Biography Part 6

On weekends, especially Sundays, my mother would pack us up and take us to visit Grandfather and Grandmother, Hans and Zina Jensen. They lived in a village called Hartly and owned a combined grocery store, and service station. In the back of the store were three small rooms where they lived and called home. Outside, behind the store, was a large yard surrounded by trees with an old truck that sat off to the side with the motor gone. My brother and I would play for hours in the old beast. Inside, My Grandmother would sneak us baloney from the store, which was better than candy and my grandfather would shake his finger at all of us when he caught her. A lot of times when we went on Saturdays my brother and I were allowed to stay over night. That is when my grandmother would tell her stories. She loved fantasy and magic. I remember sitting on her lap and listening to some of her stories of witches and wizards and fairies and gnomes. Just the way she told them, I would actually believe her and thought there were real fairies living in her backyard. She was known throughout the community as a great storyteller. (I wonder if those fairies were related to mine.)

I spent most of my childhood on the Church ranch. My grandfather decided it was time to retire, so sold the store and moved into a town called Cardston. A few years later, my Grandmother had a stroke and passed away in her bed on August 28, 1970. That was a very hard day for me because it was on my seventeenth birthday and I loved my grandmother very much. Three months later, November of 1970, my father quit the farm life and we moved into Cardston to live with Grandfather. My mother didn’t want him to be alone. My father had bought a shoe repair shop and book store, in Cardston which was quit different than farming, but he soon grew to love what he was doing, fixing shoes and cowboy boots and became very good at it. He had cowboys come from all over, even from Montana, US.