Ray Fred Blake Jr., our beloved husband, father, grandfather, brother, patriarch of our family & friend to all, passed away peacefully, Tuesday morning, November 1st, 2022, at his home in Bountiful, Utah. He was tenderly cared for and surrounded by those he loved.
Ray was born on October 22, 1942 in Solomon, Arizona and surprised us all by living to the age of 80! Ray was the second of five children born to Ray Fred Blake Sr. and Clara Cardon Blake. He was the rock of his siblings; Jeannette, Carroll, Marilyn and Jesse. When Ray was 8, the family moved to Holbrook Arizona, where he lived until he graduated from high school. When Ray was in the 5th grade, he contracted Rheumatic Fever and missed the whole school year, but through his tenacity, he kept up his studies. Ray graduated from Holbrook High School where he was Student Body President, ran track and played football.
He served a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Scotland from 1962-1964 and was assistant to the President. He graduated from Arizona State University in 1967 in Education. That same year, he married the love of his life, Susan Kay Kocherhans, in the Mesa Arizona Temple. Together they raised three children; Stephanie, Scott and Jennifer. Ray began teaching middle school right out of college, and the kids loved him. He was close to becoming a vice principal when he was recruited to work in property management. He received his real estate license and began teaching Shopping Center Management teams at Michigan State University, Arizona State University and Purdue University. He was the director of Asset Management for Collier Heinz and Associates, overseeing properties in Virginia, North Carolina, Missouri, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Montana and Utah. He became a senior partner with CHA until he retired in 2009. He was co-owner of Keva Juice in New Mexico and Utah and partnered with his son Scott, in real estate ventures.
Ray was a lifelong member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He and Susan served as docents at the Church Museum of History and Art. Ray served in Bishoprics, as a High Priest Group Leader, on the High Council, as a Scout Master, a Seminary teacher, and most recently as an ordinance worker in the Bountiful Utah Temple. However, the most fun he had was serving the little children with Susan in the nursery.
Ray loved to snow ski and took his children most Saturdays. Their favorite part was taking off their boots, warming their feet by the fire and getting hot chocolate in the lodge. Ray competed in numerous marathons and 10K races. Though he never reached his goal to qualify for the Boston Marathon, he had a lot of fun trying. Ray loved the outdoors and beautifying his impeccable yard. Ray’s greatest joy came in spending time with his family. He made each grandchild feel special and they all adored him. Most Friday nights, two or three grandkids would call him up and ask to come over for a sleepover where they would play games, eat popcorn and watch movies. In the morning, Ray would take them all to breakfast. Ray’s favorite activities were spent with his family at Disneyland, the beach, BYU football games, Jazz games, traveling to Europe, Mexico, South America, Canada, the Middle East and throughout the US. Summer vacations included a trip to Lake Powell, soaking up the sun and playing cards on the top deck of the houseboat. Ray loved an ice-cold Coke, a bowl of green chile verde and chips and salsa from his favorite Mexican restaurant, La Hacienda. Ray always made holiday family programs a special time to get together and reflect on the Savior. Ray’s love for teaching and helping others brought him great joy in his life and earned him the respect of all who came in contact with him. Ray’s positive nature elicited his famous response to most situations, “Life is Good!”. Ray had a tender heart and helped numerous people not only financially but lifted their spirits and made them feel valued and loved by our Heavenly Father through his actions. He did not like negative talk about others and quickly, yet kindly, silenced any criticism. His unwavering faith and his deep love for his Savior, permeated all aspects of his life. His legacy of hard work, generosity, patience, integrity, long suffering, meekness, service and Christlike love, will live on with those whose lives he has touched.
He is preceded in death by his parents, Ray Fred Blake Sr. & Clara Cardon Blake, his siblings; Jeannett Hubbard (Dale-living), Marilyn Blake and Jesse Blake. He is survived by his wife, Susan Kay Kocherhans Blake, his children; Stephanie Blake Getter (Bruce), Scott (Robyn) Blake, Jennifer Blake Carroll (Brent), grandchildren; Dallon Getter, Colton Getter, Makena Getter Aragon (Joshua), Cardon Getter, Jace Carroll, Bryan Carroll, Miranda Carroll, Adam Carroll, Ashton Blake, Savannah Blake, Aubrie Blake, his sister Carroll Brockman and many nieces and nephews. The Blake family would like to thank Dr. Joshua Oaks, Dr. Brent Muehlstein, Dr. Belisario Arango, and Ray’s kind nighttime nurse, Mallika Veetut, who tenderly took care of their beloved husband and father! Ray requested that In lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Self Reliance program of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
An evening viewing will be held Friday, November 11, 2022 from 6:00 – 8:00 pm in the North Canyon Fourth Ward, 965 E Oakwood Drive, Bountiful, Utah. Funeral services will be Saturday, November 12, 2022 at 11:00 am, also in the North Canyon Fourth Ward, where family and friends may attend a viewing from 9:30 -10:45 am prior to the services. Interment will be in the Bountiful City Cemetery. Condolences may be sent to the family at www.olpinmortuary.com. Funeral services under the direction of Olpin Family Mortuary, Pleasant Grove, Utah.
“Susan, I’ll watch over you and will be waiting to hold you once again in my arms. We’ll have such a tender reunion………Ray".
Wedding Photo
Ray & Susan
Louis Philippe Cardon
Highlights From His Life
Presented by Louis Bellamy Cardon at the 2011 Cardon Reunion
My assignment is to present some highlights from the life of Louis Philippe Cardon. The reason for this special attention to this middle child of Philippe and Marthe Cardon is that this year, 2011, is the one hundredth anniversary of his death, which took place in the Mormon colony of Dublan in 1911, one year before the general exodus of the Mormon colonists from that area at the time of a major revolution. My father, Louis Sanders Cardon, who was born in Dublan in 1901 – and was therefore 10 years old at the time of the death of his grandfather, Louis Philippe, used to tell me of his earliest memories of the old gentleman. For some time it was the fact that Louis Philippe was so obviously a gentleman, which made my father fearful of even talking with him. Louis Philippe always wore a suit, and carried a cane, while my father never wore shoes unless he had to. So he went out of his way to avoid encountering the old gentleman on the street or in the house. And then one day, as he was walking, or trotting, on a long path through a wheat field, to his dismay he saw his grandfather coming towards him in the opposite direction. There was no way he could avoid meeting him and speaking with him. When the meeting took place, however, he was pleasantly surprised to discover that Louis Philippe was actually a gentle and pleasant man, and very easy to talk with. After that, my father really enjoyed contacts with his grandfather up to the latter’s death in 1911, when my father was 10 years old.
While the characteristic of gentleness which this story illustrates, is a desirable trait, it is not the one I chose to emphasize in this appraisal as a whole. But before I proceed with my commentary on his principal traits, perhaps I should comment first on his name. Most of us on our genealogical charts have the name of Louis Philippe Cardon as the fifth child of Philippe and Marthe Cardon. We assume that that was the name given him at his birth. But actually his name was recorded on the parish record as Philippe Cardon. Evidently it was only after he came to Utah, at the age of 22, that he began using “Louis Philippe” among his associates (reportedly taking the name “Louis” from Louis Malan, his godfather, who presented him for baptism as a newborn infant). He was always called “Philippe” by members of the family, but by others he was sometimes called Louis Philippe or even just Louis. In this discussion I will call him Louis Philippe, which seems to have been the name he preferred.
Perhaps the most salient characteristic of Louis Philippe was his life-long pattern of pioneering. I am using this term pioneering, or pioneer in a simple and traditional sense. A pioneer is one who leads others by developing a new area of activity – perhaps a new area for settlement – and by so doing performs a major service for those who follow. The Cardon family as a whole were pioneers in the adoption of the new religion which came into their lives in 1852, when they were among the first Waldensian converts to the Mormon faith. Certainly they were pioneers when they responded to Brigham Young’s call to leave their homes and gather to Zion. In 1854 the Cardons were in the vanguard of those who disposed of their property and left the land they had defended for 600 years to begin the difficult voyage to Utah. Louis Philippe was ordained a Teacher in the Aaronic Priesthood before leaving Italy. And then he was ordained a High Priest at the age of 24, two years after his arrival in Utah.
As you might suppose, the trip from the Piedmont to Utah had its trials and dangers. The voyage to Utah took almost nine months. The first part of the trip, from the Piedmont to Liverpool, England, involved weeks of travel by sled, by carriage and by rail. Then came about two months by ship to New Orleans, which included an encounter with a terrific storm on the way. At New Orleans, on their arrival, the Cardons found the city under quarantine for cholera. It was said that this city of 35,000 inhabitants lost 5,000 to the dread disease in one twelve day period that year, 1854. Pressing on by river steamer up the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the Cardon group reached Kansas City where they outfitted to cross the plains in a wagon train with ox teams. That part of the journey took a little over three months – from July 18th to October 28th, 1854.
For Louis Philippe it also included a near-death experience on the trail across the plains. One night a band of Indians slipped in and drove off all the wagon train’s oxen and other livestock across a river and into the brush on the other side. The next morning every man and boy who could swim was called upon to go over, round up all the livestock they could, and herd them back across the river. To their great relief they were successful in bringing back every animal. Then some of the boys and younger men expressed their exuberant feelings by “horsing around in the water.” Louis Philippe was considered a fair swimmer, but had the misfortune to step backward into a deep whirlpool. The others managed to drag him out and with great effort and prayer, revived him. But the experience had been close to death indeed. After their arrival in Salt Lake, the Cardons were soon able to demonstrate how valuable they could be as pioneers. Unlike many of the early settlers, some of whom had been residents of well-established cities at the time of their conversion, the Cardons knew how to wrest a living from the most barren farming conditions. Moreover Philippe and several of his sons, including Louis Philippe were skilled home builders and stone masons.
They were highly proficient in building homes and barns from crude materials. So Louis Philippe and his father and brothers were soon in much demand.
Among those they helped were a number of their Waldensian neighbors, who followed the Cardons to Utah over the next few years. One such family was the Stale family, which had walked across the plains in 1856 in the first handcart company. The father of the family, Jean Pierre Stale, had died on the way, of exhaustion and starvation – but thanks to his efforts, his wife and children had reached Salt Lake. The Cardons helped them with shelter and food, and in early 1857 Louis Philippe married Susette Stale, the oldest daughter. This was a plural marriage, as shortly before Louis Philippe had married another young woman from the Piedmont, Sarah Ann Welborn. While Sarah Ann had no children, her marriage to Louis Philippe appears to have been a happy one. She was loved by Louis Philippe and by the children of Susette. Susette bore five children and was exceptionally active and happy up to the very day of her death in Tucson Arizona in 1923.
Since the arrival of Brigham Young with the first wagon train, in 1847, the city of Salt Lake, with its broad streets and its homes, and its surrounding farms, had begun to emerge with remarkable speed. By the time the Cardon family arrived by wagon train in 1854 – seven years after Brigham Young’s arrival – much of the work of pioneering had already been accomplished, so far as Salt Lake was concerned. The establishment of a functioning city in a desert was well underway.
But don’t forget that it was never Brigham’s intention to build one city in a wilderness. Right from the beginning, year by year, he sent out families from Salt Lake to pioneer other communities – Ogden, Provo, Logan – and eventually communities all the way from Canada in the north to Mexico in the south. That was the stage of Mormon pioneering which Louis Philippe and the other Cardons got in on. Builders and pioneers that they were, they responded time and again to their leaders’ call to help establish new towns – first north to Ogden, Logan, and southern Idaho – then south to help build a number of new communities in Arizona, and then on into Mexico to colonize an undeveloped area there.
Like virtually all the inhabitants of the Piedmont valleys and hills, and like virtually all the early Mormon settlers in Utah, Louis Philippe was a farmer, at least part time. But like his father Philippe and his younger brother Paul, he was first and foremost a mason. He was a builder of stone homes, and chimneys, and town walls – and, when he had an opportunity, of temples. It seemed that wherever he went, that capability was in demand, and was appreciated.The Cardons settled first in the Ogden area, and Louis Philippe’s first two children, Joseph and Emanuel, were born there in 1858 and 1859.
But in 1961, Brigham Young called the Cardons to help settle Cache Valley. Here their building skills were truly invaluable. Paul, Louis Philippe’s younger brother, is credited with helping to build the first house in Logan. Later, he was in charge of the mill that produced lumber for the temple. Philippe and Louis Philippe, besides building homes, built the fireplaces for a great many of the homes in Cache Valley, and worked on the temple. Paul was also the first treasurer of Logan City, and longtime town marshal.
After ten years in Logan, the Cardons were well established. But Logan itself was becoming a larger town, and was beginning to draw the attention of the U. S. government’s enforcers of anti-polygamy laws. Danger of arrest impelled Louis Philippe to move with his two wives and three children to a more outlying community, Oxford, at the northern extremity of Cache Valley. Here an additional two children were born.
By 1876 Oxford too was becoming unsafe for polygamous families. Federal authorities were arresting both husbands and wives for “unlawful cohabitation.” Consequently a worried Louis Philippe made a trip to Salt Lake City to seek Brigham Young’s advice. Upon his return home he reported that in response to his question, “Brigham Young rose from his chair, smote the palm of one hand with the doubled fist of the other and said ‘Brother Cardon, it is time for the Saints to settle Arizona, as I have been thinking about. Be here in a week with your wife and belongings. The company will be ready to leave then.’ ”
As it turned out there were four companies involved in the move to Arizona. The move was actually a part of Brigham Young’s plan to plant colonies from Canada to Mexico. Circumstances had again made Louis Philippe a pioneer. Louis Philippe’s two sons, Joseph (18) and Emanuel (17) were not originally included in Brigham’s call to build pioneer settlements in Arizona. So they planned to just help their father move down and then come back to Oxford. But the apostle Brigham Young, son of President Brigham Young, quickly changed that plan. He told the two young men that they were to consider themselves to be “Missionaries,” called to serve in Arizona by helping their father build settlements there. A young lady accompanied 17 year old Emanuel, and the company stopped long enough in Salt Lake for the two to be married. Joseph, 18 years old, already had a wife and a child at the time of the move. He married two more wives a few years later.
In Arizona the Cardons participated in the establishment of several new settlements. The first one, Obed, was on the Little Colorado River. Louis Philippe, as a mason, supervised the building of houses and also a nine-foot stone wall entirely around the town, to guard against Indians. Unfortunately, the site proved swampy and malarial, and had to be abandoned. Louis Philippe and his two sons and his son-in-law were subsequently prominent in the settlement of Woodruff and Taylor. Joseph, Louis Philippe’s oldest son directed the surveying of the Taylor site, and the four Cardon men (Louis Philippe, his two sons, and his son-in-law) formed a company which took a freighting contract, worked on a railroad, and took 3000 sheep on shares, to earn money to supplement their pioneering farming efforts.
At this point, in 1884, polygamy prosecution again intervened. The Edmunds anti-polygamy law had been passed and Utah enforcement officers began making raids in Arizona. Consequently that fall, LDS President Taylor advised Louis Philippe and Joseph to move to Mexico, where polygamy was legal.
Later, both Louis Philippe and his sons, Joseph and Emanuel would be placed on the honor roll of heads of founding families and builders of the Colony of Juarez. Louis Philippe was prominent there in the erection of homes, public buildings and the first mill for grinding grain. For himself, Louis Philippe built a fine two story brick home, where he lived for many years. In the meantime his youngest son, Louis Paul (my grandfather) after graduating from Brigham Young College in Logan in 1893, taught school for four years in Taylor, Arizona, and then was called by President Woodruff to go to Mexico to help establish an educational system for the Church there. In Dublan, he served as school principal for fourteen years and built a large home which still stands. With most of his family now in Dublan, Louis Philippe gave in to their urging and after 1900 moved from Juarez to Dublan, where he died in 1911.
The exodus of the Mormon settlers the year after that was permanent for many, including most of the Cardons. However, others returned to the colonies later, and nowadays the area is beautiful and productive, and boasts a really lovely L.D.S. temple. It is just one of a number of communities which are to some extent memorials to the pioneering labors of Louis Philippe Cardon and his family. And the Cardon family itself, whether we recognize it or not, has probably been shaped in part by attributes passed on by Louis Philippe and his family of pioneers.
Thomas B. Cardon Italian Book of Mormon Donated to the LDS Church for the Rome Temple Visitors Center
CARDONS!
Descendants of Philippe and Marthe Marie Tourn 1799-1986
Lucinda Hurst Cardon, the oldest of ten children of Phillip Harrison Hurst and Ellen Adelia Wilson was born the 15th of May 1881 in Fairview, San Pete County, Utah. Her early years were spent in Fairview where he father worked in sawmills, in a flour mill and on the railroad. Also during this time when Lucinda was a very small girl, he spent two years as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
In December 1890 the family began the long move to Mexico where the Mormon Church was establishing colonies. They went by train as far as Deming and from there by team and wagon during the middle of the winter. They settled and established a home in what became Dublan. A year or two later her father leased and later purchased a saw mill in the nearby mountains which he operated for many years. Lucinda spent some time at the saw mill helping cook for the crew and later did all the cooking herself.
On October 6, 1900 she was married to Joseph Elmer Cardon by Stake President Anthony W. Ivins at his home in Colonia Juarez. They established their home in Dublan where five of their ten children were born.
In 1912 due to the Mexican revolution they had to leave Mexico, she traveling with her children to El Paso, Texas by box car on a freight train. Although, some of the colonists later returned to their homes, Elmer and Lucinda never returned to Mexico to live. She wrote of this period, “times were very hard after leaving our home, as we left everything we had there. I left my parents and relatives, never to live near them again.”
They went from El Paso to the Tucson area, living at Jaynes Station and Binghamton. From there they went to New Mexico and Colorado where they were engaged in farming.
They moved to Mesa in 1943 where she has since resided. She has been very active in temple work having served eight years as an ordained worker. Just a few weeks ago she stated she had done the temple work for three thousand seven hundred names.
Her husband died May 8, 1965 after sixty-four years of marriage. Also two daughter preceded her in death, Hazel, who died as a girl and Mrs. Lois Chalk.
Surviving are five sons, Joseph of Durango, Colorado, Ernest of Turlock, California, Eugene of Bloomfield, New Mexico, Udell of Ignacio, Colorado and Lloyd of Winslow, Arizona; three daughters, Ella (Mrs. Howard Goodman), Gladys (Mrs. Vernon Jack) of Mesa, and Mildred, (Mrs. Ernest Klienworth) of Winslow; 43 grandchildren, 120 great grandchildren and 4 great, great grandchildren.
Also a brother, Perry and a sister, Vera Cloward of Provo, Utah as well as numerous other relatives and friends.
She passed away August 3, 1973, after a brief illness.
Back – Lucinda, Joseph Phillip, Joseph Elmer
Front – Ella and Ernest Elmer
Obituary of Lucile Reading
16 Aug 1909 – 22 Mar 1982
Great-grand-daughter of Philip Cardon and Martha Marie Tourn
Grand-daughter of Jean Paul Cardon and Susannah Goudin
Daughter of Louis Samuel Cardon and Rebecca Ann Ballard
Sister Lucile Cardon Reading, managing editor of the Friend since its inception in 1971, died unexpectedly at her home in Centerville, Utah, on 22 March 1982. She was 72.
In addition to her work at the Friend, Sister Reading was widely known for her devoted service in the Church and her commitment to civic responsibility. “I want you all to know,” said son James C. Reading during graveside services, “that my mother knew the gospel was true with every fiber of her being, and lived a testimony of it every day of her life.” She served as a member of the Primary General Board for eight years and as second counselor in the general presidency of the Primary from 1963 to 1970. Other Church service included ward and stake callings in the Relief Society, MIA, Sunday School, Primary, and the Young Adult program.
She was particularly loved in Centerville for her tireless devotion to the children and youth of that small community. Friends remember her as a warm, empathetic woman who loved nature.
At the time of her death, Sister Reading was serving her third term as president of the Davis County Board of Education. She had also been actively involved with a number of community organizations, among them the South Davis Welfare Council, the Utah State Federation of Women’s Clubs, and the Utah Division of the American Cancer Society. She was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Primary Children’s Hospital for several years.
Louis Sanders Cardon Interview
10 Aug 1901 – 11 May 1988
Great-grandson of Philip Cardon and Martha Marie Tourn
Grandson of Louis Philip Cardon and Susette Stalé
Son of Louis Paul Cardon and Ellen Clymena Sanders
CHARLES REDD CENTER FOR WESTERN STUDIES BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY
LDS POLYGAMY ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
LOUIS S. CARDON
interviewed by Kimberly James
October 8, 1981
CRC-K151
Copyright 1982 Charles Redd Center for Western Studies
PREFACE
This is a transcription of an interview conducted for the Oral History Program of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.
Scholars are welcome to use short excerpts from this manuscript without obtaining permission as long as proper credit is given to the interviewee, interviewer, and the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies and other sponsoring institutions, if any. Scholars must, however, obtain permission from the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies before using extensive quotations of the manuscript or related materials.
The original recording was only the first stage in the creation of this manuscript. The audio tape was transcribed verbatim, and the manuscript was then edited to conform to the standards of the written language. An edited copy was returned to the interviewee for his/her corrections, additions, and deletions, which in some cases might have been extensive. This bound copy includes the changes made by the editor and the interviewee. In addition to this transcript, the original tape is available for scholarly use.
Beyond the interviewer’s efforts to obtain the truth during the interview, the Charles Redd Center assumes no responsibility for the accuracy of the statements made in this transcript. This transcript and tape may only be reproduced by the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies.
CHARLES REDD CENTER FOR WESTERN STUDIES
BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY
LDS POLYGAMY ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
INTERVIEWEE: LOUS S. CARDON
INTERVIEWER: Kimberly James
DATE: October 8, 1981
PLACE: Orem, Utah
SUBJECT: Life in a LDS polygamous family
KJ: This is an interview with Louis S. Cardon for the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies LDS Polygamy Oral History Project by Kimberly James at his home in Orem, Utah on October 8, 1981. The time is 7:00 p.m. Also present is his wife, Sister Winnafred Cardon.
LC: I was born on August 10, 1901 in Colonia Dublán, Chihuahua, Mexico. This was about fifteen miles from Juarez where the stake offices were for the Church.
My father had been teaching in Arizona at Taylor. He had been called by President Wilford Woodruff to go on a foreign mission. My father and mother were both teaching, and the Authorities changed that and told them to down to Mexico to teach. They were to help with the schools in Mexico in the Colonies. So they both went down, and they both taught the same as when they were in Taylor.
My mother was my father’s first wife. Her name was Ellen Sanders. My father’s second wife was Edith Done. She was also a graduate from a college in Payson, Utah, so she taught at times.
My father was principal of the schools. He would teach in the wintertime, and then in the summertime he would do survey work for Don Luis Terases who had a ranch said to be the size of New Mexico and Arizona together.
When the colonists got there, they had to get water out on their farm lands. They built their houses close together where everybody could be in a community, and they lived in the boundaries of the town. They had their church building which was also used for their school building. Their farms were all lying outside of town.
They would go out to the farms in different directions. My father did the surveying for the canals that brought the water out from reservoirs to their lands and also for irrigation of the town lots. At that time it was vital to them.
