05222011 Interview with Glen Tarbet.1

Date:  2011-07-12	File:  05222011 Interview with Glen Tarbet.1
Keywords:	Early years, Virgil Cornia, Cecil Cornia, Corral Cornia, Grandma & Grandpa (Enoch) Cornia, Early Homes, Carol Cornia, Glen E. Tarbet, Doyle Alan Donnelly, music, 1930s, Cornia Family, Tarbet Family
People:	Jami Bernards (JB), Glen Tarbet (GT), Ann Tarbet (AT), Brad Bernards (BB), Julia Bernards (JB2)
JB:	Well, it is Sunday, May 22, 2011.   We are here at Sam and Julia Bernards’ home in Bentonville, AK, and present we have Grandma and Grandpa Tarbet—Glen Tarbet and Ann Tarbet, and Julia is here, Brad Sr., and Kiki, who is Kristin Alina Bernards, and myself, Jami Bernards are here.  We’ve had a wonderful weekend.  We gathered to celebrate James’ graduation—Kiki’s graduating from college, James graduating from high school, and today they are celebrating their seminary graduation.  James got to speak in Sacrament Meeting and sing and ummm . . . Anyway, Grandma and Grandpa traveled here from Utah and we’re just really privileged to be able to be with them, and we wanted to record a little bit for them.  Grandpa, I’m going to ask you to hold this, OK?  And then, we can just ask you some questions, if you’ll be sweet and just answer questions as we go along.  Are you good with that?
GT:	Well, I don’t know if I can be sweet.  [laughter]
JB:	Well, I think it’s sweet for you to do this for us.
GT:	Go ahead.
JB	Can you tell us what’s your full name?
GT	Glen Frank Tarbet
JB	And, do you know why your parents chose that name for you?
GT	I don’t.
JB	Did your mom ever tell you anything about that?
GT	She just kind of indicated that it was kind of a popular name at the time I was born.
BB	Ah.  So you were born popular.
GT	Well, I always felt like I was popular . . . with my family.  [chuckle]
JB	Did your mom have a nickname for you?
GT	No . . . Oh.  Glennie . . . I still have cousins that call me “Glennie”.  [laughter]
AT	And your aunt calls you Glennie.
GT	That’s right, but I don’t still have Aunt Corral.  [Coral]
AT	She’s gone now.
JB	Yeah.
GT	Aunt Corral died at 96, last spring or something last year, in 2010.
AT	She died, I think, in the early spring, but they didn’t have a funeral for her, and they had her party in the fall.
JB	How old was she when she died?
GT	96.
JB	Wow.  And was she . . .
GT	She was born in 1913.
JB	And that’s Grandma’s twin sister, right?
GT	Right.
JB	So, that’s how Grandma was born in too.
GT	Right, but she died when she was 83.
JB	So, that would be 13 years since she died.
GT	In 1996.
AT	Was it August?
GT	In August, right.
JB	So, tell us when and where you were born?
GT	I was born in Salt Lake City, on Uncle Virgil’s and Aunt Edna’s kitchen table.
JB	Really?  I didn’t know that.  . . . [muffled background discussion]
GT	And, they uh, the doctor was named Mortensen, as I recall, my mother told me.
JT	Huh.
GT	And I was an instrument baby.
JB2	Come sit right here so that you can ask him things and it can hear your comments
JB	Julia got me a chair so I can sit closer. . . So, what does an “instrument baby” mean for —
GT	It means they had to use forceps to help assist in my birth, and my head was rather severely deformed at the time, which probably accounts for my deformed character.  [laughter]  To some extent.  But the doctor insisted that my head would regain its natural shape rather quickly.   But, I don’t know about the rest of me.
JB	Uncle Virgil—was Aunt Edna his wife?  You said . . .
GT	Yeah, yeah yeah.
JB	You said Uncle Virgil’s . . . um
GT	Right.  They had four sons at the time, and that was all of the children they had.  There was Donald and David and Max and Calvin.  Calvin is the only one of them still alive of that family.
JB	So, how many brothers and sisters did Grandma have?
GT	Let’s see . . . There was her oldest brother was Virgil, and next to him was Kenneth.  Virgil was known as Virg, and Kenneth was known as . . . his name . . . Uncle Virgil’s full name was Virgil Enoch.  I got that backwards.  It was Enoch Virgil, but he went all his life by the name of Virgil, and most people called him Virg.
JB	Was Enoch named after his dad or his grandpa?
GT	His middle [first] name Enoch was after Uncle Virgil’s father, my grandfather—
JB	Who was Enoch Cornia, right?
GT	He was Enoch Cornia.
JB	And that was Grandma’s father.
GT	That was Grandma’s father.   And then their next younger brother was Cecil, and he was known as “Ceese” all his life.  But, his full name was Oral Cecil Cornia.  And then, after he was born, there was a brother Vendell who died as a teenager with what I heard all my life was Bright’s Disease, which is a kidney failure, when he was a teenager—I think they said he was seventeen (17) when he died.  And then, after him there were twins Zoa and Zelda, and then after Zoa and Zelda—
AT	How long did Zoa and Zelda live?
GT	Not very long.
AT	Were they babies when they died?
GT	They were infants when they died.
AT	So, two sets of twins.
GT	Right.  I don’t know why they died.  I don’t think I’ve ever heard.
JB	So then, Carol and Corral were the youngest?
