22 Jan 1880 – 10 Aug 1963
Granddaughter of Philip Cardon and Martha Marie Tourn
Daughter of Jean Paul Cardon and Magdalene Beus
My life started when I wu born in the year 1880. I don’t know who the doctor or midwife was, but my father and mother were there to greet me. As far back as I can remember was when I was about five years old. I would play with my two brothers who were a year or so younger than I and as I grew a little older I would run away from my mother, who was always busy. My mother was always busy in the kitchen cooking, washing, and ironing and sewing for all the the family, including my father’s first wife’s family. Auntie, as we always called her, made the beds and swept each room after the tourists left. I guess they were either tourists or people traveling through the country hunting different places to live. (My father built a large house. it had twenty-two rooms in it and it was the first hotel at Logan. He called it the Cache Valley House.) I guess that is why I used to run away, and for punishment I would have to be tied up to the bed post and rock my baby brother to sleep. I would sing some kind of a song to him, but the more I would sing the louder he would cry, until he would give out and go to sleep. Sometimes I would have to go without my supper.
There was a lobby upstairs in this hotel and it had a beautiful organ installed there and I would hear some of the people playing on it and when they were gone I would slip up there and try to play the tunes I would hear them play. I finally got so I could play a few tunes with one hand and after I was old enough to go to Sunday School I would come home and play a few of the songs I heard in there with just one hand .
I hated school. My mother would have to take me every day until I was old enough to realize it was for my benefit I got tied to the teachers apron strings more than once for doing something I shouldn’t have done. like not getting my lessons or drawing an ugly picture of my teacher on my slate and showing it to the rest of the kids. They would laugh and disturb the classes. I was really a mischievious kid. I guess I was, all the way from eight years old until I moved to Richmond. My teachers there were Herschel Bullen, Samuel Hendricks and someone by the name of Thompson. The teacher I liked best was Mr. Bullen. He was jolly and full of jokes and so were his students. so we all got along good together. I wasn’t the smartest student he had in his school, but I always got my lessons with the help of my mother, even though she never had much of an education. She had plenty of patience. While living at Richmond she did a lot of sewing and making suits and dresses to help out with the living expenses and a beautiful seamstress she was. I used to sit up at night with her and pull the basting threads out as she always basted her dresses and suits up before she sewed them up on the machine. I believe she must have sewed for about everyone in Richmond and I think that was how I learned to sew as good as I did.
We moved to Benson Ward and that is where I spent my happiest days. My father built quite a large house, large enough for his two families, and they got along very well. Whenever we had company, no matter who it was. they would open up the folding doors between the two kitchens and set a big long table and all eat together. We always had plenty of the common food such as vegtables, pork and fish. We lived right by the Logan River and my dad would catch some of the big trout that were in the river. We alwasy had plenty of hams and shoulder pork besides the good old bacon. We never did have to buy any vegetables, as my dad raised everything, even some of the best celery. We had an old boat, and our friends would come to our place and we would go boat riding on the Logan River just about every Sunday afternoon, or else buggy riding and horse back riding. That is all the recreation we really had besides going to church, and that we always did. Everyone went to church in those days.
We were just like one big family. I had several boy friends that always came to see me, and two or three of them were my husband’s brothers. They were all pretty good fellows, but I liked Silas the best, as he was always good to his mother and helped her in lots of different ways, so I decided if he asked me to marry him I would. There was a little matter of asking my father if he could marry me, as we all had to respect him in that, so he came one Sunday and decided he would ask him and I stood outside the door and listened to the conversation and I thought he was never going to ask him, but he finally did. We celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary the year before he died.
— Amanda Cardon Ricks (written in 1959)