I was born there, and I was about ten years old when we left there. I remember that my father had a house built by a carpenter named Bluth with the help of my Aunt Edith’s father, Brother Done. It was a big house. It was the biggest house in town. Of course, my father had a big family or was expecting one. I remember in that big house there were six bedrooms with closets. a library, a bath and a screened porch upstairs. Downstairs there was a large entrance room or hall with entrances from the north and west sides of the house. A front porch was on the north and the west sides of the house also. There were also five rooms, a kitchen, pantry and a bath.
The dining room was an extra large room where they all ate together for a while. This was when the families only had two or three children. When I was born. I was the fourth child in Ellen Sander’s family. It was the oldest family, so neither of the other families would have that many. But there were quite a few when all three families got together.
I don’t think that worked out. I don’t remember. I know that this was kind of the hope. It did work out that they got a house for each family. This was after they had lived together in this house. I don’t know where they lived before I came. When I was old enough to remember, we had a library upstairs. I slept in the library. The others had houses.
They didn’t have water facilities down there generally. We had a big tank where we had water in the house. We had running water. The other houses in the neighborhood didn’t have it.
One thing that I remember when I was very young was that a Brother Tanner was head of the church schools. He would come down and stay at our place when he came to visit. One night he was sleeping in the room that I was in. It didn’t happen to be the library this time. In the nighttime I heard a noise, and it frightened me very much. I went over and got in bed with Brother Tanner. He calmed me down. and I got back into my own bed and stayed. A little while later I heard a noise again. It was really frightening me. I got in with Brother Tanner. The third time this happened I stayed in bed, and I discovered that it was Brother Tanner snoring that was disturbing me. But he was awful good to me.
I remember going to Aunt Edith’s house and to Aunt Irene’s. Irene Pratt was the third wife. My father would usually stay one night at one place, and he went to each family and spent one night at a time. He would just rotate. I was the oldest boy, and of course, I worked on the farms. I would go with him frequently to the other families so as to be ready to go with him when we went to the fields.
In Mexico I remember that my mother had asthma. She couldn’t stay in Dublán in certain times of the year. She would have to go to another community like Diaz. She taught in Diaz and she taught in Juarez at different times. Being young children, we went with her wherever she went. So there were times when there would just be Aunt Irene and Aunt Edith at home with their families.
After we came out of Mexico, we settled in Jamestown right near Tucson, Arizona. We had all three families there, although in different houses. There was some concern about having the polygamous families. The people from Mexico that settled in Jamestown were having some trouble with getting the monies to operate the land that had been allocated to them which was really submarginal land and it didn’t work out. They never were able to get water in sufficient amounts.
Later we went to Binghampton near Tucson when I was older. My mother would go off to other towns in Arizona to teach. I stayed with the other families to be on the farm. I would stay with one family for a few months and a few months with the other family. Aunt Edith and Aunt Irene were both just really good to me. In fact, the thing that I remembered, and it didn’t work so well with the other children, was they would treat me like they treated my father. I would get a little extra because I was working. I would get a little more rice pudding or something like this when anything was short or I would get a little better piece of chicken. They were really considerate. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I am sure that they felt for me being away from my mother. I was the only one of my mother’s children that stayed with them on the farm. They really made it as nice as it could be. I came to love them both very much. They did very many things for me.
While living on the farm, my father was often engaged in getting work for the men of the community such as a fencing job on a large cattle ranch that took several weeks to do. The men in the community would take jobs that would bring in money other than just what we could raise. We hadn’t got started yet with raising very much. I happened to be old enough to be doing the farm work mostly. We would put in quite an area of peas. I would take the peas to town to sell them to the grocery stores to get some money for our needs.
Then we finally got cows. We got a cash crop from them. We milked the cows. The boys were in Aunt Irene’s family, and Aunt Edith’s family were girls mainly. In the dairy business there was always the cooling of the milk and the taking care of it this way. The girls took care of that, and the boys did the milking part. They all worked hard because we were on submarginal land all the time.
We had so many things to contend with. We didn’t have water, so we would have to go down on the river. It was a little drive. We would dig down into the river, get the water down there, put it into a barrels and haul it out to the fruit trees. We would get them to live that way for awhile. Then the jackrabbits would peel the bark off the trees, so we had to put little chicken wire fences around each tree. Then the ants carne. In one night a bed of ants would strip every leaf off a peach tree. They did this several times. We had quite a struggle which eventually had to be given up. It just couldn’t work that way.
In all this working there, I enjoyed living with my brothers and sisters of Aunt Edith’s and Aunt Irene’s families. Many people speak of them as being half brothers and half sisters. Even to this day I resent that. I think they are more than a half a sister or a half a brother. We loved each other. We have a family organization. All three of the families participate in it. Being the oldest boy, I happen to be the president of the organization. I am just the figurehead really. The others from both families have a very active part. My sister Edith is from Aunt Edith’s family, and she is really a genealogist. She has done a lot of work and helped the whole family in this way. We have an executive vice president from Aunt Irene’s family.
This year in November we have a family reunion. We meet every other year, every odd year in Mesa, Arizona. We come from Detroit. Michigan,. New York. Texas, California and from all over the country. We had children in New York, and they come out. We have a bulletin called Cardon’s Chronicle. This has a message in it which the president gives each year. We keep track of the new members and what they are doing. We have news about the missionaries. We keep track of all their activities this way.
For instance, just recently Lucy, who was one of Aunt Edith’s children and the wife of Brother Lamoreaux over in American Fork, died. We had members from both of the other families who came to her funeral from California and from Arizona.
KJ: It sounds like you are a very close family.
LC: Yes.
Aunt Irene was a good singer, and she loved to sing. I never could sing, but her children could sing. Owen could sing pretty well.
Aunt Irene helped me in many ways. We learned all the introductions in Parley P. Pratt’s Key to Theology. In his introduction for the book, he says, “Oh truth divine. What treasures unrevealed in thine exhaustless fountains are concealed. Words multiplied, how powerless to tell the infinitude with which our bosoms swell.” I learned that when I was fifteen years old, and I never have forgotten it. I could tell you just one more in there. The first chapter is science of theology. It goes. “Eternal science who would fanthom thee must launch his bark upon a shoreless sea. Thy knowledge yet shall overwhelm the earth; thy truth to immortality give birth. Thy dawn shall kindle to eternal day and man. immortal, still shall own thy sway.” This is a great blessing to me because I have lived with this ever since. I do this to show that the interest and the care that Aunt Irene took in me. Aunt Edith did many other things that were of the same nature too.
KJ: You said that your father was a principal and a teacher and your mother was a teacher. Were the other wives also teachers?
LC: Aunt Edith taught.
KJ: Was there a stress on education in your home?
LC: Yes.
There are twenty-nine children in the family. My mother had eight. Aunt Edith had twelve, and Aunt Irene had nine children. This was a large family. There was not one child that didn’t know that my father loved him best and better than anyone else although they knew the same was true of each member. Everyone just knew that our father loved us. He was really an exceptional person I think.
(Tape Interrupted)
KJ: What kind of things do you remember about your father?
LC: He never whipped me but once and that was with a weed. When he disapproved of what I did, it was more of a whipping than you could have had with physical punishment that he would give. I always wanted to have his approbation or approval. I think that this is true of every child.
You know the symbol for peace in China is two women together standing on a street corner. The symbol for war is three women standing together on a street corner. That was not true in my family. I am sure that there were times when they disagreed and had some conflicts. I don’t know, but it never was evidenced in any single time. They showed nothing but love for one another. That was part of what made this like it wasn’t more than one family.
KJ: This was true even though you were in separate houses. You felt at home in each home?
LC: Yes.
When we were at Tucson, we always had separate homes. It was separate tents when we first came out from Mexico. We had tents boarded up part way and a little bit of a floor in them sometimes.
KJ: What kinds of holidays did you celebrate in Mexico?
LC: We celebrated the Twenty-fourth of July and the Fourth of July. It seems like we always went out to the lakes. There were three lakes. the large lake, the little lake and the long lake as we called them. They were about seven miles out from town. My father and Brother Robison, my father’s nephew, got their water from these lakes that they used. The whole community would go out there to bathe and to have picnics. The whole community would be together. Everybody got their surreys out and would travel out there. Sometimes we went down by the river and had picnics down by the river in the other direction.
Christmas was always a holiday. On Christmas I would get an orange, a penny pencil, and sometimes a harmonica. That was good. They kept the Christmas tree hidden until Christmas morning. At night they would get it out of hiding and put all the tinsel on it. They would string popcorn mostly. It would be strung all over with popcorn strings. That, of course, we would get to eat and we enjoyed it. We had popcorn balls.
KJ: Would this tree be in your mother’s home because she was the first wife?
LC: It would be there because we had the biggest home. Aunt Irene and Aunt Edith both had fair sized houses that they lived in. One of them was about a block away, and another one was two blocks away. They were close together. Of course, often they would be at my mother’s house as a group all together. It would be at my mother’s house because it was a large house.
KJ: Would you have meals with just the three separate families?
LC: Yes. we didn’t have them together. My father lived earlier in the so-called United Order which was not really the united order. They had all the men eat first, and the women and the children would eat separately. It was not really the United Order. It served its purpose, and Brigham Young encouraged it even though the United Order was suspended in 1834 just after it had been in just three years.
KJ: It sounds like you had quite a large amount of work to do especially because you were oldest boy. What kinds of things did you do for recreation along with the work you did?
LC: I would hunt rabbits to supply the table. Each morning I would get up just at daylight. Sometimes I would go to the fields in the nighttime with a double barrel shotgun to get rabbits. I would get seven or eight rabbits. That was our meat. I enjoyed this. Lots of time if I could get a day off I enjoyed taking the gun and going out and hunting for rabbits.
It seems like we always worked in the fields except on rainy days. Always on rainy days we fixed fence. That was something we could do in the rain. It seemed like we were busy all the time. Later some of the men folk would have Saturday afternoon off, but we just couldn’t quite make it. I didn’t get to go.
KJ: I understand that your grandmother lived next to you.
LC: My grandmother on my father’s side was French. She certainly was faithful. She had her chickens to take care of and her own strawberry patch. She took care of it herself.
My grandfather was a very austere person. It was a custom not long before that time and even at that time for the wife to call the husband Mr. He had her do that. He always was dressed with a top hat and a cane. He wore the cane for the appearance and not for the need.
There is only once that I remember meeting him face to face. It was on the pathway coming from his daughter’s, Aunt Katie’s, my father’s sister. He lived with her. She didn’t have any children. She had a big house that was practically as big as our house. There were not very many in it. She kept an elderly German bachelor for a gardener. She had two boys that she adopted. That was all they had. He came from there. I saw him coming on the path. There was a gate in a fence between our lots, so I went down the fence to crawl through the fence. He called me up. I think that is about the only time I ever met him face to face. He was kind, I guess. You would have to ask some of the older ones who knew him better.
Grandmother used to pray a loud in French. She would really pray. She had long prayers for several minutes sometimes. I am sure that it was five, ten or fifteen minutes. Of course, we couldn’t understand what she would say. We children would get beside her house. There was just a little breezeway between what she had for a house and where I lived.
After we came to Arizona, our houses that my father had were different for each one of his families. None of them were much of a house. The families would change houses.
KJ: You have mentioned prayer. Was it a custom in your family to have prayer with your whole family together?
LC: Yes, we had prayer morning, noon and night. We prayed every noon. We all knelt at the table at noontime. We would all come in from work and have a meal together.
When I got older, my father loved to talk about the gospel, and I loved to get out of work talking about the gospel. I would get all the questions that I could. What I learned from him really stood me in stead in later years. I think he had more of an understanding of the gospel than most. In fact, in later years I know that people recognized this. So many realized that he understood it. Brother Nash, who was one of the teachers at the Gila Academy and later patriarch in the Arizona Temple, told about how so many would go to my father for counsel. I know that they did. I remember they used to come.
I never went a full year to school after the sixth grade because I had to stay out part of the year to work. My second year I went to high school I went exactly six weeks. That was all the schooling I got that year. When I was in the seventh grade, my mother was teaching in Thatcher, Arizona. She sent me home on Valentine’s Day for a valentine to my father, and that was the length of the year that I had that year. Because of this, I didn’t get much schooling.
There was a Haldman Julius Company that had printed little books of all kinds, physiology, philosophy and all the classics. They were about five inches long and three inches wide. I just wore them out in my pocket. I would take them to the field with me. I had some four hundred of these books. I still have a hundred or two downstairs. I realize now that they are real classics.
Milton’s Paradise Lost and Hiawatha was the diet I was raised on before I was ten years old. I memorized Hiawatha. It always has been easy for me to memorize.
KJ: It sounds like you remember quite a bit. Would you discuss these things while you were working or was this mostly at home?
LC: It was at home. At work we didn’t have time. It would be mostly in the evening time.
In Mexico we had two organs, one upstairs and one downstairs in the parlor. The one upstairs was ordinary size and looked much like a roll top desk. The one in the parlor was much larger and looked much like a modern-day, upright piano in shape and size. The parlor was quite an elaborate affair. Most of the rooms in the house had carpets, but the floor in the parlor was a beautiful quarter-sawed wood and was kept highly polished all the time. There was a regular sized door which led into the parlor from the entrance hall, but the doorway that led into the parlor from the sitting room consisted of two sliding doors that, when opened, would join the two rooms. Those doors matched the floor. When the doors were open a portiere could be drawn. The portiere was made of large glass beads and elongated glass pendants that sparkled with various colors in the light. There was a large chandelier also with pendants that sparkled. My father had a large roll top desk in the parlor. The desk and the organ matched floor. The doors to the parlor were always kept locked with a key so the children could not get in on their own.
When the colonists got ready to come out, the Mexicans were requiring that they submit their guns; they insisted on this. They turned guns in. but they didn’t turn them all in. They would bring their best guns to our house. We had a room, an attic, that was big enough for another floor, to have a three story house with higher ceilings that they made in those days. The only access to the attic was a little door in the hallway. The stairs came up about in the middle of the hall. There were three rooms on this end. Then there was just this small hole that we could crawl up through. The colonists would come with the guns, and my father would boost me up. I would get there, and they would bring me guns. I would lay the guns on the floor up there.
The Mexicans got suspicious. Two or three times the soldiers came in. One time we were just in the act of putting the guns up. The soldiers broke into the house and they didn’t even stop at all; they came right up the stairs and up the hallway. I was going to put the lid down. My father said, “Don’t put it down.” They would see this movement. They came in. and there was a room on that side, a room on this side and a room on the end. I just stood up there over them and saw them there. They came right up under the trap door and one went in all these rooms, but they never looked up.
KJ: I bet you were glad of that.
LG: I didn’t have sense enough to be sorry or afraid. They were intriguing to me. I was excited to see the Mexican soldiers.
KJ: Did you see a lot of soldiers in your community?
LG: Not in our town. We had a field that was on the river in Old Casa Grande. Then there was Casa Grande Nuevo. That was about three miles down by the river. Some of these rebels had taken this little Casa Grande. There were maybe a couple of hundred in there. On this day we saw the soldiers from Casa Grande Nuevo. It was only a few miles apart there. They came with blue suits trimmed with red. red banners and drums beating etc., just like a row of tin soldiers. They kept their order and marched right up to the town. Rebels who were in there deployed themselves out all around generally so they could shoot them from the outside. The soldiers were so disciplined that they would just come marching. They would drop down. We had field glasses. We could see the battle. They did take the place though. They brought the captured out-and just lined them against the wall and shot them.
KJ: You were watching all this. How did you feel about that?
LG: This is what I wonder about, what youngsters feel about it now. It was exciting to me. It was like I played cops and robbers. That was about the extent of it. I didn’t have the feeling of it. Of course, I can’t say exactly. I had just been in the third grade.
(Tape Interrupted)
LC: We had Mexicans working for us. We had a Mexican by the name of Jose at one time.
Mexico had three presidents in about as many months down there at that time. There were several factions. Armies belonging to different factions would come through our area at different times. Most of the generals of such armies would just turn their horses into the fields of the colonists without permission and without pay. But there was on general who did turn his horses into the fields and did give some compensation. This general was Rascon. This Mexican that we had working for us went to war with him. I guess we didn’t have enough work. We didn’t know what to do with him. Anyway at that time we didn’t.
He came back as a follower of Pancho Villa. We asked, “Why did you go from Rascon to Pancho Villa?” “Orosco paga un peso cada dia. Y Pancho Villa paga un peso y dos cada dia.” Orosco paid a dollar a day. Dos realizes is twenty-five cents. Pancho Villa paid a dollar and twenty-five cents, so he joined him. Who wouldn’t for twenty-five cents a day?
Jose had a hat, a sombrero. Everyone prized it, if they could get enough money to get a sombrero. He would have very little money, but he would go hungry if he could get a sombrero. I think maybe his going to war made it so perhaps he had enough money to get it. I really don’t know how he got it, but he was very proud of it.
On one occasion he was on the run. Of course, they were riding on horses. and this hat blew off. Here came the enemy right behind him. He just turned around and went back and got his hat. He was not going to leave that sombrero.
KJ: He was all right; he made it?
LC: Yes.
KJ: He must have been quick.
LC: He just swept it up while riding at a fast pace.
The Authorities finally said we had to leave. They took the women and children out. My father was assigned to go and help get them into EI Paso. Then we went into a vacated lumberyard. Each one of us had a space for one family. It was about the size of what you would park lumber in. It would be about eight by sixteen feet. That wasn’t for the whole three families. At this time the families were broken up for a while. They got separated until we got to Tucson, Arizona. Then we got together.
My father’s nephew had quite a number of really fine horses. We had horses that the foals were worth thousand dollars of money at that time. They were purebred. Some of the brethren were bringing their horses out, and the Mexicans began chasing them. Several of the men dropped back and shot the guns that they had stored in our attic just over their heads. Then they went on. When the Mexicans saw the caliber of guns, they didn’t chase them anymore.
KJ: How did you feel about leaving Mexico?
LC: It was an adventure, of course, for a ten year old as far as I was concerned. It was awful tiring. We went down to the depot, really just a stopping place, and we stayed all night long. The train didn’t come; it didn’t come until late the next afternoon. In fact, we went back to the house. We were just laying there on the ground for most of that period of time waiting for the train. Then when it came, it was just a freight train. It had boxcars.
WC: Your mother said that she was so concerned leaving the home, but she was most concerned with the livestock because she didn’t know what would happen to them. She said that she went out and opened the chicken gate so they could run out and get water. She knew that if she left and it closed up they wouldn’t be able to get it.
KJ: Did they just leave things as they were?
LC: They just had to leave everything. They could take only a very little bedding and the clothes. Each one just had a suitcase for a family I guess. They had a bag or two, but there just couldn’t be many of them. They just packed us in like sardines.
The Mexicans had been getting bolder all the time. They would come and steal the horses from us. One time I was going with my father out to the ranch. We lived in town, but we had this ranch about seven miles out by these lake. As we went by Brother Harris’, they had taken a horse, and they were arguing about it. Brother Harris, whose horse they were taking, couldn’t talk Spanish at all. He couldn’t tell them. My father could speak Spanish. He sent me in to tell Sister Harris. They were related to the Harris that was principal of this school, Franklin S. Harris. My Aunt Edith was related to him.
The Harrises had a boy that was just my age. The mother took this boy and myself up and put us under the feather bed. One of the older sons had a pistol, and he was pointing it out the window. He was a boy although he was much older than we were. He was watching them to see what they would do to his father. He didn’t want to shoot. They finally got it all calmed down.
They would take our horses off the pasture out at the ranch. Then Elmer, my cousin and some of the others would go and find these horses. They would get them back.
The long lake was quite a ways across. It was about one half a mile across. One time I was riding a horse down on one side. We rode horses all the time there. The cattle had come down to drink on the other side of the lake. There were some of the Mexican soldiers on that side of the lake. They just went along and shot the cattle in the water. They slaughtered them just for the fun of shooting them.
My father wasn’t at the ranch house when I got there. So I went to town to let him know. I don’t recall if there was anything that they could do then.
KJ: So there were a number of things like that that happened that would be very upsetting.
LC: Yes, it was getting worse and worse and more dangerous all the time. There was almost anarchy in the nation there. Porfirio Diaz had been a ruler for sixty years I think altogether. He had been a benign ruler; he was good. But he didn’t give any chance for progress. Of course, with their revolution, there was good and bad about it.
KJ: You have mentioned that you just had to leave things as they were. Did anyone ever get to go back?
LC: Yes, they went back. Actually after we left, they went back and that was when they got the horses. They did bring some furniture out also. After many years, in the 1930s, Mexico paid some compensation. At least my father got some money, but it wasn’t anything-like the value of what the things were.
Everybody had a nice place. They built nice big brick houses. They were very beautiful houses if you could see the pictures of them. They are not the style quite that they are here. Most of them were two story with a big attic just like ours. They had plantings around them. They had trees and lawns. Some of the cottonwood trees were still there when I went down there three years ago.
The Mexicans made our place headquarters for the armies because our house was the biggest in town.
George Romney lived down there just across the street from us. Gaskell Romney, George’s father, had a lumberyard. Brother Marion G. Romney who is in the First Presidency lived in Juarez.
KJ: Was your grandmother still with you when you left Mexico?
LC: She came with us all the way. When we gout out here, my father took care of her all the time. Most of the time he took care of my mother’s mother too. Her name was Jane Gibson Sanders.
KJ: That would have been a very frightening time I would think. You mentioned it was sort of an adventure.
LC: It was for me. I am sure that the parents were very worried. I could tell that, of course, especially on several occasions. It was getting really dangerous. The Mexicans didn’t like the gringos. I don’t blame them either because the United States had actually exploited these people down there. The Americans had gone down there and taken everything out. They had left them nothing and paid them nothing. A great deal of this went on for years in all of South America. That is why they have such a hard time getting friends with them yet.
KJ: After you moved to Arizona, were the three families more separate than they had been in Mexico?
LC: No. Aunt Edith’s and Aunt Irene’s families and I lived on the farm. There was a river and a high bench. Where the river had been there was a sandy, loomy area. That was where the farm was. We had silos and things that we had put in for the cattle and for the cows for the dairy that we had. We had two houses. One was not too far from where the milk house and the corrals were so that we could be there to take care of things. The other house was about a block or a block and a half away farther up on the bench.
My mother had a diploma from Arizona State. She taught all around in different places.
KJ: So you and your brothers and sisters stayed with the other two families.
LC: Not my sisters, and I was the only boy in my mother’s family. The sisters were older. My youngest sister was the baby, and she went with my mother. I was the only one that stayed with the other families. The others were going to school or something at the time.
KJ: That was when you got nice pieces of chicken and pudding.
LC: Yes, I got extra sugar on my rice pudding. Sometimes it was farmer’s rice. It actually is flour. I don’t know how they make it so small although it was just flour. It was just a quarter of a inch. That is why they called it rice, I guess.
KJ: Were there other families that had been in Mexico that were living nearby in Arizona?
