

Now and again, my ex and I would cook a lamb roast and then take dinner up to her home. She was widowed in October of 1966 and lived the rest of her life alone in her house in Deweyville. She was 98 years old when she passed away in April of 1996.

I would stay at her house for about a week almost every summer as a child. I loved it because you could eat whenever you wanted to. Not only was Grandma Fryer a great cook, but they lived on a farm, so one could freely pick from strawberry, raspberry, and black cap bushes. Also, fresh carrots, peas, and tomatoes from the fields. The next-door lady had a cherry tree that grew white cherries, and we could grab a few of those. Then I would climb into a tree in her backyard and leisurely munch on my goodies from the smallest, cutest paper bag ever.

Her husband was a hardworking man who was always busy at something on the farm but never really made much money. They led a more uncomplicated life. He was also quite shy and quiet. Occasionally we got to ride with him on his tractor. That was wonderful. I loved looking at the back of his neck. It was so sunbaked that the skin looked like the surface of a snicker-doodle cookie. His hands were enormous, browned, and well-used. But I never had conversations with Grandpa Fryer. He died of a stroke when I was in junior high school.

My Grandma and Grandpa Bowen lived in the small town just north of Brigham City. That is where my dad was born. We visited them for a few hours nearly every summer, but I never slept over there and didn’t do much with them. I remember my Grandma Bowen was loud and loved to cuss, “Lordy Clark” or “you cock-eyed kids.” She knitted a lot. And she was the only adult who acknowledged that I suffered from acne. She offered some helpful hints like products I should use. Her comments embarrassed me, but she was resolute in stating what was so obvious. Bowens had a bit more money as Grandpa Bowen worked for Utah Power and Light plus had a farm, so Grandma Bowen had the most gorgeous, spacious pink bathroom I had ever seen up to that time.  

Grandpa Bowen, and he was the best storyteller. He was funny and full of life. I spent the most time with him when he and my dad drove up to Grand Teton Lodge in the Tetons when I worked there the summer of 1973. They both picked me up to take me home, so I could get ready to go back to school at Utah State University. A couple of times, I did visit Grandpa Bowen while I was at school in Logan. Once, he asked me to please do the genealogy for the family and continue what Grandma Bowen had started. I took a long time fulfilling that promise but I did. (It took the invention of the internet and a company called Ancestry.com, but I think I did a pretty good job).

Grandma Bowen died at 68 years old of a heart attack, so Grandpa Bowen also lived quite a while on his own. He spent the summers in northern Utah and the winters in Arizona, near his oldest daughter. He passed away at the age of 87.

So, all in all, my memories in a nutshell:

Grandma Fryer – she was my best friend, a confidant, a person who loved me no matter what. She seriously never said a mean thing about anyone. Grandpa Fryer was a hardworking quiet man but always kind and smiley.

Grandma Bowen was loud and full of life, living her life to the absolute fullest. She seemed confident and gregarious. Grandpa Bowen was the teaser, the storyteller, the man who may not have known how to show his love the best, but I knew he appreciated and was proud of me. 

None of my grandparents were ever mean or cross or hard on me. They were the best examples ever. I have always tried to say nice things, be thankful like the Fryers, live life to the fullest, and say what I mean in an amusing, funny way like the Bowens.

Feb.14, 2022 Lessons from my first job

  

 

February 14, 2022 

My First Job 

by Brenda B Wright

 

           When a dime was a lot of money, I would agree to polish my dad’s shiny black Sunday shoes for the glory of owning that coin. The feel of the black paste as I poked my cloth-covered finger into it was always pleasant but also under my scientific scrutiny. I would watch the paste buckle up under my finger pressure. It would feel soft yet slightly rigid as it rippled up haltingly unto my cloth-covered finger. I loved the smell of shoe paste, especially the kind that came in the flat round cans with the fantastic opener, which was like a magic lever you would turn until it pried and then popped the top of the can off.

I hated how the paste always got under my fingernail, no matter how many layers I overlapped the cloth. I would scrub on the smooth paste onto my dad’s shoes with my left hand shoved deep down inside his shoe while holding the rag in my right hand. This method always left polish marks along my skin below the elbow of my left arm. That paste was hard to get off skin. I recall several days I had those marks on my forearm as I left to go to Sunday church services because I didn't like to scrub as hard as it would take to get it off completely.

But I would smear the pasty wax all over Dad's shoes and then attempt to polish the wax with his soft shoe brush. I never could whip the polishing brush back and forth hard enough to get the shine required, so Dad usually did a few quick expert strokes with the brush before handing me the beautiful shining dime.

The hardest part of polishing dad's shoes was putting a penny in the tithing envelope to pay to the church. No exceptions, a full ten percent of all earnings went to the LDS church coffers.

Then for many years, I babysat neighbor's children to earn some spendable dollar bills. I had increased by ten percent on my understanding of money.

My first so-called real job with income taxes and other withholdings was working for Utah State University Vending. I got to work at the Vending company office at the top of the university campus by six in the morning for four years. I wrapped donuts and cinnamon rolls placed in vending machines all over the campus. I sealed those sticky confections into waxed paper for all four years of college.             Occasionally my job expanded to cleaning tables in the Student Union, working concession stands at various ballgames, and adding figures for the account in the days before calculators. Watching the elderly ladies working full time made me want a degree more than ever to get a better job one day. I had no idea how those ladies did their jobs day after day, year after year, for the $1.65 hour, which was the minimum wage then. But I had advanced to working for tens of dollars. Ten dollars could repurchase a lot in the early 1970s. I could get a great pair of shoes for less than ten dollars, Levi's 501 jeans were $10.00, and gasoline was about twenty-five cents a gallon.  

While going to university, I was a firefighter for the BLM in the summer months. When I graduated, I got a job at Bentley's clothes store at Crossroads Mall in downtown Salt Lake City for a few months. Then worked as a typist for the Utah State Government Department of Criminal Identification. I was earning four hundred dollars a month. I felt I had arrived and increased by ten percent again. Now my brain began thinking in terms of hundreds of dollars. The rent was $110.00 a month for my little place on Belmont Avenue. Car payment was about $100.00 a month. 

During most of my marriage with jobs as a narcotics agent for the Utah State Department of Public Safety, Eastern Airlines, and school teaching, my life had existed around thinking in terms of thousands of dollars. We bought and sold cars, earned monthly wages, remodeled, and bought furniture for thousands of dollars.  

By 2012, my husband and I sold our house and rentals and moved downtown to City Creek. Here is when I knew I had arrived in the hundreds of thousands of dollars land. I had to write a check that was like two hundred and ninety thousand dollars for the one-bedroom condo. Our Murray home sold for two hundred and fifty-five thousand dollars. Terry had purchased that same home in 1976 for forty-two thousand three hundred and fifty dollars.

Starting with that first job of shoe polishing, it has taken me nearly a lifetime to understand the value of work, the power of money, and inflation. 

But before I die, I wonder if I can reach the million-dollar threshold? I'm not dead yet, so I believe I better get up and do some work!