LC: Yes, this was a community of Mormons mostly from Mexico. There was a man by the name of Bingham who had established the town before the Saints from Mexico came. They called it Binghampton. It is enclosed now in Tucson itself. They have built out to there. There was Fort Lowell, an old fort near where we were in this community but it was about seven miles from town. The town of Tucson has grown and taken that seven miles and far beyond there.
KJ: How did other people like non-Mormons react to your family situation?
LC: There were hardly any non-Mormons there. It was just really a Mormon community at Binghampton. We had a branch there of the mission; we didn’t have a bishop. We were in the California Mission.
Brother Kimball’s brother, Gordon Kimball, lived in about the next house to us. His house was about a half mile away. I used to go up and take organ lessons from his wife. I didn’t care much about the lessons, but I did get out of the work. The work got pretty tiresome there.
KJ: Tell me about how you met your wife.
LC: My mother was teaching in Superior. She was staying at a hotel. My wife’s folk and my wife lived right next door to this hotel. Her mother’s family were the only Mormons in town.
WC: Louis’ uncle, Mine, was my father’s best friend.
LC: He was my mother’s brother. He lived in the town of Superior where my wife lived. When we came out, he sent us a hundred dollars. A hundred dollars then was about like five thousand now. If we ever got a penny or two pennies, that was a lot of money. He helped us out. I guess it was through him that my mother got this school there.
I met my wife then. Her father died just about that time. Her mother was coming up to Salt Lake to do the work in the temple for him. They even did the work for him before a year had passed. That is unusual.
WC: He had expressed a desire to join the Church to the missionaries there. They had it in their records that he had asked to join, so they didn’t hold it to a year. It was more convenient for us to go in the summertime. We went up there. Louis’ mother and Louis went. He drove her car. They went in their own car, and we were in our car. We traveled together.
LC: It took several days to go from Phoenix to Salt Lake. They didn’t have any roads. We were staying in the same hotel up there. I met her and saw her there. I knew that she was the only one for me then. She was young, and I was just starting to school in the university.
LC: I never have thought about anyone else for a wife. I tell my wife this I don’t know how many thousands times. There was never anyone else that I ever considered marrying. I went with some other girls when I went to the Gila Academy. I was popular enough because I played basketball and was a new one in the school. They used to have girls’ choice at dances. When they got up to eighteen ahead, I would tell them that they would just have to take their turn. The first one there would be the first one. But I really didn’t see one that I would have married. I have never seen one since that I would have traded her for.
KJ: When you were in Arizona, did you continue live with your aunts?
LC: It was just the last year or two when I was in the University of Arizona when I didn’t live with them.
The first year of high school we were milking thirty-three cows. Aunt Irene had four boys at that time. Three of them were quite young in those-days, and they didn’t milk many cows so most of the milking was up to her oldest son, who was three years younger than I. We would get up four o’clock in the morning and milk the cows. The other boys weren’t going to high school; I was going to high school. I would ride a bicycle seven miles to the high school. Then in the evening we milked the cows.
The next year I went six weeks. At that time, I got a job at Western Union delivering telegrams and packages. John Carlson a friend and I were the two that started working for them. But in a short time seven or eight other Mormon boys were working for Western Union. Often we would start at four and work until ten at night. Then we would ride horne on our bicyles after that. So we got a good deal of bicycle riding. But it brought in some money. I went to school just exactly six weeks. and then I had to go on the farm and work.
KJ: Did your father continue to trade off evenings with your aunts in Arizona?
LC: With the two, yes. He would stay at Aunt Irene’s and Aunt Edith’s. They did get so there were maybe two or three days depending on the work at sometimes. I don’t remember just how it was arranged, but I know that they changed. I remember definitely that often it was just a rotation around both in Mexico and even after we got out there. My mother would come some times. During certain period of times of the year, she would be there.
KJ: When she carne, would she have a separate place to live?
LC: Yes.
Finally when I lived with my mother, she got a school in Binghamton. There was quite a bit of animosity towards polygamists in Tucson, so she had to stay away from there. Mr. John Mess had gone to school with her, and he knew her. In fact, somebody made some remark about polygamy, and he just up and knocked the guy down. He was a big man. She wasn’t there. It was a remark that they had made. He wouldn’t stand for it all. He got the school district to let her teach there. That was after I started to the university.
I stayed out of school one year. I bought a dairy route. I would pick up the milk and deliver it. I ran it just exactly one year. Then I sold it again. I got the money to start college.
Then I got the first real bus in tne state of Arizona. They hadn’t had any real buses. and I got this bus that was built specifically for bussing people. It was just when they were beginning to bus all the high school children to town. But they had been using passenger cars for buses. I used this real bus until I got married. I drove the bus.
KJ: As your parents got older, what were their reflections about their lives in polygamy?
LC: This is just my impressions. I never really talked with them. One time I did a little, and the answer I got was that it made for better relations among the contracting parties. Now what does that mean? I never really knew. That was the answer I would usually get from some of them.
Right up until the time I left the family, they were all three living in the Chandler and Gilbert neighborhood down near Mesa, Arizona. Finally my father got to have a big broiler factory with thousands of broilers. Always Elmer would be the one to work with my father. He was a good worker, and he would take care of it of actually managing the farm. My father was usually working with other things. He was president of the dairy association of the county that worked to get markets for the produce that we had from the dairy.
In Binghampton we had all three families, but my mother had a house rented right close to the school. When we got married, my mother lived in the Jones’ house before Dan Jones did. That was about the first time that she had come to Tucson.
KJ: How long did she continue to teach?
WC: She taught until she retired. I guess she must have been sixty-five.
KJ: So she really made thata life long career.
WC: She taught when she was having her babies even. She taught really all of her life.
LC: She had three girls in three years and still taught. I think that they were a lot more than teachers. There was more religion in the schools.
When I was bishop in Grand Junction, whenever the General Authorities would come or some of the people would come with them for some special Primary or Relief Society program and they were from Old Mexico. I would say, “I will see if you are from Old Mexico.”
“Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!) Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace, And saw within the moon light in his room, Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom, An angel writing in a book of gold; Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold, And to the presence in the room he said, ‘What writest thou?’ The vision raised its head, And with a look made of all sweet accord Answered, ‘The name of those who love the Lord.’ ‘And is mine one?’ said Abou. ‘Nay, not so,’ Replied the angel, Abou spoke more low, But cheerfully still: and said, ‘I pray thee, then, Write me as one that loves his fellowmen.’
The angel wrote, and vanished, the next night It came again with a great wakening light, And showed the names whom love of God had blessed, And lo, Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest.”
If she couldn’t tell me that, I knew she didn’t come from Mexico. Everybody learned that just at the starting at the fourth grade.
KJ: When you were in the fourth grade and in grade school, would you all meet in the same rooms for school?
LC: No. It was a church house that the school met in. We would have rooms. We had different grades divided in different rooms.
KJ: Which school was your father principal over?
LC: Dublán Town. Of course, he was involved with the general stake. These were church schools and paid by the Church.
KJ: I have the feeling that your experience with polygamy has been that you found it to be something that you remember fondly.
LC: Yes, very much so. I loved everyone, everyone of the children. I saw more of my aunts than I saw of my mother. They treated me with respect and with kindness all of the time.
KJ: You mentioned that one of your aunts had mainly daughters. Would they take care of the laundry and those types of duties for the family?
LC: No, not for the whole family. Each one of them did those things. Aunt Irene had three daughters too. They were younger. They grew and helped take care of things.
The one thing that the wives had in common was the beehives. They had beehives, and they helped care for them. Then we would get Grandma Done who was an expert at it to come. She could almost pet the bees. Everyone else would have the veil on. Sometimes she would wear a veil, and sometimes she wouldn’t. She would go right to the hive. She seemed to know just how to handle the bees. I used to marvel how she could do this.
KJ: You mentioned before that you did things such as raising peas and other things in Arizona to get cash. When you lived in Mexico, did you live off your farm and your ranch?
LC: And off the cattle. My father was pretty well off there. He had quite an estate there of many thousands of dollars. He owned two houses and the lots in town. We had this big tract of pasture land. Then Don Louis Terases was a really good friend of my father.
This Don Louis Terases’ home was a hacienda said to have one thousand rooms. It was built like a fort. He would bring in people or people would come to celebrate an occasion, and he would fill these rooms up. So he was a big man. He did a lot for my father. My father made a lot more in the summertime working for him than he did in the winter teaching school. So he had this source of money that no one else really had.
KJ: After you were married, did you move right to Colorado then?
LC: We were in Arizona after we were married. We have five children, and we were in a different state for each birth. Two of them were born in Arizona, but we were living in Texas for one of them. My wife went to Arizona to have her second child.
KJ: What was your occupation?
LC: I went with a law correspondence school shortly after we were married. This came right at 1929 or a little before. We were beginning to feel the pinch of the Depression, so I didn’t finish it.
I lived in Texas for four years. I was the president of the first branch of the town of San Angelo, Texas.
WC: Then we were transferred to Albuquerque and then to North Dakota. We went to Albuquerque because we had been through it and liked the idea.
LC: We liked Albuquerque. I took the examination for the post office just about that time.
I went out and worked on the chain gang for a while in the Oklahoma Oil Company. It was just like being in the prison. All the escaped prisoners were in here. Officers would come frequently in the night time. We slept in long tents. We did anything then to get something to eat. We had the Depression right after that. I think there were fifty in a tent with twenty-five cots laid just as close as you could to get them with no room between them. Many a night at four o’clock in the morning the guards would come in and pick up this guy and that guy for prisons. They had escaped from prison. It was pretty wild.
They had just discovered oil down there. They were competing with some other Texas company to get an oil line finished to McGammy, Texas. There were brawls and fights all the time.
We would get out at four o’clock in the morning, and there would be a pot of spaghetti. That was what our breakfast was. It was spaghetti and catsup. Catsup was the sauce.
Then we would get on an open truck. We would drive for about an hour from camp to get to where it was. It was hardly ever that we were going along that they didn’t have to shove two or three off and let them finish their fight. If anybody started it, they would just make them get off, and we would go on. This was in about 1929.
KJ: What do you remember of the Depression?
LC: I was lucky to get the top grade in the post office. Out of the top three they could choose one to make sure they knew who they got. That was pretty secure. At the post office, we had a job although we only got Sixty-five dollars a month. But that was good.
I remember wages going down to two or three dollars for a day’s labor. I went down to Mesa, Arizona one time for a vacation. While I was there, they were picking cantaloupes and packing them. I got a job on a machine sorting them and then packing them on the machine. I got eight cents a crate, and I did a hundred crates. I got eight dollars, and that was big money. I was really happy. The first night the guy came and fired me. He said, “You are too slow.” My brother had worked there, and he had put in three hundred crates. He had been doing this for some time, and that was the first time that I did it.
They had them hauling on little flat wagons to bring the melons in. For that they would have two men and a driver. They would load from both sides. I said, “I will tell you what I’ll do. I’ll load up and bring just as many loads in by myself. You just have the driver and let me load. You pay me time and a half what you pay the loaders.” That went a couple of days, and he came and said, “I can’t do this anymore.” I said, “Why? You owe me that. You are keeping up with them.” He said, “They are all complaining about the money that you’re getting.” I would get time and a half for what I counted. So I got fired for being too slow and too poor and then fired for being too good.
During the Depression, I was working in the post office at Albuquerque. At that time the rural routes were kind of gems that the retired congressmen would want because they paid lots more. They wouldn’t go work in the post office. but they would get this route and get someone to run it for them. There was a route up in North Dakota that was available. It was pretty long. It was a fifty-two mile route. That would make $2700. That was a thousand dollars more than I was making at Albuquerque. Actually, it was more than double. That was the reason we went up to North Dakota.
I contracted hay fever up there. After about five years I had to get out. That was when we went to Canyon City, Colorado. We had a child there. We had one in North Dakota, Colorado, Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico.
KJ: You mentioned that you had just recently taken a trip back to Mexico. What kinds of memories did it bring back?
LC: This brought a lot of memories. It seems like it just burned in my memory. I went to different places. I went to Diaz. I know how old I was when I went up there; I know how old I was when I lived in Juarez when my mother taught up there. I can pretty well establish the things that happened there.
There were a lot of little things that happened that were big to me. In the wintertime my mother would go up to Diaz to teach, or some other colony.
In the summertime she would come to Dublán. During the summer she had an ice cream parlor. That was in one of the houses. My mother would just come in the summer, and she was living in this house that my aunt had been living in. Aunt Irene would live in the big house. We had a big strawberry patch, and my mother would put real strawberries in homemade ice cream. Anyone but her children would get it. If I got to lick the paddle, that was good. They would come there and get it for a nickel or a dime. She sold it on plates. It was delicious when you would get it.
The ice came from EI Paso, Texas. It came on a flat freight car out in the sun. It would be three hundred pounds when it left EI Paso, and if we got fifty pounds, it was pretty good.
KJ: Would she chop it up herself?
LC: No, she had her son chop it up and turn the freezer.
KJ: Was that you?
LC: Well, she only had one son. I didn’t do all of the chopping and churning I guess. but I thought I did. It seemed like a lot.
KJ: That must have been a popular place there.
LC: It was. Everybody knew about her. They would come from far and wide to get the strawberry ice cream. They had vanilla too.
One time there came a hail. It hailed so much that they stored the hail away in the granary that we had there. That lasted all summer long. They put gunny sacks over it and piled straw up over it. That was really a good year. That was for the ice for the ice cream.
I remember the granary was bigger than this room where we put the wheat. Everyone raised their own wheat or else they would swap peaches for wheat or whatever.
Of course, we paid the tithing with wheat. I would hear my father tell about where it says in the third chapter in the last book of the Old Testament, “Will a man rob God? Yet ye have robbed me. But ye say, ‘Where in have we robbed thee?’ ‘In tithes and offerings. Ye are cursed with a curse for ye have robbed me, even this whole nation. Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse that there may be meat in mine house,’ saith the Lord of Host, ‘and prove me now herewith if I will not open you the windows of heaven and pour you out a blessing that there shall not be room enough to receive it.'” I knew my father paid tithing, but I never did see that wheat get so full that it wouldn’t hold it. That used to worry me. I was concerned because he paid his tithing, and then there was not going to be room enough. I didn’t see the wheat grow tall. That was what I expected it should do.
Maybe Bowmans had water in their house. We were about the only ones that had water in the house. We had a well, and some of them had barrels. We had a big tank. When they made the big house, they made a bathroom upstairs and a bathroom downstairs. The way we got the energy to get this water in the house was with a pump that we had a horse on. The horse would pull it, and it would go round and round. This was my chore to ride that horse around. Old Kit was a horse that weighed a ton and stood eighteen hands high. I couldn’t reach up even to the hame. I had to catch a hold of the tug and get a ways up. The problem with that was that Kit was just as nice and tame and lazy as could be. That was why I had to keep riding her all the time to keep her going.
She would stomp. The flies would get on her legs. I never wore shoes down there. It seemed like I had my toes smashed all the time. She would just stomp on my toes until I really never got a well toe.
KJ: Would you have a schedule for baths?
LC: I don’t remember exactly. The bathrooms were not in all in the house. They had their outhouses and in the other places they had big barrels full of water, so they didn’t have to go out to the well all the time for it. We had this one house, and there were not that many of us in it at the time. Isabelle, my younger sister was born down there, in Mexico, but she was just a baby. She was seven years younger than I was.
KJ: How would they take care of the laundry?
LC: They rubbed the clothes on a wash board.
WC: About taking a bath, my grandfather used to carry three one hundred dollar bills in a little tobacco sack. He would sew it inside his fresh underwear every time he took a bath. He kept it there just as an emergency fund in case he needed it.
KJ: You mentioned you had this water tank on your home. Where did the water come from?
LC: From a well. This horse would go around and it would pump the water up into the tank. It was a lot of water. We were glad to have the water then. I liked it better there than when I would go to Aunt Irene’s or Aunt Edith’s because at their houses they just had barrels.
We used to have three ollas. They were made of a porous clay, and they had them all different sizes. The ollas that we had stood about two feet high. Then they would flare up at the top. The evaporation through that clay would keep that water cold. We had a dipper with a long handle, and we could just get a drink of cool water. In summertime often people” would drop in to get a drink of cool water.
WC: Sometimes they were wrapped in burlap.
KJ: As people went down to Mexico, were there things that they learned from the people there?
LC: There weren’t many Mexican people in Dublán. In the town of Casa Grande Nuevo, there was a store and a shoe shop. As I said, we hardly ever wore shoes.
One time I got a new pair of shoes, and I thought it would be real fun to have shoes on. I walked up about three miles and got these shoes. I put them on and walked back. When I got back my feet were so sore that I never wanted shoes again.
We didn’t like to wear shoes. The girls, of course, wore shoes. Girls had to wear shoes.
I remember my mother scolding the girls about going out without their bonnets. The bonnet would cover down the sides of their face so that they wouldn’t get to looking like Mexicans.
KJ: What were your Sunday meetings like in Mexico?
LC: They had sacrament meeting in the afternoon. I think we had fast meeting on Thursday. I really don’t remember anything about Sunday School there. I dreaded going to meeting because nobody knew when they were going to be called on. Even the children were called on to speak. I would just hide down behind the bench there. I wasn’t ten years old. I was frightened half to death. One time they told me to prepare “faith is the evidence of things not seen; the substance of things hoped for.” I memorized that, and I said that.
KJ: Did you ever get called on?
LC: Yes, I got called on one time just to come up and bear my testimony. I didn’t have that much of a testimony. I just knew that my father and mother said that it was right. That was a testimony, of course.
KJ: The church was the same building that the school was held in.
LC: It was really a church house. They had a big hall where they would hold dances. They danced a lot. It was quadrilles mostly. We did get to two steps. The whole family would go; everybody would go to the dances.
That was the same in Tucson. Everybody would go to the dance. We had a dance once a week every Friday night. We called my cousin’s wife Aunt Retty. She was a Call. Anson Call was quite a figure in the Church. She was quite heavy; she was fat. But she made the best candy, all kinds of candy. I would take it to the dance and sell it at night for her and get a commission on it. Of course, I nearly always ate more than my commission. She was really patient with me.
She was really a patient person. When I was fifteen years old, my father told me that I could grow some watermelons and I could have whatever I made off of them in a certain area. She and Roy, my cousin had chickens. They lived half a block from us. She had a chicken fence, but the chickens always were out. I told her several times that they were just ruining my watermelons. They were just blooming, and the chickens would come up and pick holes in the small melons.
So one morning I went out. There their chickens were in the melon patch pretty thick. I had a double barrel ten gauge shotgun. I just fired into the chickens. I killed about four or five chickens in the one shot. Then I went over and told Aunt Retty what I had done. I expected to get fits for it. I took her chickens over to her place. You know what she said? She said, “Well, we will just have a good big chicken and dumpling dinner.” She cooked those dinners, and our family and her family came. Did we ever have chicken and dumplings! That was a treat.
KJ: Do you remember the kinds of foods that you would eat in Mexico and in Arizona?
LC: I don’t really remember that in Mexico. We had big gardens. We had sweet potatoes, potatoes. strawberries and peas and radishes and all the vegetables.
They made the lots down there in Mexico ten acres like they are in Salt Lake. But there would usually be just two families on the lot. We had five acres. This was separate from the farm land. We would have a garden on the lot. We had water running down each street. The ditches were on both sides, and they always had water in them in the summertime. I guess they turned it out in the winter.
They always had water, and people had plenty of water to make their gardens. So everybody had gardens.
We put up things; they would can them. They made their own soap.
KJ: There would be enough supplies like the bottles there or would they have to go to El Paso?
LC: There was a union mercantile, a general store. Off her strawberry patch and her chicken, my grandmother had a sizable sum in this union. She had two or three thousand dollars. That was a lot of money in this union mercantile. My Aunt Katy had a lot invested in it. I don’t think my father had any. He invested his money in this cattle ranch; he had a lot of cattle. They sold things from the grocery.
KJ: That kept you supplied pretty well with the things that you could not take care of on your own then.
LC: Yes.
One time I went to the store. My father told me to get some ten penny nails, twenty cents worth of ten penny nails. I went to the store, and I said that I just wanted ten penny nails. They said, “Well, I think your father wants this.” I insisted that I just wanted ten nails. I got ten nails. There was a lot of money left over. They said, “What are you going to do with this? I said, “I will get piloncille. Piloncille was a kind of a candy that was hard. If you chewed on it, it would get softer so that you could get a bite off of it. It was about two inches in diameter and about four or five inches long. That was the shape of them most of the time. I had enough to get me one of those. When I got home, I hadn’t done right. My papa didn’t know what to make of it.
I can’t remember even now why he whipped me the one time. There were weeds that grew in the neighborhood sometimes, and they were hollow. We improvised; we would make bows. Then we would put a nail in this end of this weed. It was straight; it was like a reed but it was hollow inside. It was very light, but with that nail in the end of it we could shoot a long ways. That was the kind of a cane he used to whip me with that one time.
KJ: In situations like that, he would just talk with you.
LC: He always told me. He would show me the wrong and why it was wrong.
KJ: Would he be the one to discipline the children or would your mother and your aunts be the ones to do that most often?
LC: My mother and aunts would. I don’t like to tell you this. We had what we called dark closets. Upstairs in this room where I told you Brother Tanner and I slept there was a closet that had a lock on the door that went into it. It was a sizable closet. None of the children would dare to go in there; it was too dark. Here was where they would put the Christmas toys and the Christmas tree. We had a big, wide stairway that came in and that went up and turned part way up and then went up the other way. The room where you came in from outside was a big room or hall just like you see on some of the old houses. That was the style they had. Under the stairway there was a closet, and it was dark. This was where my mother put me when she wanted to discipline me. I was scared to death of the dark.
My mother would send me out for a switch. I knew enough not to get too small of a switch because then she would get a great big one. It was always a problem for me to determine what size switch I should get. If she thought it was big enough, then it was all right. I wanted to get as small as she would accept. I had experienced it a time or two when I brought in a twig that was too small, it didn’t work.
In Juarez the McClellens had an orchard. We lived in a house in the orchard. They lived in the main house, and we had the other house they lived in before they built a new big one. My mother taught one year and rented the house from the McClellens. It was right along side of a hill. We had a cow named Pinky. Katie, my sister, was five years older than I, and she milked the cow. I was just getting so I could milk. I always wanted to milk. I wanted to find out how I could get more milk than Katie did.
We had two bridges. There was a bridge built high and went over the ditch of running water. Then there was another low bridge that was just over the water. It was a narrow bridge that went across the water. The other bridge was so high that you could walk up and walk across it. It had arms on the sides. I came on the run one night with a bucketful of milk. Mother couldn’t believe that I had that much milk. I had overdone it. I had dipped it in and got water out of the ditch. It wouldn’t work. They finally let me have the privilege of milking all the time.
LC: I don’t know whether they threw it all out or not. It was dark, and I just couldn’t see how much I got in. That water was coming. fast, and there was quite a bi t of water.
For recreation I always liked to hunt, even down there. I had a .22 gun. My uncle who lived in Diaz had given us two presents. He gave a big blunder bust gun. Those old .44 blunder bust guns were big guns. It was a long thing, and you loaded it with powder, etc. He gave us a horse also. We called the horse Gold Dust. It was gold in color. It was for Katie and me to decide which we wanted to have. We drew. She got the horse, and I got the blunder bust.
Aunt Katie’s adopted son was the age that he wore a handkerchief in the back pocket. That was the style then.
KJ: Was it a red handkerchief?
LC: It was not always red, but it was generally red. The part of it hanging down might be blue or it might be white. But he was to have half of it hanging out. He played ball; he was on the ball team. He inveighled me in to trading this blunder bust for a .22 that he had.
I took the .22 out to the ranch. There was a roadrunner sitting on the fence. You are not supposed to shoot roadrunners, but they didn’t tell me that at that time. That was something to shoot at. I would shoot at rabbits, squirrels, and things. I shot at the roadrunner, and it just sat there. I would come up closer by a mesquite tree. I got as far as from to the corner of the house, which was about ten feet, and shot a whole box of bullets. I never even scared it. What had happened was that gun was leaded, not ever a bullet came out of it. All of those bullets were in it. My father really got after this boy for giving it to me that way. I didn’t know it.
I could have had that thing explode right in the face. I don’t know why I didn’t get the blunder bust back again. I wish I had; it would be worth a fortune now.
I think it is just as hard on the man as it is on the women to live in polygamy. My father was even handed with everybody, every member in the family I think. I never had any sense of any problem because of the three families. I never ever thought of that way. It was just one family as far as children were concerned.
The older girls may have thought differently because they lived for three or four years before the marriages. Katie is five or six years older than I am. Aunt Edith had a baby, and my mother had twins, a boy and a girl that didn’t live but a short time. They died the day that they were born. My Aunt Edith had a baby and they named it Louie. It couldn’t be named after me, but she often mentioned this. I was just the same age as the baby she had, she was taking care of both of us when I was a baby. We were “twins.” She considered that she had twins.
KJ: Do you recall the medical services that you had in Mexico? Would they have midwives come in and assist with the births?
LC: There were always midwives. Aunt Edith’s mother was a midwife. Even after we got out to Arizona, she would do this.
KJ: Would midwives also help in other areas beside child birth?
LC: Yes. Aunt Edith’s mother was just a wonderful worker. She was busy all the time. Everyone respected and loved Grandma Done because she was that way. Everyone knew her as Grandmother Done.
Even after she died there was another family of Dones. They were Abeggs. She was the other wife of Brother Done, and she took over after Grandmother Done. She was just like her.
KJ: When you got sick, what would happen in your family?
LC: My father’s brother, Joseph Cardon, lived across the street. Joseph Cardon was a very spiritual person, and he worked in the Church a great deal. I think he was only about fifteen or sixteen years old when he went on a mission. He was very young. He filled a successful, worthy mission. He got typhoid. He had two families in one house. It was a smaller house. While he was sick, they brought him over, and he used our parlor for a bedroom. He died at that time.
There was a siege of typhoid. I had it; my sister Katie had it. Practically all the family had this typhoid. There was a Gentile doctor that lived in the Casa Grande. There were some non-Mormons who lived in Casa Grande Nuevo. He would come down from there to doctor. The main medicine any time they suspected you were getting sick was castor oil. I drank bottles of castor oil I think.
One Sunday when I was recovering from typhoid fever, we had chicken. We had what we called a dumb waiter. We had the kitchen and then a pantry. It was a large pantry, and they had a good deal of things stored in it. Then there were four cupboards that opened from the pantry through the wall to the dining room so they could just pass the things through to the dining room. There were shelves that they put things on. They could open the cupboard doors in the dining room and take the things off those shelves. Everyone had gone to Sunday School except me, and I was getting better and was pretty well. I was up and around. We were going to have a chicken dinner. I was home alone and found this chicken on this dumb waiter.
Then I was dumber than the waiter was. I ate chicken and just ate a lot of it. That pretty nearly was the end of me. I had not had any solids to eat for weeks. I had been sick for weeks. It tasted so good that I thought just one more won’t hurt.
For colds they blew sulfur down our throats. They just roll a paper up with one end bigger than the other. It was big enough just to put into the mouth. Then with a sudden blow they would blow all that sulfur that they had in the paper down the throat. It was just like choking us. That sulfur would come down and just fill our throats and choke us. We had to swallow some of it. It must have made me feel better. I know that I lived anyway. I wasn’t sure when they did that, that I would live.
We entertained too. I was always the center of attraction when my folks had parties, or at least I thought so. When they would have parties, they would open up the sitting room and the parlor. They would draw back the curtains. They were beautiful beaded petitions. We had a big organ that was made like a piano. We used this organ in the parlor. They were always singing songs. The finale of the party was a hobby horse. I would be the hobby horse. I would put my hands and feet in the sleeves of a shirt. Then they would stuff the shirt with pillows. It made out a horse. This would be the show of the evening I thought.
I am sure I annoyed a lot of them waiting to get to it. But I am sure they all wanted my part of the show to come because it always got a laugh. They had to, of course. (laughter)
My father was choir leader too. He could sing well and so could Aunt Irene. So they had some children that could sing. Parley, my brother, was three years younger than I. He was Aunt Irene’s eldest child. He went to the University of Arizona after I married and left. He became the manager of the glee club. He sang in it. They took this Arizona glee club to Hawaii and all over the country. At that time it was unusual. Now, of course, everybody goes everywhere. This was fifty years ago.
KJ: Would you have singing in your home with the organs?
LC: Nearly always.
We would have little games like guessing numbers from one to ten. I can’t even remember now how I did it, but it seemed like I had awful good luck in this. We played different games. We played games that children played.
I always think of a second cousin, of mine when I am reminded of children’s games. He was the son of this nephew that worked with my father. His name was Joseph.
He lived out on the ranch. He had a cart and a horse named Dolly that was a really lively horse. When he would come to town with that cart, all the children wanted a turn to ride on it. Everybody liked Joseph. I never saw this young fellow lose his temper. He was pleasant always; he never quarreled. When we would sing our Primary song, “Jesus Once was a Little Child,” we would sing the line “He played the games that children played, the pleasant games of yore. But he never got vexed if the game went wrong and he always spoke the truth. So little children, let you and I try to be like him, try, try, try.” I get to thinking about Joseph when I hear that song. He just personified it all his life. I knew him later in life and he was still the same.
It seems to me that in considering the matter of the principle of plural, polygamous marriage, one should always bear in mind the purpose and the reason for such a marriage and how it must be practiced if it is to be successful. We know that righteous men in ancient past, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, and Solomon had plural wives and that the Lord justified them except in cases of abuse. But the Lord forbade the Nephites to have more than “one wife and concubines he shall have none.” One reason being that both the Nephites and the Lamanites were children of Israel, thus they were the Lord’s “people” and “heritage,” and they were isolated from all other peoples. However, the Lord also declared to the Nephites that if He wanted to raise up a holy seed unto Himself, He would command His people. The Lord needed to have His newly established Kingdom built up and strengthened so He commanded Joseph Smith, through revelation, to institute the practice of plural marriage, under very strict rules. It can only be practiced under the Divine Patriarchal Order of Marriage which makes fathers and mothers spiritual as well as physical parents. Joseph Smith stated that the practice of plural marriage was “a commandment of God for holy purposes.” To be successful it must be practiced on a high spiritual, moral, and idealistic plane. This places grave and great responsibilities upon the fathers especially and the mothers in such families.
I feel that our father met those great responsibilities and test (a test that Joseph Smith stated “was the greatest test of faith”) because his whole household, loved, revered, and respected and obeyed him. I also feel that all three mothers fulfilled their obligations and responsibilities because all twenty-nine children grew up loving one another and with a love for the Lord and the gospel.
(From a book in Cache Genealogical Library, Logan, Utah, entitled “Latter Day Saint Biographical Encyclopedia” by Andrew Jensen, Assistant Church Historian. Vol. It pages 420-421. Published 1901. Call number Ut I J )
CARDON, Louis Samuel, a prominent Elder of the Second Ward, Logan, Cache County, Utah, was born June 23, 1869, in Logan, third son of John Paul Cardon and Susannah Goudin. His childhood was spent at home; and at the proper age he began attending the public schools. He was baptized at the age of eight years, and was ordained a Deacon when fourteen years old.
When he was seventeen years of age he accompanied his father (who was obliged to leave home on account of his religious convictions) to Montana, where they worked on the railroad. In the winter of 1887, Louis returned home with the intention of entering school, but circumstances ruled otherwise.
In March, 1888, in company with his fathers three brothers and sister, he left home once more, for Oregon, where they had taken a contract for railroad work. Louis labored there and in Washington until the fall of 1889, when he returned to Cache county, Utah.
In the fall of 1891 he entered the Brigham Young College, at Logan, this being the first school he attended since he was thirteen years of age; he found it very difficult to keep up in the work with his companions, who had enjoyed better advantage; but by hard labor and untiring application to the work, he succeeded in completing a four years’ normal course.
He taught school in Greenville during the school year of 1895-96 with much credit to himself and his patrons.
Jan. 8, 1894, he was ordained an Elder by Thomas Morgan, and during that winter he acted as secretary of the Y.M.M.I.A. of the Fourth Ward, Logan. In March, 1894 he was appointed assistant postmaster in Logan, which position he filled to the entire satisfaction of all concerned.
June 17, 1896, he married Rebecca, daughter of Bishop Henry and Margaret Ballard, of the Second Ward, Logan.
In 1896 he was chosen first counselor in the Y.M.M.I.A. of the Second Ward, Logan, and during 1897 and 1898 he was president of said association. Having received a call to take a foreign mission, he left Logan June 7, 1898 to fulfill the same. He was set apart and ordained a Seventy the following day in Salt Lake City, by Christian D. Fjeldsted, and arrived in Berth, Switzerland, July 3, 1898.
Having studied French to some extent at home, he expected to be sent to labor in the French part of the Swiss mission; but the president of the mission (Henry E. Bowman) desired him to labor in the German part, and he was accordingly sent to labor in (Bale) Basel.
He entered at once into the spirit of the work, and through the Blessings of the ‘Lord, soon acquired the German language. Three months later he was placed in charge of the Basel branch. He labored earnestly in that place for thirteen and a half months, when he was called to preside over the Zurich branch, which was the largest branch in the Swiss mission.
Under these several appointments he labored earnestly for the cause of truth, and his whole soul was in the work before him, as witnessed by the improvement of the branches over which he presided. Nov. 23, 1899, he received word from Liverpool that he had been selected to preside over the Swiss mission. This was a great surprise to him, and he keenly sensed the great responsibility; but he went forth humbly, putting his trust in God, and was enabled to perform a good work and bring many honest souls to the light of the gospel.
Nov. 29, 1899, he left Zurich for Bern, and after visiting all the branches in the mission with Pres. Bowman, he took charge of the mission. During his term of presidency, the mission made wonderful advancement in all respects. Baptisms were frequent, tithing was greatly increased, great improvement was made in the keeping of the Word of Wisdom, and missionary labors were extended into new fields.
Elders were sent into Italy, where they tried hard to establish the work once more. Elder Cardon traveled very extensively in his efforts to visit all the Saints in the mission; he also visited a number of branches in Germany, visited Italy and had the pleasure of seeing Paris, France, during the exposition.
Dec. 20, 1900, he and other Elders came down with the smallpox and were compelled to go to the pest-house, where they were confined until Jan. 12, 1901. Feb. 22, 1901, Elder Cardon received an honorable release to return home. He sailed from Liverpool Feb. 28, 1901, and reached Logan, March 15, 1901.
Soon after his return home he was set apart as assistant superintendent of the Second Ward Sunday school, Logan. He also has charge of the lesser Priesthood of the Ward and holds several other positions.
President Louis Samuel Cardon
1900-1901
Mission Presidency from the Austria Mission Website
President Louis S. Cardon
Age at call: about 31
Born: Logan, Utah
Mission: Swiss 1898-1900
Education: Brigham Young College, in Logan
Career: taught school in Greenville (1895-96)
Assistant postmaster in Logan (1896)
Missionaries who served with President Louis S. Cardon.
Elder John L. Ballif
*Elder Martin Ganglmayer
Elder Franz Kortie (served in Hungary)
Elder Hyrum M. Lau (served in Hungary)
Elder Mischa Markow (served in Hungary)
Elder H. G. Mathias (served in Hungary)
Elder Brigham Franklin McIntire
Elder Mathias Tedorf (served in Hungary)
*missionaries known to have served in current day Austria. (The others served in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.)
Patriarchal Blessings:
A PATRIARCHAL BLESSING GIVEN BY HENRY BALLARD
January 27, 1905
Louis Samuel Cardon, in the name of the Lord, Jesus Christ and by the authority of the Holy Priesthood invested in me, I lay my hands upon your head and seal upon you a Patriarchal blessing, even health and strength and long life to be a blessing to your companion and family.
You shall be blessed with a good and numerous posterity and have joy with the same. I seal upon you every blessing that will be for your good and advancement in the work of the Lord, and whatever position you are called to occupy you shall have wisdom given you to honor the same and help to advance the purposes of the Lord upon the earth.
Your mind shall expand to be able to grasp every principle of the Gospel and make it plain to the children of men among all of your associates. You shall be an honorable example in your father’s family and a blessing and comfort unto your parents and to all of your brothers and sisters. You shall grow in faith and knowledge and understanding of the gospel and no power shall be able to darken your mind nor your testimony in the glorious principles of the gospel which have been revealed to the Prophet Joseph Smith in this, our day.
You shall be blessed in being able to continue faithful in the performance of every duty that is required of you for the advancement of the purposes of the Lord. Now rejoice that you have been blessed to come upon the earth in this day and receiving the gospel and gathering with the saints and receiving your blessings in the house of the Lord.
Now to this end, I bless you with every blessing that will be for your good in the name of the Lord, Jesus Christ, Amen.
A PATRIARCHAL BLESSING GIVEN BY O.N. LILJENQUIST
November 12, 1896 – Logan, Utah
Brother Louis, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and by virtue of the Holy Priesthood, we place our hands upon your head and seaI upon you your father’s and a Patriarchal blessings with the blessings of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; and of the new and everlasting covenant, with health and strength of mind and body, that you may live to the honor and glory of God. And be a laborer in the Lord’s vinery and even until the Lord and master shall come and receive you unto Himself with all the faithful of His servants. Unto this end we dedicate and consecrate thee unto the Lord and seal upon you the keys of wisdom and of prudence with the attribute of faith, that you may be full of faith, hope and charity, and the testimony of Jesus, and become a leader among your brethren a wise counselor in Zion; a mighty man of God, a preacher of righteousness by precept and by example.
You are destined to preach the Gospel of the Son of God, on the land of Joseph and among foreign nations. And help to gather Israel; to bind up the law and seal up the testimony, and if you will be meek, and lowly of heart and listen to the still small voice within, then shall you enjoy the revelations of the Holy Spirit; have communion with holy angels, hear the voice of the Redeemer and behold His countenance in glorious visions and have power over the plagues, over pestilence, sickness and death, and the destroyer shall pass you by, you shall be instrumental in the hand of God to bring many souls unto repentance, and do a great work in the redemption of the dead; and stand as a Savior on Mount Zion.
Be blessed in your family, in your homes and habitations in your fields and orchards and in all your administrations here below. You shall help to build up the waste places of Zion, with temples, towns and cities including the New Jerusalem. You shall travel in safety on land and at sea; and have power to heal the sick and raise up the dying; and cast out evil spirits. The Holy angels shall be round about you, strengthen and uphold you, and give you the victory over your enemies.
You shall enjoy all the blessings and comforts of life that are for your good. Thou art of Ephraim a legal heir to the fullness of the Holy Priesthood, with all its ordinances, sealings and anointings, and to crowns and kingdom and to a numerous posterity, and to become a King and a Priest unto the Most High God, and to reign with the Redeemer on earth a thousand years, and to stand on Mount Zion with your fathers house and all the redeemed of your kindred in the morning of the first Resurrection; and with your fathers house receive a glorious inheritance. These are your blessings through your faithfulness and we seal them upon you with eternal life; in the name of Jesus even so, Amen.
Missionary Blessing:
Given upon the head of Elder Lewis Samuel Cardon, in the Salt Lake Temple Annex, June 8th, 1898, by President C. D. Fjeldsted.
Lewis Samuel Cardon: We place our hands upon your head and ordain you a Seventy in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and we confer upon you all the keys, powers, authority, blessings and privileges that belong to this high and holy calling in the Melchizedek Priesthood; for you are called to be a servant of the Living God, even a preacher of righteousness, a proclaimer of the plan of salvation to the human family, where you shall be sent.
And inasmuch as you are called to go on a mission to Switzerland to perform labor there as a missionary in proclaiming the Gospel and testifying that the Lord has restored the same and the Holy Priesthood upon man. Inasmuch as you will not fear the face of man, but fear God, the Spirit of this calling shall rest upon you and you shall be able to preach the Gospel both long and loud, and shall have access to the honest in heart, and even the language that is spoken in that country shall come easy to you, even that you shall be able to preach the Gospel of life and salvation in that land with freedom.
The Lord has called you by the inspiration of His Holy Spirit, through His servants, to perform this mission; therefore, we say, may the Spirit of this mission and the love of Christ be upon you, that you shall love your fellow-men and try to save them and do them good. Do not fear to lift up your voice and testify that Joseph Smith was a Prophet in these last days and that he had revelations from God, and the Priesthood sealed upon him. You shall be blessed in this testimony, for it shall be with you in power and you shall be able to proclaim the Gospel long and loud, even to your own astonishment.
When the Lord does bless you and loosen your tongue, give the honor to Him, to whom it belongs, and remember you are a weak instrument in His hands. If you keep yourself near unto the Lord, be humble and call upon His name, His Spirit shall warn you of danger if it comes in your way. You shall be kept and preserved from the diseases that are prevalent among the children of men.
We seal upon you the blessings of life, health and strength to perform this mission. You shall be preserved in traveling upon the sea and land, or wherever you may be. You shall be blessed and prospered in your work, in the work of God, and shall be able to convince many honest in heart of the principles of the Gospel, and shall lead them into the waters of baptism and baptize them for the remission of sins; you shall lay your hands upon them and they shall receive the Holy Ghost. You shall administer to the sick and they shall be healed. You shall escape the sickness and disease abroad in the land, and shall go in peace and return in safety.
We say unto you, receive these blessings and all other blessings that would qualify you for this work that is now before you. You shall return in safety and be blessed with great joy and satisfaction because of the mission that you have performed. These blessings we seal upon you in the name of Jesus, even so, Amen.
Logan Herald Funeral Report
Wonderful Spirit
Pervades Services
of Louis S. Cardon
With the same sweet spirit of hope and good will, which had characterized the life of Louis S. Cardon, permeating the large audience, inspirational funeral services were held for that beloved church worker and business man in the Logan tabernacle Wednesday. The entire main floor and most of the balcony was filled with friends, neighbors and relatives eager to pay tribute to the sterling citizen who was removed from earthly activities without any previous warning late Sunday afternoon. A remarkable spirit of satisfaction and assurance seemed to pervade the services. This was especially felt during the soul-touching discourse of Elder Melvin J. Ballard. member of the quorum of Twelve of the L. D. S. church and a brother-in-law and former business associate of Mr. Cardon. Elder Ballard forcibly brought out the convincing declaration that the sudden death of his life-long friend was God’s plan rather than accidental, that’ his work had been accomplished and that It was time for him to take up his work beyond the veil. A resolution of respect adopted by the board of education of the Logan city schools was read by , Superintendent L. A. Peterson. BOYHOOD CHUM SPEAKS OF VIRTUES Elder A. E. Cranney, who had been associated with Mr. Cardon since his childhood, spoke of him as a peacemaker, advisor, thinker and student. He told of the high Ideals and the refined personal attributes the departed had inherited from his mother. He recalled the splendid work accomplished by Mr. Canton in all of the various priesthood quorums as well as in the auxiliary organization of the church.
President A. E. Anderson of the Logan stake bore testimony oft he willing service always rendered by Mr. Cardon and his family. He characterized him as a great man who had labored under handicaps which had partly been overcome due to the exceptional backing and cooperation he had received from his remarkable family. Dr H. K. Merrill, for 25 years a co-laborer with Mr. Cardon in stake high councils and for the past five years associated with him on the board of education of the Logan city schools, declared that no man was better prepared to go on short notice than Mr. Cardon. He spoke of the extremely willingness to serve which had always characterized Mr. Cardon both in church and civic work. Although he was always a busy man and had many things to do, he was ever ready to do more than his share of work. STATE FAIR BOARD HEAD TELLS OF ACTIVITIES Mr. Cardon’s activities as vice- president of the Utah State fair board were recounted by W. C. Winder of Salt Lake City, president of that organization. Mr. Winder said he had never known a more lovable and congenial man. He was as true as steel. He was always able to control his feelings and was easy of approach, always having a kind word to everybody. In ringing tones that went straight to the hearts of his listeners, Elder Ballard eulogized his kinsman and spoke of him in glowing terms. “Brother Louis was a courageous willing worker who never shirked,” said Elder Ballard. “He was a volunteer in assuming responsibilities. He has carried a tremendous load. Yet he never complained. Hope never died in his heart. He had a disposition as mild as a woman. If we can go through life with as heavy a
load as he carried and yet remain as sweet as he did we need not fear. “His taking away is no accident. He had accomplished his work. He had learned the lessons for which he had been sent here. He deserves to be a prince, and he is a prince among God’s faithful children. He may not have succeeded in making much material wealth but what he did have he earned honestly. There was not a dishonest hair on his head. While he did not leave any material riches, all of his wealth goes with him today—his character, his testimonies, his knowledge of truth. He has greater riches than most men. “It is not important how long we live but how, well—ah, that is important. Death is not the end. It is but the beginning. Elder Ballard also told how a few weeks ago in Logan addressing the scouters of the local council he had received the impression that the earthly- activities of Mr. Cardon were just about to come to a close. Bishop William Worley of the Logan First ward, who presided at the services, told of the activities of Mr. Cardon at the Sunday school last Sunday just prior to his sudden demise. The First ward choir with Frank Baugh, Jr., directing and Professor S. E. Clark at the console, sang “Oh, My Father,” and “I Know That My Redeemer Lives.” Solos were sung by Frank Baugh, Jr., and Fred Baugh. An instrumental trio was played by Mrs. Phyllis Spicker, Hal Farr and Professor Clark. Prayers were offered by George W. Squires and President C. W. Dunn of Logan stake. The speakers stand was covered with an array of beautiful flowers. The grave in the Logan city cemetery was dedicated by H. W. Ballard, Sr.
Funeral Services for Louis S. Cardon
December 17, 1930, 1 P.M.
“Oh My Father’ sung by the Choir
Prayer: Elder George W. Squires
Our Father, Who ar’t in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name; We, Thy covenant children have met this afternoon in honor of one of Thy Servants, Elder Louis S. Cardon, and we do humbly plead with Thee in the humility of our souls that Thou wilt be pleased to open the windows of heaven and look down upon us in tender mercy and compassion, so much so that Thou will cause that Thy holy spirit will flow from heart to heart, as water from vessel to vessel, that there will be a feeling of love and friendship present, that will cause everyone present to know that Thou does love them, and will hear and answer their prayers. We realize that Thou ar’t the giver of all good gifts and that Thou can comfort and bless those who are called upon to mourn; that they might realize that he has gone to prepare a place for them, and that when they go he will be there to welcome them and make them feel at home as he always did here in life.
Bless us all, and help us to appreciate the blessings of this gospel, not only for what it holds for us in this life, but in the life to come.
We invoke Thy blessings on all that is done or said here this afternoon that it may be done to Thy name’s honor and glory, and make us all better and more determined in our hearts and souls to do Thy will and keep Thy commandments and especially do we plead with Thee for and in behalf of the loved ones, who are near and dear to Uncle Lou Cardon.
These blessings, together with all unmentioned ones for our benefit and comfort and especially do we pray for power to walk in the straight and narrow path, as our Brother has done, we plead and pray for by the power of the Priesthood, and In the name of the Lord, Jesus Christ, Amen.
“HOLD THOU MY HAND, DEAR LORD”, played by Sister Phyllis Spicker, Brother Harrison Farr, and Brother S. E. Clark.
Resolution of Respect was read by Superintendent L. A. Peterson:
Whereas, The Creator of us all has in His infinite wisdom called one from our number; namely, Louis S. Cardon, and
Whereas, The Logan City Board of Education feels deeply the inestimable loss of their associate whose noble character, high ideals, wide knowledge, and whole-hearted cooperation was a constant support and a source of inspiration, and
Whereas, the splendid service done by this valiant worker, stands as a monument to his memory, and as a testimonial to his integrity, his wise counsel, and his untiring zeal for the public welfare, and
Whereas, His associate members grieve with his stricken family and many friends in his sudden passing, realizing the irreparable loss that is suffered by his loved ones, and likewise the great loss to his community and fellow citizens
Therefore be it resolved, That the Logan City Board of Education, its officers and teachers of the City Schools, express to the beloved wife and the bereft family of member Louis S. Cardon their heartfelt sympathy and sincerest friendship in this sad hour, and their desire that God may lighten the burden of sorrow of those who mourn this loss, and
Be It further resolved, That a copy of these resolutions be made a part of the permanent records of the Logan City Board of Education, and that a copy shall also be given the bereft family of our departed member.
Signed: 0. A. Sonne, President J. H. Watkins, Jr., Vice President H. K. Merrill A. G. Olofsen L. A. Petersen, Superintendent Dave Tarbet, Clerk
Talk, Elder A. E. Cranney:
My brothers and sisters and friends, I deem it an honor and a privilege to say a few words upon this occasion with regard to the life and labors of my friend and companion, Brother L. S. Cardon.
Brother Cardon received a wonderful heritage in coming into this world. When one knew his father and his mother, as I knew them, we could hardly expect anything from their children, but a life like that Brother Cardon has led. That sainted mother of his, who was an inspiration to all who knew her, and especially to we boys who associated with her, like her own children, left with Brother L. S. Cardon that same high ideal of life which was in her soul and in the home.
I was born and practically reared In the same lot, just across the fence, and associated together with him in all the experiences of youth, I can say here today, and that truthfully, that as a boy in all games, I never have known L. S. Cardon to ever lose his patience, or have anything in his mind, but was of the highest Ideals. There never was a time, if little difficulties arose between the associates, but what the voice of L. S. Cardon would have power to calm the troubled waters. He had such a wonderful influence that he could turn things into the right; this was noticeable both in our association with other members of the family, and in the organizations of the church, our deacons quorum.
If our first Bishop were here today – Bishop Thomas X. Smith, I am sure he would voice the same sentiments as I would. We were as a family of boys under the tuition of our worthy bishop – there never was a request made but what brother L. S. Cardon was always one of the foremost to offer his services. And from then on, into the other organizations as a teacher and as a priest, and as he grew to manhood and began to take upon him the greater responsibilities of life, amongst his associates, thru the classes, I never knew him, as I have stated before, to ever say a cross or an unkind word to anyone.
I never knew him to exercise anything but that wonderful spirit of peace, which was with him in all the affairs of his life, and he was blessed with that heritage which came thru his parents in rich abundance. He was a peace-maker, teacher and student, with the highest ideals of life, and one of the best men I have known all my life. I have been with him under the most trying circumstances, and have been with him in the mountains, slept with him, and prayed with him, and yet I never knew him to say anything but good.
When the call came from his Church to go into the mission field, and there bear his message of truth to the nations of the Earth, did he go? Yes. Has there ever been a call made of him when he has not made the best of the call and that freely, willingly, gladly. So I say, I never knew a man with a stronger and more forceful character to maintain the principles of Justice.
So in conclusion, if I can just turn to a verse in the Doctrine and Covenants, I would like to read it, for I think that it sums up the life of Brother L. S. Cardon in such a way that it would be better than I can express It myself. It seems as though he has not left us, as it was only Saturday morning, as was his custom, to come up the street with his daughter to take her to school, he came into my place of business with that same smile and same good morning brought his car in Saturday evening, and there it stands.
He had finished his mission and a measure in life, that in thinking it over, his kindness to his parents as a boy; never did his mother or father call but what he met that call with a smile; he was a worthy son.
Never have I witnessed any more devotion than he gave to his family and to his children. No matter if a difficulty came up, he had that fine disposition to make the best of things and in all kindness and finest language that could be given, make everything go pleasant. When time would permit him to, and he made that time very often, he was at the House of the Lord when his good wife was called there to officiate in the Temple of the Lord; when he could not be there to officiate by her side, he was there to take her home when she was through.
To me Brother L. S. Cardon has been one of the most devoted husbands and father to his family that I have ever known in my life. He has left with them a heritage that is worth more than gold. In the 84th Section of the Doctrine and Covenants, when the Lord was speaking to the Prophet and six elders, he said, “For whosoever is faithful unto the obtaining these two Priesthoods of which I have spoken, and the magnifying their calling, are sanctified by the Spirit unto the renewing of their bodies; They become the sons of Moses and Aaron, and the seed of Abraham, and the church and kingdom, and the elect of God.” He magnified his calling, he officiated in all of ordinances of the Gospel, and therefore he has won the great battle of life; he has accomplished that which he came on the Earth to accomplish, and has won the prize, which is above everything in life. He has found the pearl of great price; he has left a heritage to this beautiful family of his that is more than gold.
I pray that the same spirit which has always existed in this family – never have I witnessed such a fine spirit, – may continue on thru life with this fine family, and when they have finished their course in life may go to their father, who has earned the greatest prize that can come to any man here on earth, I pray in the name of Jesus, Amen,
A PERFECT DAY” sung by Elder Frank Baugh.
Talk, Elder A. E. Anderson:
I am indeed grateful this afternoon for the privilege I have to say a few words over the bier of my dear friend, brother, and comrade in the work of the Lord, Jesus Christ.
What has been said is very true; never was a man in our counsel loved more than Brother Cardon, and his dear wife. They have fit into the religious and community life of this Stake perfectly always dependable and willing; we always knew when a task was assigned to Brother Cardon, that task would be filled.
The last two days I think I have missed Brother Cardon more than anyone I have missed in my life. At other times, when things of this nature came up, we could call on Brother Cardon and he would arrange details and take care of arrangements as well as giving comfort and consolation to those in need. Yesterday morning Brother Quinney, Brother Dunn and I met and we hardly knew what to do, we have been so used to getting counsel and help from Brother Cardon. We have other men in the counsel who have been, and are willing and glad to take their part in this great work, but Brother Cardon being senior in the counsel was given this work and he always did it faithfully and well, to those in need.
Brother Cardon, to me, has been a great man. For a long time Brother Cardon has labored under a financial handicap I believe very few men could work under. His family has been one with him. Years ago he could have paid his debts like others have done, thru a process of law and been able to give his family the comforts and luxuries of life, which they, with him, have sacrificed. Brother Cardon had an aim in life, a name and honor, and I believe if the Lord had given him a short time more, he could have been out of debt. I had a talk with Brother Cardon a week ago, and he told me of some of these things. He and his family with him, have denied themselves the things which his neighbors and friends have had in order to uphold his name and honor. So I say, he has left his family a heritage that they can be proud of so long as they live.
Brother Cardon never missed an obligation which devolved upon him without a good excuse. I think that is something that we can admire in a man, if he will fill his obligations, or have a good reason for not doing so. Brother Cardon missed less meetings than any one I know. I think the bishop of our ward could say that Brother Cardon was one of the most faithful attendants at meetings, and he always took an active part in the ward. After we are put on the Stake Boards we sometimes feel that we are divorced from the ward, but not so with Brother Cardon, he wanted to work, and as I recollect, he had several duties in the Ward besides his Stake duties. Brother Cardon magnified his calling. I do not know of anyone who has done better.
The Lord has been good to him, blessing him with such a fine wife and family; I believe Brother Cardon appreciated this. His heart was for his family; he did all that was in his power for them, and they, with him, have gone thru a great many sacrifices in order to keep their family name honored and unstained.
Our hearts go out to Sister Cardon and her family; I know the Lord will make up to them what they are missing in the passing of their father and husband , if they put their trust in Him. The Lord will come to our rescue if we do what is right.
In our Stake we have gone thru a great many things the past few months; and yet we are glad to have had the privilege of laboring with the men that we have. I pray that the Lord will bless Sister Cardon and her family, and all who mourn with them, that they shall be comforted and shall look forward to the time when they shall meet again and know that their father and husband has been one of the worthwhile men of the world, and has done his utmost to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ among men.
May the Lord make us equal to the sorrow and burdens which have come into our lives, I pray in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.
Talk, Elder H. K. Merrill:
I trust, my brothers and sisters, that the Lord will bless me with His Spirit that I might be able to control my feelings on this occasion. I feel as his family feel, that I have lost my best friend. I labored with Brother Cardon for twenty-five years in the High Counsel. I have labored with him for five years on the Logan City School Board, and I think I knew him pretty well. I never knew him to appreciate him like I have done the last year and a half. When I have needed counsel and advice and wanted to go to someone who was interested in me, and would advise me as a father, I have gone to Brother Cardon. He has always been willing to devote his time to me, and what he has been willing to do for me, he has been willing to do for others. Brother Cardon was a busy man, he had a lot to do, and as Brother Anderson said, he was prepared to do it. There has been no one on the School Board who has been more willing to visit the schools at the call of the Superintendent or to attend meetings. I know of no man who was better prepared to go on short notice than was Brother L. S. Cardon.
I think in my soul there is no question of a doubt as to where Brother Cardon will go, or what his reward will be. He will receive the reward that the Lord has promised to his faithful children, and I know that he has just gone for a short time to prepare a place that his family can go to him, and we, his friends, if we will live as he has lived, we will be able to meet him. When things like this happen, the thought that it brings is a realization of what life is more than anything else.
When Brother Cranney was speaking I thought of the uncomplaining dispositions of his parents when trials beset theme and brother L. S. Cardon inherited their dispositions. I trust that the life that he led and that the example he set will not be forgotten by his associates and that God will bless his good wife and his children with the same peaceful influence that accompanied their father, that it will always be with them; that these boys of his will follow in his footsteps and do the things which they have seen him do, and they will have joy come to their souls.
May Sister Cardon be comforted and blessed with strength that she can be both father and mother to these children, and guide and direct us aright. And may God bless us with His Spirit to guide and direct us day by day, that we may be faithful to the end, is my prayer in the name of Jesus, Amen.
Talk, Elder W. C. Winder, President of the State Fair Board:
I esteem this an honor, my Brothers and Sisters, to be asked to say a few words on this occasion. My acquaintance with Louis S. Cardon goes back to the time when he was appointed a director on the State Fair Board, and from the very time that he was appointed, I think that we have been very dear friends. I never knew a more lovable man in my life than Brother L. S. Cardon. He was true as steel, and I know that every act he performed on the State Fair Board he did conscientiously. He was a man that I never saw disturbed or confused. He was always able to control his feelings, and always the same. I think that the department he was supervisor over was one of the hardest departments to control on the Fair Board, but he always did it in such a pleasant and agreeable way. He could get along with the class of people he had to deal with better than anyone I knew on the State Fair Board. He was a man anyone could approach and he always had a kind word for everyone; and the longer I knew him the better I liked him. My feelings towards him were that of a brother, just as dear to me as anyone I have had any dealings with.
I never was so upset in my life, as when I read in Monday mornings paper of his passing away, I think possibly that working in a position as a director on the State Fair Board we can judge of the character of the man and the woman possibly better than in any other position as they are working without compensation. They are working and giving their time and energy for the benefit of the people of the State. I can say for Louis Cardon that he never shirked a duty; he was always on time, and he performed his part in a most creditable way. He gained the respect of everyone that he came in contact with. He has many friends among those associated with him on the State Fair Board, and I never heard a person speak of him, but who spoke with the utmost respect and love. I hope we will be able to get someone somewhere near the character of Brother Cardon to take his place, but that is a question, as I never knew a man just like he is.
I do sympathize with those who have been bereft. I know he must have been a lovable man about his home because he was so even tempered. I know it was a great shock to his family, and I know it was a great shock to all who knew him.
I pray that the spirit of the Lord may comfort his dear wife and sons and daughters, that they may ever have in mind the life and character of their husband and father, and if they will emulate him they will have peace and joy In this life, and receive a reward hereafter.
I do not think it would be wise for me to take up any more time. We were late in coming in, we hoped to get here in time to visit the home, but an unavoidable accident prevented us from getting here.
I pray that the Spirit, of the Lord may be with the family, that they might acknowledge the hand of the Lord in taking away Brother Cardon. I pray the blessings of the Lord upon all of us, and I do it in the name of Jesus, Amen.
Talk, Elder Melvin J. Ballard:
A prince has fallen in the house of Israel. He was a prince indeed, and I feel highly honored to be called upon to say something at this time, but it Is hard to express the feelings of my heart in doing honor to this, one of God’s honorable men. I bear witness that what has been said of him is true; from boyhood we were close companions and intimate associates; he was a business partner of mine for many years. I loved him just like I love my own brothers in the flesh, and Indeed he seemed as near and dear to me.
Two weeks ago, when I was in Logan speaking to a group of Scout leaders, he invited me to ride as far as Ogden with him — I had planned on going back on the train, but I decided, because of a very deep impression, to go with him; and that impression was that it might be my last opportunity to have a visit with him, as indeed it was I am grateful for that opportunity, as for many others, that I have had in my association with Brother Louis.
He was courteous and willing to render service, and always willing to carry just a little more. Brother Louis was a willing worker who never shirked, he was a volunteer in assuming responsibilities. He has carried a tremendous load. Yet he never complained. Hope never died in his heart, He had a disposition as mild as a woman. If we can go through life with as heavy a load as he carried and yet remain as sweet as he did we need not fear. He was a friend in every sense of the word.
When I was called from this community twenty-two years ago, to preside over the Northwestern States Mission, there were obligations that had to be taken over by someone, and it was Louis who took them over and handled them but yet he uncomplainingly fought on and on, sword in hand and met every discouragement with a smile. Some men have more than they can bare, such a man was Louis. He was always optimistic that things would come out alright, and so it has for him. Surely he is to be envied, If all of us can go through life, and still remain as sweet and good as he, none of us need to fear the future. I am also convinced that life is very precious, and a life like his, if it is taken away, is no accident. I am convinced that it makes no difference how we go, when the summons comes, we go, and I am sure that Louis had accomplished his work, because of the testimony I received two weeks ago concerning him and the probability I would not have the pleasure of another visit with him. I did not tell him that.
This passing so suddenly is an awful shock to the loved Ones who remain, but how pleasant it is to the man who goes, especially when he has done his work, and done it so well. He has accomplished the purpose of life, he has learned the lesson for which God sent his children into the world. He has kept his second estate, and he is entitled to be a prince and when I say a prince, I mean that he will rule and reign in the House of Israel, for he has earned that title; and so has every man who has received the two priesthoods, and magnifies his calling, and is faithful in the few things, shall be made ruler over many.
He may not have been fortunate enough to have gathered together much of this World’s goods, but what he did have he secured honestly. There was not a dishonest hair on his head. While he did not leave any material riches, all of his wealth goes with him today – his character, his testimonies, his knowledge of the truth. He has greater riches than most men.
Recently I heard an Eastern man say that the older he became the more he was convinced that the man who gathered together goods of this world, was wasting his time in comparison to the man who spent the greater part of his life in preparing himself for that which he can take with him; lessons that he has learned will qualify him for service in the world to come. Knowledge of the truth of this gospel are some of the things that man can take with him, and if he has this, he is rich today.
I am sure that he lives, and that he does not live very far away from us; and that our loved ones are near us, and belong to this sphere; yet they have difficulty in talking to us. If we could meet them, shake their hands, and counsel with them although they operate in another world, but I presume there is a good reason why we can not. There must be some law which prevents the law-abiding man and woman from talking with men in the flesh. I recognize that their law may be broken, just the same as the moral law Is broken by a person taking their own life, their spirit is rushed into the spirit world before their allotted time; so may spirits unlawfully, on their own account come to the earth; but the law-abiding spirits abide the law under which they dwell, and do not come unless there is some very good reason, and special permission given; and occasionally that permission Is given.
I experienced a very comforting thing, that came to me last month while visiting in the Canadian Stakes of Zion. Some time ago a fine young elder had received a call to go on a mission – he wanted to go to the South American Mission, so he talked to me about it, and after conference, it was decided to let him go to South America. On the way he lost his life in the sinking of the Vesperous — I refer to Elder Burt.
I was distressed over his father and mother, and I tried to comfort them, for the assurance came to me was that he was still a missionary and that God needed him and was using him in a more effective way than if he had gone on his earthly mission. But his folks could not be comforted. I learned from the father, while on a trip to the Canadian Temple with some of the saints from the Northwestern States Mission, how the Lord had comforted them.
He is a worker in the temple. After the evening session, Brother Burt had performed his part of the work, and had retired to his room to change his clothing to go home, when this big, stalwart man said, “I heard the voice of my son, I did not see him, but he was standing in this room, and he talked to me and said ‘You must cease to grieve, everything is alright, and you and mother must stop grieving, because your grief distresses me, and you and mother must stop grieving, because as a witness that everything is alright, tonight you will be called upon to speak to the people, it will be out of the ordinary, but it will be a witness unto you”. So, instead of going home, he followed the company until they reached the “Veil”, when President Wood, was impressed to stop the company and have a testimony meeting, or call upon members of the company to speak. Several had spoken, and he had announced someone to be the last speaker, and when Brother Burt had not been called upon he felt crushed, and began to descend the stairs to go home. President Wood said, “I heard a voice say distinctly to me that I should call Brother Burt to talk, which I did, but they said in the room that he has gone home, and I said, ‘send for him’.” They found him near the door, and Brother Wood announced him, and not the other man, as the concluding speaker. When he returned to the room, big, strong and stalwart as he was, he broke down and told the story of his son’s visit to him that night, and how it had brought peace and comfort to his distressed soul.
So I say to every soul that in some manner God will manifest to every man and woman who patiently bear their troubles and worries, that He has not forgotten them, or forsaken them, and he will lift the clouds that death brings, and cause hope to live, and assurance that He has done all things for the best.
So I say to my dear sister, who with my wife and I, and Louis, went on the same day into the house of the Lord, and had a double wedding; all that she was given then of promise and blessing is hers; thank God for that, and for the hope we have and the faith we have, that notwithstanding the discouragements that come, we have the assurance that death is not the end, it is the beginning; it is the one great comfort of my life. It is not important how long we live, but how well we live, ah, that is important. Think of the association which is Louis’ today, with father and mother, and relatives and friends – there are many more than we see here today with us, rejoicing that another soul has won the battle and comes a conquering hero, with his honesty unsullied, and uncontaminated, and they rejoice over it; and when we have fought the good fight and endured death, which are just an idea of what Hell would be like are forever left behind. Even if it is a world just like this, and we can have father, mother and loved ones with us, it will be heaven enough for me; I ask for no more, just give me them – the joy of living forever with them and it will be heaven to me. Thank God we have the privilege to meet them and to have them, and to hold them; let us do nothing that will in any way hamper our opportunity of living together.
May God bring to my dear sister and her children that added strength and wisdom that she may be both mother and father to her children God bless them and guide them, as I am sure he will, that they might have His guiding spirit to be with theme that they might live so that their father may be near them, and safely guide them, and perhaps he can do even more for them than he could have done here; that they might do nothing that displeases him, and then you shall be happy and make him happy.
God help us to do this, I pray, in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.
Talk, Bishop Wm. Worley:
My brothers and sisters, I feel highly honored to have the opportunity to say a few words on this occasion. Little did I think last Sunday morning when L. S. Cardon came into our Sunday School that it would be the last Sunday School he would attend. He came as usual with that same pleasant smile, taught his class as usual. When he left us at 11:30, apparently in the same health as he had every day, we did not think it would be the last time we would see him alive. I do not know of anything that has come into my life that has been just as hard for me to bear, outside of losses in my own family. Louis Cardon was one of my closest and best friends. You could go to him at any time and receive good counsel, and he would always give the best he had. I could call on Brother Cardon any time of the day or night to go out into the ward, and he would always say “Yes, I will go”. Everything that has been said of Brother Cardon, I can bear witness of as the truth.
We do not want to overlook that wonderful family of Brother Cardon’s — I know they are a fine family, as I have associated with them in every walk in life. A more devoted mother and wife you could not find, such a lovely family, willing and ready to serve. There is not a family in our ward, or in any ward, that is giving the support to their Bishop that has Brother Cardon’s ‘family. I was talking to one of the ladies of the Ward the other day – Sister Clara Hulme, who has been a worker on the mutual Stake Board, and she said of him – “I never knew a man who was more faithful and devoted to work than Brother Cardon”, and hundreds could testify to the same.
I want to say in conclusion, may the Lord Bless Sister Cardon and her family with that spirit which emanates from him, may he bless them that they may follow the example of their father. Bless them, and bless us all that we may prove faithful to the end.
On behalf of the family I wish to thank you for your presence here, and for every expression of kindness and sympathy you have shown. May He bless us all and help us to prove faithful to the end, I humbly pray, in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.
“I’LL GO WHERE YOU WANT ME TO GO”, Sung by Fred Baugh
Benediction, Elder C. W. Dunn:
Our Father, who art in Heaven, we are sorrowful today at parting with our friend and brother, the faithful servant, Louis S. Cardon, but our hearts axe filled with gratitude for the long, pleasant and profitable association we have had with him. We thank Thee for the service he has unselfishly rendered to his Church and to this community for these many years; and we praise Thy name that he had in his heart an abiding, unfaltering testimony that Jesus is the Christ, Thine only Begotten Son, and that it is His Devine plan of salvation.
We pray that this testimony may remain with his family and with us all for all time, and that Thy sweet spirit may heal the hearts of his loved ones and assuage their grief and cheer them in their lonely hours.
Let Thy protecting care be with us through the remaining activities of this day, that no harm or accident may befall us, we humbly pray in the name of Thy Son, Jesus Christ, Amen.
REMEMBERING LOUIS SAMUEL CARDON
The following information was compiled for the Cardon Family Reunion held in the summer of 1980. Each of the daughters of Louis Samuel Cardon wrote some thoughts concerning memories of their father. Louis Hickman wrote on behalf of his mother Margaret.
MEMORIES OF MY DAD
Edna Cardon Taylor
My first memory of my father was when the World War I ended in 1918 – I was just past three years old, but I do remember that when the local soldiers came home from the war, there was a parade in their honor down Main Street and Papa lifted me through a window, onto a lower roof and then up to a taller roof which was that of the office of Cardon Company, so we could watch the parade from up there. How exciting it was for me and how scared I was of falling, but he held my hand all through it, and I was all right then.
It is impossible to put the rest of my memories of him in any kind of chronological order, so I won’t even try, but here are some that flood into my mind now.
whenever I was sick in bed, he would always ask me what I wanted him to bring home to me, and it was always without fail “Nabiscos”. They were “sick, and getting well” food, done up In nice little tin boxes that lasted long after the cookies were gone, and the tin box was used to store some of my childhood treasures in.
Many are the times when I combed his hair with a two edged, fine toothed comb. He would sit and read his paper or his favorite magazine “The Saturday Evening Post” and ask if I wanted to comb his hair. (or did I ask him if I could?) When I would be so intent on “styling” it, all of a sudden he would jerk his head and make a funny noise and I would jump with fright and then we would both laugh about It. Always, too, he would tear a corner off of the paper to show me how it would cling to the comb because of static electricity.
On many evenings or Sundays when he was at home, he would ask someone to play some of his favorite records on the Edison phonograph. His favorites were Harry Lowder, I think. We had “thick” records and “thin” records, each of which took different needle attachments.
Is there anyone who fails to remember seeing Mama and Papa walking home from church together? He was always a few feet ahead of her as they walked along together.
In the spring we usually waited eagerly for his announcement that he had arranged for the man to come with his horses and plow and harrow the garden. That was a sure sign of spring. But I always failed to remember, until too late, that lots of hard work followed that day! Anyone who was big enough, or had any spare time, or could, or would, was expected to help rake and level that garden and help plant it, and weed it, and water it and help harvest it. It was a very big garden – a full building lot on which the house just east of the old family home now stands.
Every few weeks, Mom would announce she wanted a chicken for Sunday dinner, so Papa would select the chicken, get out his old chopping block and his axe and kill a chicken or two. I’ll never forget the bloody mess those headless chickens made flopping around on the ground trying to die. It’s a wonder I could ever eat any of them after watching that!
But, I was always anxious to be awarded at least one chicken foot so I could pull the tendons in it and cause the toes to expand and contract. Oh, the simple joys of childhood.
The pleasures we used to share with all the neighbors in Our car will long be remembered. The first one I remember was a big Studebaker Touring car with jump seats between the front and back seats. We would put a board across the jump seats so more people (usually children) could be accommodated. When we went for a ride it was usually “around a block or two” but almost always down to Rich Land Acres to see how crops were doing down there.
Once when we were coming down the canyon (or it may have been going up), we met a team of horses and a wagon on a narrow curve of the road. It isn’t exactly clear to me now, but I believe Papa had to back up and move our car over, then help the other man drive the team and wagon past us on the narrow road.
When I was in the fifth grade at the Woodruff School, my teacher, Miss Creighton, whom I was deathly afraid of, sent me out of the room for chewing gum. I was so upset aver it I went and sat on the ditch curb and cried. Who should happen along about then, but my Dad. He was pretty upset about it all, but he took me back into the room, and made everything all right for me.
We were beginning the great depression before he died, and times were pretty tough then. Although I wasn’t very old, I realized that he was very worried about money. My friends seemed to have more spending money than I did, and they often urged me to ask for picture show money, etc., but I loved Papa so much I couldn’t stand to see the sadness in his eyes when he had to refuse me money – or when he found a way to give it to me – so most of the time I just wouldn’t ask for any more than needed for necessary school expenses.
Even at Christmas time, I’d cut my Christmas wants and money for gifts to the bare necessities rather than see how troubled he was in trying to get more for us.
One of the things everyone remembers about my Father is his kind, calm disposition and his compassion for other people. I can only remember one time in my life when he even scolded me, and that nearly broke my heart. I guess that is the reason I remember it. It happened at the family dinner table. During a discussion (I don’t even remember what the subject was), but someone said something I didn’t like or agree with, and I began to tell her how I felt about it, and Papa turned to me and said “You had better keep still’ this doesn’t happen to be any of your business”. I felt terrible, because he had seldom ever even rebuked me before, and I thought I had certainly displeased him.
When I was going to the Jr. High school on first east and second north, we always went home for lunch. There was no hot lunch program in the schools then. We (Helen, who was secretary there, Ruth and I) usually stopped off at Papa’s office and he would give us a ride home and back in the car. Other wise we could barely make it in the short noon hour.
Papa usually was the first one up in the mornings at our house. He would build the fire in the furnace and in the kitchen stove and would make a big pot of Germaid mush. Many were the mornings when he would call up the stairs and tell us goodbye as he left for the office, and tell us that it was time to get up and that there was mush on the stove for us.
I never heard my father swear! Whenever he was inclined to cuss a bit, the worst thing I ever heard him say was “the confounded thing”.
Neither did I ever hear my parents quarrel. There is no doubt that they must have had disagreements sometimes, but I never heard it or saw it. That is a tribute to both Mama and Papa. And he didn’t like to see his children quarrel either. Even though we did our share of quarrelling, as children in a big family will do, he usually acted as the peacemaker and settled us down as best he could.
On New Year’s eves, when I was quite young and found it difficult to stay awake to hear the bells, Papa would play games with us to help pass the time and help me stay awake.
How well I remember when a circus would come to town, he would get us up about 4:30 or 5:OO a.m. and take us down to the railroad yard to watch the circus unload. Then later on during the day he would take us to the parade. Tickets into the circus were too expensive for us to go, but we never felt cheated because of his effort to see that we didn’t miss the excitement in town.
I know that my sisters have always said I was Papa’s favorite, spoiled child, but I disagree with them. My view of his helping me with dishes, taking me places with him and taking my side in family disagreements was his way of keeping peace. I was rather pliable and he would say “come on and don’t fight about the dishes, I’ll help you and we’ll do them”. It wasn’t I that got out of doing the dishes, it was Ruth or someone else. Papa and I did many things together, and I practically worshipped him. I believe I would have done anything in the world he asked me to do.
Our playhouse was always a fun place to be. Papa had been able to get a hold of a one room house and had it moved to our lot west of the garage. This was a playhouse for his girls. We loved it and fixed it up with curtains at its two small windows, old furniture and our dolls. I have spent many hours of play in it during my childhood.
I guess the most enjoyable times I can remember though are the many summers we spent in our canyon home. Papa loved it, and I guess we all inherited his love of the mountains. Early each spring we’d all go up the canyon and open the home up and clean it up so we could stay there as soon as school let out in the spring.
Papa and the older girls who were working in town would go to work each day and back to the canyon at night. Mama and the younger children stayed there full time. I loved it! On December 14, 1930 when my Father died, I was 15 ½ years old, and the bottom fell out of my world! How well I remember that day. It was a Sunday and we had all been to Sunday School, except Mom, who stayed home and cooked ‘Sunday dinner’. Papa had taught his Sunday School class as usual.
Following dinner, each of the family settled into his own activity of studying, reading, playing, etc.
During the afternoon, I began to notice him pacing the floor, rubbing his arm and chest and saying to himself “Oh, hum, ” or “Oh, My. Finally I realized something was bothering him, so I went and told Mama that I didn’t think he felt well.
When she questioned him about it he admitted that he didn’t and he thought it was indigestion but he consented to go to his bed and lie down.
I was dispatched to Aunt Lettie Squires’ home to borrow some SaI Hepatica for him. They did not have any, so I went then to Aunt Bessie Ballard’s home next door and was able to get some there.
When I returned home with it, there was great urgency around him. He was much worse and doctor Merrill had been called. Someone was rubbing his arms and hands and others his legs. I immediately began to help with this, and we thought he was still breathing but we know now that it was only air exhaling from his lungs.
He was gone before the doctor arrived. That is the first time I had ever seen a man cry. Dr. H. K. Merrill was not only our family doctor, but he and Papa were best of friends.
That is the last memory I have of Papa, except for the funeral which was held in the Logan Tabernacle on December 17, 1930.
How much I have missed in not having more years with my father! It seems my memories of him are those of insignificant little things, but nothing very big had happened to me by the time I was fifteen years old. I had lived at home and was sheltered in what I feel was a secure, happy family. If major problems arose, I either was immature enough to not see them, – or the family didn’t want me, as a child, to see them.
But – through the years, as I grew up and met the same problems in the world of college, dating, marriage, jobs, etc. as everyone else, I would often wish I could talk to Papa about them. When things didn’t seem to be going right, I just knew that if he would have been here, he would have understood them and helped advise me about how to handle them.
I’m sorry, too, that Tom and our children and grandchildren were never able to know him and love him as I did.
SOME MEMORIES OF PAPA
Ruth Cardon Leonard
I once read in a book some words that have stayed in my memory all these years. They went something like this “Memories are tricky things – fragile and sweet. We look back through the years and often things we find are a surprise”.
As I have thought back through the years about my early life, and particularly about Papa, I have found I remembered things that surprised me; many of them sweet, as the saying goes.
I didn’t realize very much at the time, but certainly do more and more as time goes by, how very kind, patient and considerate Papa was. I only remember once being spoken harshly to, and that was one evening when Papa had a long distance phone call. Mom said “Now everyone be quiet”, but Edna and I had an argument, as usual, and started to chase each other around the room. I guess we were rather noisy, and as I passed by the telephone, Papa reached out and tugged at a piece of my hair. He never said anything – he didn’t need to. It nearly broke my heart to know that he was cross with me.
Nothing was said or done to Edna. SHE was the sweet, round faced, chubby, curly haired baby, especially to Papa. It was often mine and Edna’s chore to clean up after dinner. This we put off doing as long as we could. We would argue about who would clear the table – who would wash or dry the dishes – or who would sweep the floor, etc. Often Papa would stop in on his way someplace and Edna would immediately start to cry. Papa would pick her up (even when she was a big girl) and hold her on his lap and say “What is the matter with my little baby girl?” Then Edna would say, “‘Ruth won’t clear the table, or wash the dishes, or whatever” and Papa would always say, “Now Ruth, you are the oldest and biggest girl. You get this work done”. Then he would sit and rock her while I did the work. Funny, I never felt any resentment toward him. It was always Edna I was mad at.
Our house was always the gathering place for the neighborhood kids in the early evening to play “kick-the-can”, “run-sheep-run”, “Mother, may 1?” or many other games. When the kids were all called home, or most of them, anyway, papa would nearly always say “would you like to go around a block or two?” We would all pile into the Studebaker. A lot of times we would have a neighbor kid or two and would put a board across the jump seats in order to make more room. We would then ride as far as “the dam” which was north and west of Logan; or to the south limits of Logan City – and then we would usually end up with ice cream cones for all.
I also remember how we would take our little tin cup with us when Papa went to milk the cow. We would always get a cupful of nice warm cow’s milk to drink. (ugh!)
One of my fondest memories was how Papa loved the canyon and of how hard he worked to get the house built, little by little each year. I remember how each evening we would go down to the bridge when it was time for Papa to come, and wait and wait for him. Often we would play guessing games while we waited.
One summer day, we all had to go to Logan for the day. We started out early in the morning. After we had gone a little ways, Papa said, “The brakes are gone”. We were all panic stricken, as we were headed down the canyon. Papa, however, remained calm. He stopped us by running into the side of the mountain. Then he slowly and carefully and safely, drove the rest of the way home.
When I was in Junior High School, I remember walking home from school one day. About three blocks from home, Papa passed us. Normally, he would have stopped and given us a ride home, but this time he only waved and smiled and drove on. Then we heard the fire engine sirens and realized it was coming down the street past us. We hurried on, and then when we were about a block from home, we saw the fire engine was at our house. We ran the rest of the way home. Papa said later that he had been impressed to go home, even though it was in the middle of the afternoon. The firemen said that if he hadn’t closed the windows and doors upstairs in our house, the fire would have been much worse.
Papa used to like to watch the lightning. He would go out an the front porch during a storm and watch it. He tried to get us to go with him, but Lucile was the only one who was brave enough to go. I was scared to death and would head for the deep, dark closet under the stairs in the “little bedroom”.
Once Papa took us to Salt Lake with him to the State Fair. He was on the State Fair Board, and I believe I was the proudest person in the world when he took us to the Board dining room and we ate dinner there.
The death of Papa was an extra sad time for me. This was in December just before I graduated from High School. I had secretly looked forward to having my father hand me my graduation diploma. He was then President of the School Board and this would have been his job. It was indeed a sad day for me when someone else handed me my diploma.
As I said at the beginning, “Memories are tricky things – often fragile”- and in my case – mostly sweet!
MY FATHER AND I
Lucile Cardon Reading
When we were growing up, there weren’t classes on parenting to explain to fathers and mothers and children what their needs were and how they could be fulfilled. So we didn’t worry about words like coping and we all just did the best we could.
As a child I felt wholly inadequate to compete with my sisters even though I hadn’t the words to express it. Looking back, I don’t remember being depressed or feeling sorry for myself, but I often wondered why I was such a peculiar member of the family – and the question. continues to plague me at times although I’ve finally learned to live with it.
Early In my life I decided that I must have been left on the family doorstep and that was why I didn’t measure up to the others. And then, one awful day I overheard Mom confiding to a relative that she had wanted all of her children but Lucile and Paul. That made me feel even worse; after all, it was better to have been adopted than not to be wanted!
In our family the girls were lumped together into twos: Margaret and Rebecca, the older ones, who were given extra privileges and responsibilities; Ruth and Edna, the younger girls, who were given special consideration and care; and Helen and Lucile, the middle twosome.
Being lumped with Helen should have been some help, but it turned out to be quite the contrary. My self-image suffered daily because she overshadowed me in every way. She was known as a good girl and I certainly have never been given that appellation. Though I thought our work in the home was divided equally between us and we rotated the tasks from week- to-week-to-week, I never seemed to do well enough to merit any praise while Helen’s efforts were frequently approved.
And Helen was certainly prettier. I began to notice this difference after I heard one of the neighbors compare the two of us one day. “Helen has quite noble features,” she said, “but that poor Lucile is surely a scrawny, awkward kid who is always running around with those awful skinned knees.” I was painfully aware of Rebecca’s justification for labeling me “Ugly, bow-legged, freckle-faced, Billy Goat whiskers.”
Nor did my voice lend any charm to my existence. I found it impossible to pronounce my R’s and Th’s, much to Grandma Ballard’s concern, and early in my Primary days Ruby Mitton urged me not to try to sing with her group. “You always get us off key”, she accused. I didn’t question the validity of her contention since I didn’t even know what key I was supposed to be on.
And besides all these problems, I was not a worthy daughter. Who else was ever caught having a “Show and Tell” sex session with our boy cousins in the loft of our old barn! Although I was only five or six at that time, Mom looked at me mournfully and accusingly for so long afterward that I lived with that guilt for years. In those days there wasn’t help for mothers or daughters to explain that such a situation was not uncommon with preschool children, and so I believed that I must be the only bad girl in all the world. As a result, I was in high school before I learned that a woman has to do more than kiss a boy to become pregnant. No wonder that I always sneaked away from the neighborhood parties whenever the other girls and boys started to play Post office, for I knew that the others might not get caught, but I would!
By Mom’s own admission, I wasn’t wanted in the family, at least not by her, and so I turned to our father for comfort, which he gave in ample supply – not in words but just by being the warm, loving person he was. He made me feel that he accepted me as I was and without apology – except for the time he hid me out in Logan canyon so no one would see me until Rebecca’s carefully executed shingle haircut grew out. My gratitude and love for my father was fierce and overwhelming though never expressed. Any show of affection in either words or touch was not something in which the Cardon family indulged. How much we all missed by being that way!
The only thing I had to offer our father in return for so much that he gave to me, and my only chance to be alone with him, was to pretend I liked those wild and frightening Cache Valley thunder storms that he so much enjoyed. I feared them as much as the rest of the family did, but I forced myself to sit on the porch with him while lightning streaked the sky and thunder boomed and everyone else stayed fearfully indoors.
And the wonderful thing is that eventually I learned to enjoy those Storms as much as he did!
The following story is one that I wrote about those cherished experiences enjoyed by my father and me. It was published more than ten years ago in The Children’s Friend, under the title of “Summer Storm”.
The rounded thunderhead billowed up in the southwest. Rachel watched it and shivered when she saw a far-off flash of lightning and heard the low rumble of thunder. She was alone and terrified.
Rachel knew that her sisters, and even her mother too, would be frightened if they were home, but even a frightened family would be some comfort. It was a fearful thing to be all alone in a summer storm.
Most of all Rachel wished her father were at home, as she anxiously watched the fast-moving black clouds. Father liked to sit on the front porch during a summer storm. Several times he had invited her and other members of the family to join him, and seemed to want their company. But she had always been too afraid to go outside and her sisters and mother must have felt the same way, too, so he’d sit there by himself.
A gusty wind began to bend the trees. Rachel jumped as a window in an upstairs room banged shut. The first big drops of rain pelted down just as her father turned his car into the driveway, jumped out, and ran into the house.
Rachel’s heart turned over with a suffocating love for him as he explained, “Thought I’d better check on you. And now that I’m here, how about a ringside seat with me for an A-No. 1 attraction that’s going on outside?”
Rachel followed her father out onto the porch. He pulled two chairs close together, then reached out to pat one of her trembling hands. “How beautiful this is,” he said. He was quiet for moment and then he added softly, “You know, Rachel, being frightened won’t ever stop a storm, but facing the beauty and majestic power of it can bring a strange and exciting kind of joy – and a deep gratitude for being a part of such a wondrous world. How much people miss in life if they spend their time being afraid!”
At his quiet words, Rachel looked up, letting her eyes sweep across the sky as one streak of lightning followed another and almost constant thunder growled and crashed around them. In all of her ten years, she had never really seen a summer storm before. It is beautiful, she thought in wonderment.
And in that moment, with her father close to her, Rachel decided that all of her life she’d be glad for the beauty in the world, and she’d try to always have courage – even in a storm.
Papa
Helen Cardon Lamb
I can’t think of any really special reason, why I think Papa was the finest, kindest, most patient and best man I have ever known. I thought so when I was younger, I thought so when he died and I still think so, especially when I see some other men.
He was never angry (or showed it at least), and would do anything for Mama, and any of us, or anyone. If we did something wrong (which we all did at sometime or other), or said something we shouldn’t, like swearing etc., he would just look at you and that was all it took. He ‘would never let us talk back to Mama or show her disrespect – just a look was all that was needed to make me feel guilty. I don’t remember of him ever as much as slap me. I remember how patient he was when Mama would call him at work nearly every morning about eleven o’clock – or later- to have him go to Harrison’s grocery store and bring home a pound of butter and some steak for dinner. He always did this no matter how busy he was, and then he would have to wait for the meat to cook – and they didn’t have micro ovens, or even presto pots in those days.
When I went to work for the school board at the Junior High School (he was on the Board of Education at that time) he told me about the job being available, but made me go and get it myself. (I don’t know if he talked to them before hand or not – but I doubt it, for he said I had to get It myself.) When Frank was on his mission he never said a word when I would go with other fellows, but I know he didn’t really approve. Whenever I would get a letter from Frank he would bring it right down from the post office, not even waiting until he came home for dinner. When we were married we both had the feeling that Papa was there in the temple that day.
I do remember that he was always going to administer to someone who was sick. I think I must have been around 10 or 11 years old and he was called one night to administer to a neighbor through the block (Ollie Jean Nibley, I think). When he came home I heard him say to Mama that he really couldn’t bless her to get better – he just had a feeling when he was praying that she wouldn’t get better, and she didn’t. I don’t remember why I often think of this even, but I still do.
It was just the little things that made me feel he was so wonderful!
MEMORIES OF MY FATHER
Rebecca C. Peterson
I have been trying to go back, in memory, to the very earliest recollections of the days of my youth. I do remember that our lot seemed as big as the whole city of Logan to me. And all of it was our play ground with a fence around it. We had apple trees, apricot trees, raspberries, strawberries, garden truck of all kinds, flowers and vegetables. Also, cats, dogs, lambs, chickens, rabbits, calves, pigs, etc. I loved them all.
There was a big frame house on the corner of 3rd West and 1st North, where the Gwen Jones family now live. It was occupied by Uncle Melvin Ballard and his family for a time and then rented to a Reverend Lewis and family when Uncle Melvin went to be President of the Northwestern States Mission. Then it was sold to Uncle George Squires and they lived there until Gretta sold it to the Jones’. Going west of that corner, our house was next. That was the little yellow frame house, built by my father, where Howells now live. Then there was the Morgan house and Aunt Liz Edwards rock house and Tarbets on the west corner. Across the street where Thomsons live was Grandma Hopkins little house. Two of her grandchildren lived with her. They were Susan Roberts and her brother, Eugene. One day he climbed up the telephone pole and took hold of the wires. Our father heard the screaming and went up the pole and got him off of it. I don’t know how, but there was nothing my Dad couldn’t do, I thought.
Going south from the house on corner of 3rd West and 1st North there was the little frame house that Uncle Willard remodeled and Carlisles now own. Then there was Grandma Bakers and Hamps lived in part of that and the old Sarah Card home that June Reading now lives in. So you see that we had most of the block to range in, and we ranged.
In the back of our house was a great huge barn with a big hay loft above it. It was very fascinating. The bottom part of the barn had several rooms and divisions. There was the stable where we kept the cows, the chicken coop and the large fenced off chicken run, a storage room for feed, bran, and wheat and implements and then there was a store room and everything that wouldn’t go in the house, went into the barn and there moldered away. There was also a pig pen and a water hydrant with a large tin tub for the livestock to drink from.
I remember the cows, chickens and pigs, but I don’t remember the horses. We must have had horses because l remember that one of my fondest adventures was to go buggy riding with our Dad, down 1st North to the big ditch and riding right through it. Papa would stop in the middle of the stream and let the water run around us, while we all got excited and sea sick. Mamma did not come with us on these trips because she was afraid of water. I remember Papa accusing her of taking a bath one leg at a time as she was afraid to get into the tub all at one time.
At the front gate of our fenced yard there grew a large bush of dark red roses. We loved them, Papa would go to his priesthood meeting early Sunday morning and then come home for us, to take us to Sunday School. Mamma didn’t go to Sunday School because she always had a new baby. Papa would stand at the front gate and pick a rose bud and pin on each of our Sunday best dresses. We were scrubbed and combed and often painfully rag curled, wearing several petticoats, a gorgeous home-made dress with a large sash around our fat little middles, a huge bow in the back and hair ribbons to match. What a sight we must have been as Papa lined us up and took us into the church (2nd Ward) with love and pride in his eyes. We all loved him, he was so loving and kind.
One Sunday morning we were going to Sunday School. I was holding one of the younger girl’s hand and a wasp got in between our hands and stung us both. Such bawling you never heard. Papa was coming home to get us and met us running and screaming. He came to the rescue, took us over to the big ditch and put cool soothing mud on our hands. We were comforted by a loving father which was the best medicine in the world. But, I wonder how proud he was that day as he ushered two tear streaked muddy handed children into the church house.
I guess I can make Lucile feel less of an outcast, by confessing that I too, have some experiences that I thought were not to be talked about.
I remember that I was smarting off at the dinner table one night, and any Dad said, “Stop that, it is getting a bit too thick”. I said, smartly, “You mean the cheese”, which I was cutting at the moment.
Mom said, in great disgust, “Lou, slap that girl”. And to everyone’s surprise, including me, he did just that. I was hurt (not physically, which I could have endured easier) but my feelings were sore, and I was disgraced for not to my knowledge, did he ever do that to any of this other children. I never did blame my father, my mother made him do it.
I also had a young female curiosity. Aunt Littie came down and brought Walter and got all the neighborhood women in to see Walter’s hernia and the new truss which he must wear. I tried awfully hard to catch a peek at it between women and investigators. I got caught and sent firmly from the room. So, after the side show, Walter told me that I could have a look at it if I would come out to the hayloft of our old barn, which we proceeded to do. We reckoned without my ever watchful mother, who knew about barns and temptation, I guess. She always kept an eagle eye on that old barn and her kids. We forgot that the window in the front of the hay loft was wide and high and straight in line with the kitchen window. She appeared at the most inopportune moment, and yelled us down from the barn, AT ONCE! I never got to see a truss in action, and only in the drug store window, but I always had a certain curiosity about them. Why couldn’t the women have told me that they were medical aids. Instead I went through life thinking that it was a sex symbol. I thought that all men had to wear a truss, or were born with it.
So, Lucile, I join you in being ugly and wicked and guilty. But I was watched pretty well from then on. However, I used to steal a bunch of early radishes and wash them in the hose, and take them, a warm crust of bread, and. a book to the hay loft, carefully keeping out of sight, and read and dream. It was a nice place to meditate and dream, and watch the view, and escape unwelcome chores.
As I write this, my memory takes me back to those hot July days when Papa had to work so hard to provide for an ever increasing family, including relatives who always hung on to him for support and help. How he loved his cold ice water drink. I remember how often he came home, tired and hot, and headed directly for the Ice box. He took the ice pick and chipped off some pieces of ice from the large block of ice that the ice man would deliver every other day, took a long drink of his ice water and said, “there’s nothing so good as a drink of cold water on a hot day”. Then he would see that the drip pan under the ice box was beginning to overflow and emptied it, never saying a word about us neglecting to empty it on time.
One summer he had a bout of diarrhea, and I remember Mamma saying, “Lou, you drink too much of that ice cold water. That’s not good for you and is probably the cause of your trouble”. But he did not stop drinking it, and he eventually was cured. How he would have enjoyed our modern day refrigerators, and ever ready ice cubes, which we now take so much for granted.
As I write this, memories came crowding in and it seemed that there was no end to the things that should be written, recalling our trips to the canyon, living in a tent, at first and then making a wooden floor and part way up the walls, and later a real cabin house which still stands and belongs to Margaret and Louis and his family. I remember that Papa threw away most of our croquet set, balls and mallets, trying to get a sage hen. They were very plentiful in those days. I remember our trips to Salt Lake City to see the Utah State Fair, and how proud we were to be sitting in box seats and eating in the Colosseum, with all the dignitaries, because our father was the most important man on the State Fair Board.
I remember that on one of these trips in our big new “Velie”, with Uncle Joe and his family In their red one, that we got stuck in the “Sand Ridge” and had to get a farmer to bring his horses and pull the cars out of the sand. In the meantime Mamma took all of us kids and all of Uncle Joe’s kids and took the Bamberger (train) into Ogden to wait there for men and their cars. She said that when she got on the cars with all those kids the conductor said, “My goodness, lady, are all those kids yours?”
I remember that no matter what he was doing, at any time of the day or night, Mamma would call Papa and he would come and get her or take her to town, or to meeting, or to the temple, (where she officiated for some years) or to the doctor for her or any of us kids. He never complained, but went steadily on, trying to love us and make a living for us all.
When Mamma was having morning sickness or quinsy, both of which she often had, Papa would go to the B&B Cafe and bring her home a wonderful cooked dinner, on a large platter, hot, and smelling heavenly, while we kids scrambled eggs, or melted cheese or fried mush left from breakfast, for Papa and us to eat. We always hoped she could not eat it all, so we could have a small taste of it.
I remember circus day, when we got up at the break of day and waited for the train whistle which would tell us that the circus train was coming in to the station. Papa would hustle us and some of the neighbor kids into the car and take us down to the station to see the train unload. He always took us to see the circus parade which we viewed from the roof top of the “office” or on chairs in front of the building. We felt very special, even if we didn’t get to the circus unless Papa got some free tickets for putting a poster in his store window.
I remember the great Christmases that he always provided for us. How Mom would work and sew and hide things for months before the great day. When the day came, Papa was as excited as any of us kids and would get up early and have the house snug and warm when we tumbled out of bed. I can still see those big Christmas trees, setting in the Music Room, the den, that we used to have an the west end of the front room. They were decorated with strings of icky candy and candy canes and hard candy animals, and were loaded with multi colored ribbons and sashes for 6 little girls. Also a doll for each one of them, and many other gifts. Piles of them. We were always so excited to see what Papa had bought for Mom. It was always something special and beautiful, a pearl star pin with a diamond in the middle, or a necklace or something wonderful and we were as happy over this as if we had gotten it for ourselves. We knew how very much he loved our mother, and us. I remember Ballard’s subscription to the “Youth’s Companion” and his magic lantern, and slides, which he treasured and he put an many a picture show for us all. I remember Paul’s trains and his “Chemistry Sets”, and how awful the basement smelled for weeks after.
I think we had the best father and mother that God ever gave a family and I thank Him and look back on my childhood as something very special.
In 1918, the World War raged, and so did the flu. Many folks died with it and it was a terrible time of sickness, quarantine and “flu masks” and death. Nurses and doctors were worn out and hard to get. Many of them contracted the disease, themselves, and died. Papa was on the go, morning and night, administering to those who were sick and helping all the friends and neighbors who needed him. All public gatherings were closed and churches, schools, movies, etc. were banned.
Our mother and father came down with it, just hours apart. We kids were stricken with fear. Then our beloved “Teddy Day”, who worked at the Court House, came home and said, “I have gotten off work and have come home to take care of your mother and father”. What a load that lifted from our young shoulders. But our relief was short lived as Edna came down with it and was put to bed in the “Little Bedroom”. They were all seriously sick. So we kids all moved upstairs to live and hung a quilt at the bottom of the stairs so we would not catch it. Some of us did anyway. I remember that Lucile did and I think some of the others did too.
Our family doctor, Dr. Parkinson, finally got us a nurse. Camilla York (now Wennergren) came to help us. Many years later she told my mother of this particular time, among many, which showed the great love my father had for my mother.
Papa and Mama lay in the large downstairs bedroom that was their room, in separate beds, both sick, almost to death, in fact the doctor felt that he my not be able to pull them through. The overworked elders were sent for to give them a blessing. When they placed their hands on my Mother’s head to give her a blessing and plead for her life, Father crawled from his bad, and on his feeble knees he got to her bedside to join in that prayer. He had to be carried back to his bed. The Lord heard and answered their prayers, for they all three, Mom, Papa and Teddy Day lived and got well. How thankful we were that Christmas time in December 1918.
Then when my father died, another Christmas time in 1930, very suddenly of a heart attack, my safe, happy world was severely shaken. I felt that nothing bad could happen to us as long as we had our father to go to. He wouldn’t let it. That was my first real sorrow. I can still feel that sad Christmas, so many years ago, as we all banded together to get on with the rest of our lives.
We were blessed with a wonderful father, kind, loving and understanding, always there when needed, no matter what the cost. Ever ready to do his share, and much, much more. He was my ideal of what God meant a man to be. Moral, honest and true to the end. He was always overloaded with helping his whole family. We always had relatives living with us. Part of Uncle Joe’s family, while he was in Independence, Missouri, on a two year mission. We had Rula, Bart and Carma, I think. Then there was Everett Griffin, Melvin Ballard, Gladys and Miriam Ritchie, and Ida Gubler, to name a few, who lived with us and went to school in Logan at the BY College. (Now the location of the Logan High School). Besides that we had Oriel Griffin, Carmen Ballard and Veda Guild, practicing on our piano daily, so they could take piano lessons. I loved to listen to them play.
We were always having overnight company, shifting beds and making room for them all. Uncle Melvin and Aunt Mattie always stayed with us when they came to Logan. Mamma loved to have them.
I look forward to seeing our parents again, and also to seeing our two beloved brothers, who were so much like their father, loving, kind and a little bit shy.
I hope they will not be too ashamed of us, and our accomplishments, and failures in this world. I know that they still love us, and will welcome us, and that we will each one be a member of that great eternal family.
It is wonderful to see you all here today and to greet you and love you more than ever before. May God be with us all in our lives, and bless us all in the coming year, and forever more. “‘TiI’ we meet Again”.
MEMORIES OF MY GRANDFATHER
Louis Hickman
There is some duplication, but I guess there is in all of ours, but Edna wasn’t the youngest, I was, and it was always, “The youngest will do it”. So, see Teddy?
I remember Grandpa Cardon. I remember him getting up very early in the mornings, with me trotting behind him, badgering him with unending questions. I have retribution now, with mine. I remember him always fixing breakfast, a habit I haven’t been able to break. I remember him working in the big garden, east of the “new” family home, and commenting that the best crop that garden grew, was rocks. He threw so many off of that garden, that when he sold the lot that Walt Raleigh built on, the lot was 18 inches below the driveway.
I remember him stopping by the house and picking me up and taking me on various business trips throughout the valley. I became an expert on irrigation and drainage before I was seven years old, from the time I spent in Rich Land Acres. I remember him taking the family, and a good number of the neighborhood kids for a Sunday evening drive around the towns, and the valley, and we usually ended up in College Ward for an ice cream cone, at the old service station down there.
Grandpa always bought the largest car available with jump seats, in order to get everyone in. My, but he would have loved these three seated station or suburban wagons and these new vans that are out.!
I remember him taking charge of Sunday School, and how proud I was that he belonged to me. I remember his great love for literature and music. As kids, we would go down to the bridge in the canyon and guess the number of cars that would pass before Grandpa and my mother would come. We would look forward to the times when he would bring up a new record for the old crank Victrola. I attributed my love for good music to him. I remember records of Caruso, John Charles Thomas, and Harry Lawder. How many of you remember this? (Louis sang this)
“Oh it’s nice to get up in the mornin’ when the sun begins to shine, at four or five or six o’clock in the good ol’ summer time, but when the snow is snowing, and it’s merky over head, oh, it’s nice to get up in the mornin’ — huh — but it’s nicer to lie in yer bed “.
We would sit around the front room in the cabin, with flickering candle, or lamp lights, and play those records over and over. And sometimes he would read to us until we fell asleep. I remember his mechanical ability. I still have one old broken, rusty brace and bit from his carpentry tools, that I cherish. I remember his ingenuity. As a boy, I was subject to extreme cases of croup, and we were at the cabin one night when I got a bad attack. We had no medicine in those days, at least, not in the canyon, and he knew that getting me to the hospital on the old dirt roads, was too time consuming, or risky, so he took the top off of the lantern and poured some kerosene down my throat. It worked marvelously. The doctor was amazed when we told him what had happened about that trip.
I remember Grandpa’s great love for people, – all people. He would do almost anything to help anyone in need. I can remember him sitting on the front porch of the house and reading letters in French or German to people who were either illiterate or did not know the language. And I remember him loaning money to people, when he knew that he would never get it back.
I remember the day that he had a heart attack and died. We were sent up to Aunt Lettie Squires’ to get us out of the way, and were not told what had happened, but we realized it. Lucile had been teaching us “Silent Night” in German, that year, so we could sing it for Grandpa Cardon on Christmas Eve. He never heard it, but I can still remember the singing words today. My wife has been on a mission to Germany and that is the only thing that she and I have in common in German is “Silent Night”.
I remember his funeral in the Logan Tabernacle. It was probably one of the very last funerals held there before they quit holding them there. I remember the great love and devotion that I have always held for him. In my eyes he was perfect, and after fathering nearly the same number of children that he did, and after comparing my efforts with his, I am more than ever convinced that he was just that! – a perfect father, grandfather, neighbor and friend, church and civic leader.
May we always strive to remember him and these wonderful qualities, I pray, in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.
Logan City Cemetery, D-100-12-6
Louis Philip and Susette Cardon–Thatcher
by Edith Cardon Thatcher
a Grand-daughter
The ancestors of Louis Philip Cardon and Susette Staley have been traced back several generations in the Piedmont Valleys of Italy to 1644. Some of the maternal lines have been traced to the middle of the 1500s. Connections have not been made out of the valleys, but they were of French extraction, since French was the main language they spoke. These people were known from the twelfth century as Vaudois, Waldense, or Walloon and were driven to various parts of France, Switzerland, and Germany, then to the final refuge in the High Alpine Valleys of the Piedmont. They sent preachers out, first openly, then as opposition grew, disguised as tinkers and various other occupations, gaining many adherents. They were constantly pursued as heretics and had two Crusades directed against them. They were subject to unjust taxation, many persecutions, and as late as 1848 the law forbade them entrance to any of the universities or the professions. However, they owned their own homes and in 1848 were permitted to enjoy civil and political rights but were still restricted in their religious worship. This background built character, and they were ready to accept the Gospel as preached by the missionaries of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when they finally heard it.Philippe Cardon had accumulated enough money by 1836 to purchase a large vineyard and an orchard in the valleys of the Piedmont, and there he built a good, comfortable home. Unfortunately this was shortly destroyed by fire. His eldest child was seriously ill upstairs at the time and they felt fortunate in being able to save her. It was the middle of the winter, so there was even more hardship. However, they were able to rebuild, and by the time the Mormon Elders came were in good circumstances.Louis Philip Cardon was the fifth child of Philippe Cardon and Marthe Marie Tourn. He was born March 9, 1832, in Prarustin (Prarostino), Torino, Italy. The other children were: Anne, Jean, Barthelemy, Catherine, Marie Madelaine, Louise, Jean Paul, and Thomas Barthelemy.Louis Philip’s young sister tells in her autobiography of a dream she had as a very young child. Three men came to her and told her they were the servants of God. They related the story of the restoration of the Gospel, about the Prophet Joseph Smith and his vision, along with many other truths. Continuing, they said the day was not far off when her parents would embrace the Gospel. Many things concerning their departure from their home and the long tedious journey they would take as they went to Zion were also mentioned. When she awoke she felt so strange that her mother wondered what had happened. When the father came in she told him how strange the child was acting. He listened to her as she told him the whole story. The mother also listened and stored up every word she heard. Relieved, the child then forgot all about it, as a young child would.The father, Philippe Cardon, was an architect and was directing the building of a large house one day about 1851 when a man came from La Tour, quite a distance from his home. This man said some strangers were teaching and preaching some very strange doctrine and related what he had heard. Philippe listened intently and knew then that these men were teaching and preaching the very things his young daughter related to him as a child from the three strangers in her dream. He immediately put down his tools, saying he would go find the strangers.He walked all Saturday afternoon, all night and the next morning over the mountains and down the valley. He reached the Palais de La Tour in time to find these men and hear them preach. After the meeting he went to them and invited them to come to his home and make it their headquarters.At the October Conference in Salt Lake City in 1849, many missionaries had been called to go preach the Gospel to the nations. President Lorenzo Snow, Elders T. B. Stenhouse and Joseph Toronto were sent to Italy. After checking around, President Snow felt impressed to go to the Piedmont Valleys. When they got there, there were about 22,000 Protestants and 5,000 Catholics. They had been but a short time at the Palais de la Tour and were laboring hard. While they were allowed to preach in the streets it was hard to get contacts so they were glad to accept the invitation to the Cardon home.Marie Madelaine was now about eighteen years of age. She was reading a book and did not see them approaching. When she heard her father say, “This is my daughter who ha the vision I told you about,” she looked up quickly, and recognized them and the dream came back to her memory.Philippe, his wife, their son Louis Philip and his brothers were soon converted to the Gospel of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and were baptized. The sisters were slower, studying more but all joined except one whose husband forbade her to even listen to her sister. Their minister tried to stop the conversions but could not.The congregation grew to about fifty faithful members. Meetings were generally held in the Cardon home, but as the crowds came from far and near, a bowery was built and meetings were held there. The Cardon family often served food to those who came so far. Opposition became strong and, on occasion, mobs threatened them.When Philippe Cardon received word to prepare to go to Zion, he decided in February, 1854 to sell his home. Since he was in a hurry, he did not get full value, but enough was raised to leave. A few days before they started the Elders held a meeting, giving instructions for the journey over the great ocean and the desert places and gave them a blessing saying if hey obeyed the principles of the Gospel faithfully they would reach their destination safely and in good health in spite of the dangers.Three days before they left, friends came to bid them goodbye knowing full well they would never return. Eight of the Cardon family left for Zion. They had with them a family of five who had no money of their own. They could neither understand nor speak English but soon met Elders who spoke French as the Cardons did, so gradually they picked up the language.First they went to London where two weeks were spent making the necessary preparations. Then they went to Liverpool where they waited seventeen days for their ship to be completed. There were 485 passengers, all Latter-day Saints, except the crew and captain.The first few days out were good sailing. Then a terrible storm arose. The ship rocked to and fro and finally the captain ordered the anchor to be dropped as they were about onto “the Rock of Providence” as he called it. The captain said no ship ever hit that and had survivors. However, calm weather finally came, and drawing up anchor, they sailed on. On reaching New Orleans, they were transferred from the sailing ship to a big steamer.Some of the company who went ashore to view the City of New Orleans contracted cholera. In a short time cholera broke out on ship and they were quarantined on an island not far from St. Louis. Quite a number died.The father, Philippe, contracted the disease. For a time it seemed that death would come. But through faith and prayer he recovered. When the cholera abated, the family and Saints continued their journey up the Mississippi and camped above Kansas City. Here they began final preparations for the journey across the plains. However, cholera struck again, worse than before. Many died, sometimes as many as fifteen or twenty a day were buried. This too finally passed.The Cardons left with a few others as soon as the oxen, cattle and covered wagons could be readied. Louis Philip and his two brothers had a wagon with three to four yokes of cattle each. The roads were rough and there were many steep dug ways, so they often had to stop for repairs. At times they were frightened by Indians but the captain of the company was crossing the plains for the third time so he knew how to deal with emergencies as they came up. They finally arrived safely in Utah.Susette (Susanne Stalé) Staley was born February 12, 1837 in Angrogna, Torino, Italy, in the Piedmont Valleys, and was the daughter of Jean Pierre Staley and Jeanne Marie Gaudin. Her parents, being thrifty became quite prosperous, having two homes, one in the mountains and one in the Valley at Prarustin. They spent summers on the mountain with their sheep and cattle, the winters down where it was warmer. They lived mostly on their own produce.Susette had a long way to go to church. She was religious and learned her catechism so well she was always able to quote long passages from the Bible. When the missionaries came she went wherever she could to hear the Gospel preached. Opposition arose as the Church grew, with mobs trying to break up the meetings. On one occasion in 1855, Elder Franklin D. Richards and two other missionaries were forced to hide in the high mountain passes from the mob, going without food for three days before being found by the Staley family.Elder Franklin D. Richards was instrumental in getting members of the family to emigrate. They were in the company overseen by Elder Canute Peterson and sailed from Liverpool, December 12, 1855, on the Ship John J. Boyd. There were a number of other families from Italy and some 500 saints from Scandinavia and Great Britain. Immediately after their departure, the Italian Mission was closed and was not reopened again for forty years.They arrived in New York on February 15, 1856 and went from there to Florence, Nebraska by rail, stopping at Chicago and St. Louis on the way. They were delayed for three months waiting for the handcarts to be completed, then joined the first handcart company which left on June 9, 1856 with 273 in the company. Many things have been written of the trials and tribulations, acts of faith and heroism of those who came in the handcart companies.The father, Jean Pierre Staley was not well when he left Winter Quarters and became progressively worse. It is said that he did not eat all the food issued for him, saving it for his children. Susette and her brother Daniel did most of the work after he became ill. He told his wife he would never reach the valley, but that she and her children would, and that they would never want for the necessities of life. The second morning that he had to be helped into a wagon, he died. His body was wrapped in a sheet placed between layers of sagebrush, and was buried on the banks of the Platte River, opposite Ash Grove. His death was entered in the diary of the handcart company, August 17, 1856. A bonfire was built over the grave to keep the Indians and coyotes from finding it.The company arrived in Salt Lake Valley on September 26, 1856 and was met at Willow Springs by President Brigham Young and many others. The Cardons from Ogden met the widow and her younger children and helped them to get settled in a dugout. Susette and her sister Mary went to work to help the family. The trials and tribulations made her faith grow stronger and dearer. The twenty-fourth of July was sacred to her and took precedence over all other celebrations.Louis Philip first married Sarah Ann Wellborn. No children were born to this union. In 1857 at Logan, Susette and Louis Philip Cardon were married. Their first two children, Joseph Samuel and Emanuel Philip, were born in Ogden. The daughter, Mary Katherine, was born in Logan. They next moved to Oxford, Oneida (now Franklin) County, Idaho where Louis Paul Cardon and Isabelle Susette, who died when about two years of age, were born. They persecution because of plural marriage became so persistent that Louis Philip traveled to Salt Lake City to ask advice from President Brigham Young. President Young arose from his chair, smote the palm of one had with the fist of the other, and said, ”Brother Cardon, it is about time for the Saints to move to Arizona, as I have been thinking about. Be here in a week with your wife and belongings. The Company will be ready to leave.”Again there was a long journey. They settled first at George Lake’s Camp on the Little Colorado in Northern Arizona. The camp was later called Obed. In February, 1877, he and his family moved to Tenney’s Camp. Here they lived in the United Order, being on the first roll taken. This called for sacrifice as the Cardons had ample supplies for two years. They were active in church and building up the community.After two years they moved from Woodruff to Taylor. The Woodruff Ward was organized on September 26, 1879 when the name was changed to Tenney’s Camp. They had hoped to make Taylor their permanent home but peace was not possible for those practicing plural marriage. In 1885 President Taylor advised Louis Philip, his firs wife Sarah and his son Joseph, to move to Mexico. Emanuel and Louis Philip went along to help the families move, but Louis Paul returned to Taylor where he had married and stayed there with his mother, Susette, until 1896 when he was called to go to Colonia Dublan to help with the church school. Susette and her daughter Mary Katherine Cardon Clawson, wife to Joseph I. Clawson, accompanied him and his family The father Louis Philip, had settled in Colonia Juarez, where he stayed until a couple of years before his death.The town of Dublan was blocked out in the Mormon way: A mile square, divided into blocks of ten acres each, minus a large street all the way around. Louis Paul and his sister Katie were able to purchase a block across the street from their brother Joseph, so once more the brothers and sister were together. They were active in church, community and civic affairs, in addition to teaching and supporting the schools. Louis Paul led the choir too.The farms of the colonists were in town. Irrigation was a problem so it was decided to build what was called “The Big Canal.” Louis Paul did all the surveying and his brother Joseph was the chief engineer. The men of the community worked hard to get the project completed. When the new irrigation system was laid many shook their heads saying, “he can’t make water run uphill.” Both Louis Paul and Joseph contracted typhoid fever before the project was finished, and Joseph died. Later, the whole town turned out for a parade and dedication service when the canal was finished. Susette said she felt as though she was going to her son Joseph’s funeral, as to her, the work seemed like a monument to him. The water was turned into the canals and they worked perfectly. Plentiful water made the farms produce more and prospects for the colonist and their future were more encouraging.The industrious and thrifty habits of Susette kept her family well clothed and well fed. She wove her own cloth from wool, coloring it with plants and indigo. She even made suits for her husband and sons. These clothes were durable and beautiful, and some were good thirty-five and fifty years later. She lived to be eighty-six years old and many of her grandchildren remembered her dresses. They were old-fashioned then but on her they looked very beautiful.She always preserved meats, vegetables, and fruits. But her specialty was strawberries and cream. She planted strawberries both in Arizona and Mexico. Her Strawberry Parlor was a popular place to gather. She was successful in drying strawberries and after her move back to Arizona, the University of Arizona Economics Department asked for samples of the, saying they had never heard of strawberries keeping in places like Arizona and Mexico. She was very generous, and many a friend received strawberries from her.Louis Philip Cardon died of typhoid fever and was buried in Dublan on April 9, 1911. Dublan Memorial Cemetery, Colonia Dublan, Chihuahua, MexicoSusette continued to live near her son, Louis Paul, as she had done since the days in Taylor. Her testimony of the Gospel never wavered, and she always did whatever she was asked by those in authority.When the Saints were driven from Mexico during the Madero Revolution, she had over six thousand dollars in stocks in the Union Mercantile store. One of the greatest trials of her life must have been to be reduced from a condition of easy independence. She never complained or mentioned what she had left behind as so many of us did.When the colonists finally knew they were going to have to leave Mexico and would not be able to take their treasured possessions, many tried in various ways to hide them so they would not be stolen. Some dug holes and buried things that would not rust. Susette was asked by someone if she wasn’t going to try and do something of the kind. She replied, “No, they will never touch any of my things.” Her son Louis Paul’s home, a large two-story home, at one time housed twelve Mexican families, and was badly misused and stripped. The large parlor and living room were used to stable the horses of the Revolutionists, planks being put on the front steps to bring them in. Her home, a neat little three roomed adobe, stood just a few yards away.When the first war storm passed over, Louis Paul sent some teams down to the colonies and told the driver to bring back anything of hers he could find. When he came back that was all he had on the wagons, for nothing had been molested. She had trunks of clothing, bed linen, and table linen, quantities of dried fruit, and preserved fruit. Elmer said that it did not look as though the door had been opened, although it was unlocked.She was a brave woman. The afternoon the Rebels came into town, one of them went to her clothesline, which was made of rope, and cut it so he could lead away a horse belonging to Roy Clawson. Disregarding the fact that the rebel had a gun and a knife in his hand, she went out and demanded that he return it. He did.The Exodus occurred in late July, 1912. The Saints went first to El Paso where they received temporary help. They were then encouraged by the government to go where their relatives were or some place where they could start making a living. Her son Louis Paul moved his family to Binghampton near Tucson, where some of the refugee Saints were making a colony. He built a nice one-room place for her near his own. She didn’t want to be a burden to anyone.Although she spoke English, she did all her reading and praying in French. She was intuitive, and at times would ask us if something had happened. When we asked her how she knew, she would say, “I knew it. I dreamed it.” She died on July 19, 1923 at Binghampton (now in Tucson), Pima, Arizona and is buried in the Binghampton cemetery. Binghampton Cemetery, Tucson, Pima, Arizona
Highlights by Louis B Cardon
Highlights From His Life
Presented by Louis Bellamy Cardon at the 2011 Cardon Reunion
My assignment is to present some highlights from the life of Louis Philippe Cardon. The reason for this special attention to this middle child of Philippe and Marthe Cardon is that this year, 2011, is the one hundredth anniversary of his death, which took place in the Mormon colony of Dublan in 1911, one year before the general exodus of the Mormon colonists from that area at the time of a major revolution. My father, Louis Sanders Cardon, who was born in Dublan in 1901 – and was therefore 10 years old at the time of the death of his grandfather, Louis Philippe, used to tell me of his earliest memories of the old gentleman. For some time it was the fact that Louis Philippe was so obviously a gentleman, which made my father fearful of even talking with him. Louis Philippe always wore a suit, and carried a cane, while my father never wore shoes unless he had to. So he went out of his way to avoid encountering the old gentleman on the street or in the house. And then one day, as he was walking, or trotting, on a long path through a wheat field, to his dismay he saw his grandfather coming towards him in the opposite direction. There was no way he could avoid meeting him and speaking with him. When the meeting took place, however, he was pleasantly surprised to discover that Louis Philippe was actually a gentle and pleasant man, and very easy to talk with. After that, my father really enjoyed contacts with his grandfather up to the latter’s death in 1911, when my father was 10 years old. While the characteristic of gentleness which this story illustrates, is a desirable trait, it is not the one I chose to emphasize in this appraisal as a whole. But before I proceed with my commentary on his principal traits, perhaps I should comment first on his name. Most of us on our genealogical charts have the name of Louis Philippe Cardon as the fifth child of Philippe and Marthe Cardon. We assume that that was the name given him at his birth. But actually his name was recorded on the parish record as Philippe Cardon. Evidently it was only after he came to Utah, at the age of 22, that he began using “Louis Philippe” among his associates (reportedly taking the name “Louis” from Louis Malan, his godfather, who presented him for baptism as a newborn infant). He was always called “Philippe” by members of the family, but by others he was sometimes called Louis Philippe or even just Louis. In this discussion I will call him Louis Philippe, which seems to have been the name he preferred. Perhaps the most salient characteristic of Louis Philippe was his life-long pattern of pioneering. I am using this term pioneering, or pioneer in a
simpleand traditional sense. A pioneer is one who leads others by developing
a new area of activity – perhaps a new area for settlement – and by so doing performs a major service for those who follow. The Cardon family as a whole were pioneers in the adoption of the new religion which came into their lives in 1852, when they were among the first Waldensian converts to the Mormon faith. Certainly they were pioneers when they responded to Brigham Young’s call to leave their homes and gather to Zion. In 1854 the Cardons were in the vanguard of those who disposed of their property and left the land they had defended for 600 years to begin the difficult voyage to Utah. Louis Philippe was ordained a Teacher in the Aaronic Priesthood before leaving Italy. And then he was ordained a High Priest at the age of 24, two years after his arrival in Utah. As you might suppose, the trip from the Piedmont to Utah had its trials and dangers. The voyage to Utah took almost nine months. The first part of the trip, from the Piedmont to Liverpool, England, involved weeks of travel by sled, by carriage and by rail. Then came about two months by ship to New Orleans, which included an encounter with a terrific storm on the way. At New Orleans, on their arrival, the Cardons found the city under quarantine for cholera. It was said that this city of 35,000 inhabitants lost 5,000 to the dread disease in one twelve day period that year, 1854. Pressing on by river steamer up the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the Cardon group reached Kansas City where they outfitted to cross the plains in a wagon train with ox teams. That part of the journey took a little over three months – from July 18th to October 28th, 1854. For Louis Philippe it also included a near-death experience on the trail across the plains. One night a band of Indians slipped in and drove off all the wagon train’s oxen and other livestock across a river and into the brush on the other side. The next morning every man and boy who could swim was called upon to go over, round up all the livestock they could, and herd them back across the river. To their great relief they were successful in bringing back every animal. Then some of the boys and younger men expressed their exuberant feelings by “horsing around in the water.” Louis Philippe was considered a fair swimmer, but had the misfortune to step backward into a deep whirlpool. The others managed to drag him out and with great effort and prayer, revived him. But the experience had been close to death indeed. After their arrival in Salt Lake, the Cardons were soon able to demonstrate how valuable they could be as pioneers. Unlike many of the early settlers, some of whom had been residents of well-established cities at the time of their conversion, the Cardons knew how to wrest a living from the most barren farming conditions. Moreover Philippe and several of his sons, including Louis Philippe were skilled home builders and stone masons.
Theywere highly proficient in building homes and barns from crude materials.
So Louis Philippe and his father and brothers were soon in much demand. Among those they helped were a number of their Waldensian neighbors, who followed the Cardons to Utah over the next few years. One such family was the Stale family, which had walked across the plains in 1856 in the first handcart company. The father of the family, Jean Pierre Stale, had died on the way, of exhaustion and starvation – but thanks to his efforts, his wife and children had reached Salt Lake. The Cardons helped them with shelter and food, and in early 1857 Louis Philippe married Susette Stale, the oldest daughter. This was a plural marriage, as shortly before Louis Philippe had married another young woman from the Piedmont, Sarah Ann Welborn. While Sarah Ann had no children, her marriage to Louis Philippe appears to have been a happy one. She was loved by Louis Philippe and by the children of Susette. Susette bore five children and was exceptionally active and happy up to the very day of her death in Tucson Arizona in 1923. Since the arrival of Brigham Young with the first wagon train, in 1847, the city of Salt Lake, with its broad streets and its homes, and its surrounding farms, had begun to emerge with remarkable speed. By the time the Cardon family arrived by wagon train in 1854 – seven years after Brigham Young’s arrival – much of the work of pioneering had already been accomplished, so far as Salt Lake was concerned. The establishment of a functioning city in a desert was well underway. But don’t forget that it was never Brigham’s intention to build one city in a wilderness. Right from the beginning, year by year, he sent out families from Salt Lake to pioneer other communities – Ogden, Provo, Logan – and eventually communities all the way from Canada in the north to Mexico in the south. That was the stage of Mormon pioneering which Louis Philippe and the other Cardons got in on. Builders and pioneers that they were, they responded time and again to their leaders’ call to help establish new towns – first north to Ogden, Logan, and southern Idaho – then south to help build a number of new communities in Arizona, and then on into Mexico to colonize an undeveloped area there. Like virtually all the inhabitants of the Piedmont valleys and hills, and like virtually all the early Mormon settlers in Utah, Louis Philippe was a farmer, at least part time. But like his father Philippe and his younger brother Paul, he was first and foremost a mason. He was a builder of stone homes, and chimneys, and town walls – and, when he had an opportunity, of temples. It seemed that wherever he went, that capability was in demand, and was appreciated.The Cardons settled first in the Ogden area, and Louis Philippe’s
first two children, Joseph and Emanuel, were born there in 1858 and 1859.
But in 1961, Brigham Young called the Cardons to help settle Cache Valley. Here their building skills were truly invaluable. Paul, Louis Philippe’s younger brother, is credited with helping to build the first house in Logan. Later, he was in charge of the mill that produced lumber for the temple. Philippe and Louis Philippe, besides building homes, built the fireplaces for a great many of the homes in Cache Valley, and worked on the temple. Paul was also the first treasurer of Logan City, and longtime town marshal. After ten years in Logan, the Cardons were well established. But Logan itself was becoming a larger town, and was beginning to draw the attention of the U. S. government’s enforcers of anti-polygamy laws. Danger of arrest impelled Louis Philippe to move with his two wives and three children to a more outlying community, Oxford, at the northern extremity of Cache Valley. Here an additional two children were born. By 1876 Oxford too was becoming unsafe for polygamous families. Federal authorities were arresting both husbands and wives for “unlawful cohabitation.” Consequently a worried Louis Philippe made a trip to Salt Lake City to seek Brigham Young’s advice. Upon his return home he reported that in response to his question, “Brigham Young rose from his chair, smote the palm of one hand with the doubled fist of the other and said ‘Brother Cardon, it is time for the Saints to settle Arizona, as I have been thinking about. Be here in a week with your wife and belongings. The company will be ready to leave then.’ ” As it turned out there were four companies involved in the move to Arizona. The move was actually a part of Brigham Young’s plan to plant colonies from Canada to Mexico. Circumstances had again made Louis Philippe a pioneer. Louis Philippe’s two sons, Joseph (18) and Emanuel (17) were not originally included in Brigham’s call to build pioneer settlements in Arizona. So they planned to just help their father move down and then come back to Oxford. But the apostle Brigham Young, son of President Brigham Young, quickly changed that plan. He told the two young men that they were to consider themselves to be “Missionaries,” called to serve in Arizona by helping their father build settlements there. A young lady accompanied 17 year old Emanuel, and the company stopped long enough in Salt Lake for the two to be married. Joseph, 18 years old, already had a wife and a child at the time of the move. He married two more wives a few years later. In Arizona the Cardons participated in the establishment of several new settlements. The first one, Obed, was on the Little Colorado River. Louis Philippe, as a mason, supervised the building of houses and also a nine-foot
stone wall entirely around the town, to guard against Indians. Unfortunately, the site proved swampy and malarial, and had to be abandoned. Louis Philippe and his two sons and his son-in-law were subsequently prominent in the settlement of Woodruff and Taylor. Joseph, Louis Philippe’s oldest son directed the surveying of the Taylor site, and the four Cardon men (Louis Philippe, his two sons, and his son-in-law) formed a company which took a freighting contract, worked on a railroad, and took 3000 sheep on shares, to earn money to supplement their pioneering farming efforts. At this point, in 1884, polygamy prosecution again intervened. The Edmunds anti-polygamy law had been passed and Utah enforcement officers began making raids in Arizona. Consequently that fall, LDS President Taylor advised Louis Philippe and Joseph to move to Mexico, where polygamy was legal. Later, both Louis Philippe and his sons, Joseph and Emanuel would be placed on the honor roll of heads of founding families and builders of the Colony of Juarez. Louis Philippe was prominent there in the erection of homes, public buildings and the first mill for grinding grain. For himself, Louis Philippe built a fine two story brick home, where he lived for many years. In the meantime his youngest son, Louis Paul (my grandfather) after graduating from Brigham Young College in Logan in 1893, taught school for four years in Taylor, Arizona, and then was called by President Woodruff to go to Mexico to help establish an educational system for the Church there. In Dublan, he served as school principal for fourteen years and built a large home which still stands. With most of his family now in Dublan, Louis Philippe gave in to their urging and after 1900 moved from Juarez to Dublan, where he died in 1911. The exodus of the Mormon settlers the year after that was permanent for many, including most of the Cardons. However, others returned to the colonies later, and nowadays the area is beautiful and productive, and boasts a really lovely L.D.S. temple. It is just one of a number of communities which are to some extent memorials to the pioneering labors of Louis Philippe Cardon and his family. And the Cardon family itself, whether we recognize it or not, has probably been shaped in part by attributes passed on by Louis Philippe and his family of pioneers.
Susette (Susanne Stalé) Staley was born February 12, 1837 in Angrogna, Torino, Italy, in the Piedmont Valleys, and was the daughter of Jean Pierre Staley and Jeanne Marie Gaudin. Her parents, being thrifty became quite prosperous, having two homes, one in the mountains and one in the Valley at Prarustin. They spent summers on the mountain with their sheep and cattle, the winters down where it was warmer. They lived mostly on their own produce.Susette had a long way to go to church. She was religious and learned her catechism so well she was always able to quote long passages from the Bible. When the missionaries came she went wherever she could to hear the Gospel preached. Opposition arose as the Church grew, with mobs trying to break up the meetings. On one occasion in 1855, Elder Franklin D. Richards and two other missionaries were forced to hide in the high mountain passes from the mob, going without food for three days before being found by the Staley family.Elder Franklin D. Richards was instrumental in getting members of the family to emigrate. They were in the company overseen by Elder Canute Peterson and sailed from Liverpool, December 12, 1855, on the Ship John J. Boyd. There were a number of other families from Italy and some 500 saints from Scandinavia and Great Britain. Immediately after their departure, the Italian Mission was closed and was not reopened again for forty years.They arrived in New York on February 15, 1856 and went from there to Florence, Nebraska by rail, stopping at Chicago and St. Louis on the way. They were delayed for three months waiting for the handcarts to be completed, then joined the first handcart company which left on June 9, 1856 with 273 in the company. Many things have been written of the trials and tribulations, acts of faith and heroism of those who came in the handcart companies.The father, Jean Pierre Staley was not well when he left Winter Quarters and became progressively worse. It is said that he did not eat all the food issued for him, saving it for his children. Susette and her brother Daniel did most of the work after he became ill. He told his wife he would never reach the valley, but that she and her children would, and that they would never want for the necessities of life. The second morning that he had to be helped into a wagon, he died. His body was wrapped in a sheet placed between layers of sagebrush, and was buried on the banks of the Platte River, opposite Ash Grove. His death was entered in the diary of the handcart company, August 17, 1856. A bonfire was built over the grave to keep the Indians and coyotes from finding it.The company arrived in Salt Lake Valley on September 26, 1856 and was met at Willow Springs by President Brigham Young and many others. The Cardons from Ogden met the widow and her younger children and helped them to get settled in a dugout. Susette and her sister Mary went to work to help the family. The trials and tribulations made her faith grow stronger and dearer. The twenty-fourth of July was sacred to her and took precedence over all other celebrations.Louis Philip first married Sarah Ann Wellborn. No children were born to this union. In 1857 at Logan, Susette and Louis Philip Cardon were married. Their first two children, Joseph Samuel and Emanuel Philip, were born in Ogden. The daughter, Mary Katherine, was born in Logan. They next moved to Oxford, Oneida (now Franklin) County, Idaho where Louis Paul Cardon and Isabelle Susette, who died when about two years of age, were born. They persecution because of plural marriage became so persistent that Louis Philip traveled to Salt Lake City to ask advice from President Brigham Young. President Young arose from his chair, smote the palm of one had with the fist of the other, and said, ”Brother Cardon, it is about time for the Saints to move to Arizona, as I have been thinking about. Be here in a week with your wife and belongings. The Company will be ready to leave.”Again there was a long journey. They settled first at George Lake’s Camp on the Little Colorado in Northern Arizona. The camp was later called Obed. In February, 1877, he and his family moved to Tenney’s Camp. Here they lived in the United Order, being on the first roll taken. This called for sacrifice as the Cardons had ample supplies for two years. They were active in church and building up the community.After two years they moved from Woodruff to Taylor. The Woodruff Ward was organized on September 26, 1879 when the name was changed to Tenney’s Camp. They had hoped to make Taylor their permanent home but peace was not possible for those practicing plural marriage. In 1885 President Taylor advised Louis Philip, his firs wife Sarah and his son Joseph, to move to Mexico. Emanuel and Louis Philip went along to help the families move, but Louis Paul returned to Taylor where he had married and stayed there with his mother, Susette, until 1896 when he was called to go to Colonia Dublan to help with the church school. Susette and her daughter Mary Katherine Cardon Clawson, wife to Joseph I. Clawson, accompanied him and his family The father Louis Philip, had settled in Colonia Juarez, where he stayed until a couple of years before his death.The town of Dublan was blocked out in the Mormon way: A mile square, divided into blocks of ten acres each, minus a large street all the way around. Louis Paul and his sister Katie were able to purchase a block across the street from their brother Joseph, so once more the brothers and sister were together. They were active in church, community and civic affairs, in addition to teaching and supporting the schools. Louis Paul led the choir too.The farms of the colonists were in town. Irrigation was a problem so it was decided to build what was called “The Big Canal.” Louis Paul did all the surveying and his brother Joseph was the chief engineer. The men of the community worked hard to get the project completed. When the new irrigation system was laid many shook their heads saying, “he can’t make water run uphill.” Both Louis Paul and Joseph contracted typhoid fever before the project was finished, and Joseph died. Later, the whole town turned out for a parade and dedication service when the canal was finished. Susette said she felt as though she was going to her son Joseph’s funeral, as to her, the work seemed like a monument to him. The water was turned into the canals and they worked perfectly. Plentiful water made the farms produce more and prospects for the colonist and their future were more encouraging.The industrious and thrifty habits of Susette kept her family well clothed and well fed. She wove her own cloth from wool, coloring it with plants and indigo. She even made suits for her husband and sons. These clothes were durable and beautiful, and some were good thirty-five and fifty years later. She lived to be eighty-six years old and many of her grandchildren remembered her dresses. They were old-fashioned then but on her they looked very beautiful.She always preserved meats, vegetables, and fruits. But her specialty was strawberries and cream. She planted strawberries both in Arizona and Mexico. Her Strawberry Parlor was a popular place to gather. She was successful in drying strawberries and after her move back to Arizona, the University of Arizona Economics Department asked for samples of the, saying they had never heard of strawberries keeping in places like Arizona and Mexico. She was very generous, and many a friend received strawberries from her.Louis Philip Cardon died of typhoid fever and was buried in Dublan on April 9, 1911. Dublan Memorial Cemetery, Colonia Dublan, Chihuahua, Mexico
Susette continued to live near her son, Louis Paul, as she had done since the days in Taylor. Her testimony of the Gospel never wavered, and she always did whatever she was asked by those in authority.When the Saints were driven from Mexico during the Madero Revolution, she had over six thousand dollars in stocks in the Union Mercantile store. One of the greatest trials of her life must have been to be reduced from a condition of easy independence. She never complained or mentioned what she had left behind as so many of us did.When the colonists finally knew they were going to have to leave Mexico and would not be able to take their treasured possessions, many tried in various ways to hide them so they would not be stolen. Some dug holes and buried things that would not rust. Susette was asked by someone if she wasn’t going to try and do something of the kind. She replied, “No, they will never touch any of my things.” Her son Louis Paul’s home, a large two-story home, at one time housed twelve Mexican families, and was badly misused and stripped. The large parlor and living room were used to stable the horses of the Revolutionists, planks being put on the front steps to bring them in. Her home, a neat little three roomed adobe, stood just a few yards away.When the first war storm passed over, Louis Paul sent some teams down to the colonies and told the driver to bring back anything of hers he could find. When he came back that was all he had on the wagons, for nothing had been molested. She had trunks of clothing, bed linen, and table linen, quantities of dried fruit, and preserved fruit. Elmer said that it did not look as though the door had been opened, although it was unlocked.She was a brave woman. The afternoon the Rebels came into town, one of them went to her clothesline, which was made of rope, and cut it so he could lead away a horse belonging to Roy Clawson. Disregarding the fact that the rebel had a gun and a knife in his hand, she went out and demanded that he return it. He did.The Exodus occurred in late July, 1912. The Saints went first to El Paso where they received temporary help. They were then encouraged by the government to go where their relatives were or some place where they could start making a living. Her son Louis Paul moved his family to Binghampton near Tucson, where some of the refugee Saints were making a colony. He built a nice one-room place for her near his own. She didn’t want to be a burden to anyone.Although she spoke English, she did all her reading and praying in French. She was intuitive, and at times would ask us if something had happened. When we asked her how she knew, she would say, “I knew it. I dreamed it.” She died on July 19, 1923 at Binghampton (now in Tucson), Pima, Arizona and is buried in the Binghampton cemetery. Binghampton Cemetery, Tucson, Pima, Arizona