GT	Carol and Corral were the youngest.  And Carol was the first of the twins born, and there wasn’t much time between the twins Carol and Corral, but they had very distinct personalities.  They were definitely fraternal twins.  My mother was chubby all her life, and I think those twins are very good examples of how people can have . . . heavy weight genes.  My mother was heavy weight even when she was little.  We have photographs of the two of them when they were little, and she was chubby and her sister was skinny.
JB2	Where are those photographs?
GT	I have some of them, and they are various places.
JB2	I’d love to see them.
GT	I don’t know where some of them are — heh heh —most of them are, I guess.   I think Aunt Corral’s family probably has a lot of them, but they’re — Aunt Corral married a Catholic when she was — I think she was about eighteen (18), I think, when she married.  And, my mother was nineteen (19) when I was born out of wedlock, and she explained to me that my father . . . uh . . . She found out that he had written letters to her somehow, that had disappeared.  She never explained how she knew, but, he had moved to Nebraska, so I was always thinking of my father as being in Nebraska when I was four years or so old.  And, there was some time that there was confusion as to what my surname ought to be, and I was Glen Frank Donnelly until I was five years old, when my mother met and married Glen E. Tarbet.  And, I suspect that part of the reason my mother married Glen E. Tarbet is because his name was Glen, just like mine.   [chuckles]  But, she never owned up to that.
JB2?	What was the “Donnelly” after?
GT	That was my real father’s name, was Doyle Alan Donnelly, according to my mother.  And, uh, that’s just hearsay of course, and that’s all the evidence I have of it.
JB	Hmmm . . .
GT	But they, uh— My grandfather told me when I was about thirty (30) that they just refused to put me up for adoption.  They wouldn’t think of it.  And, I remember a few things about my infancy — at least, I seemed like I was in my one-year-old time, when I fell down some stairs, when my mother was babysitting and doing housework, and I was upstairs with her, and at the top of the stairs I decided to jump down the first step, but I went end over end clear to the bottom.   And, I think I’ve remembered that all my life and have had dreams about it.  I haven’t had those dreams for several years — eh, maybe ten (10) or fifteen (15) years since I had the last ones — that I remember.
JB	So, when you would dream, did you have variations on that dream of falling down the stairs?
GT	Oh, yes.  I did.  Yes.
JB	What kind of things?
GT	I dreamt I fell out of an airplane [chuckle], and uh . . .   I have another incident of falling down stairs . . .   Uncle Virgil’s and Aunt Edna’s house was near Liberty Park when I was born, and shortly after that, they moved to Logan.  And, my mother lived with them in Logan for a while — Logan, Utah.  And I can remember falling down some stairs in the house in Logan.  Concrete stairs.  And then, uh, I also remember living with Grandpa Cornia and Grandma Cornia in the Kennion Hotel, which was on the corner of Second South and Main Street in Salt Lake City.  It was an old hotel when we lived there.  We lived in a one-room apartment on the second floor, and I can remember two incidents there pulling a pot of chicken that was boiling on a hot plate on the kitchen table.   I pulled the cord and pulled it off the hotplate, and Aunt Corral was there, and she managed to knock it away from me and it spilled on her foot.  They took a picture of Grandpa holding me and her standing next to us, in Uncle Virgil’s front yard by Liberty Park, and Aunt Corral has her leg all bandaged up from the burn she got.  But, I was just a baby then.
AT	She saved your life.
GT	I guess she saved my life.  And, I can also remember Uncle Cecil putting me in a satchel, they used to call them, like a little suitcase, little cloth briefcase.  I think they used to call  — it was the kind of things that the carpet-bagger agents used to carry down south, when there were carpet baggers.  It was a carpet bag satchel.
JB	Did you tell us your birthday?
GT	I don’t know if I did.  It was September 30th, 1931.
JB	So, this would have been in the early thirties, the memory you are telling us right now?
GT	Yes.  . . .  I started to tell you about Uncle Cecil putting me in this satchel and carrying me down stairs in the Kennion Hotel, into the lobby, and opening it up.  I can remember climbing out of that satchel and surprising everybody there.  [laughter]  ‘Cause I was such a cute little kid.  [laughter]
AT	Now, is that in your opinion?   [laughter]
GT	And, I remember Grandma taking me places.  That was when they had street cars in Salt Lake City . . . And [chuckle] they’re putting them back now . . .  But, the street cars used to run down Main Street, and she’d take me down and take me on trips on the street car.  And, I can remember having to wee-wee and doing it in the gutter on Main Street.  [laughter]  I wasn’t the least bit embarrassed.  [embarrassed laughter]
AT	Your grandmother probably was.  [laughter]
GT	Grandma, I think, had me do it because I needed to go, if I remember right.
JB2	Poor little boy.  Who cares?
JB	Yeah, just . . .  There you go. How long did they live in Salt Lake City.
GT	Well, when they decided to tear down the Kennion Hotel, I was four years old, and I can remember moving over to North Temple and what was then Second West, but what is now Third West, to the Alamo Place, which was on the corner of North Temple and Second West.  It was a group of two-unit . . . what do you call them?  . . . Anyway, side-by-side —
BB	Duplexes.
GT	Dwellings—duplexes.  That’s what I was trying to say.  There were I think — I think about six duplexes in there, in Alamo Place, plus two apartment houses right on the street, with the duplexes behind them.  But, from President Monson’s description of the houses his uncle — his maternal uncle built that they lived in over on Second West and Fifth South, I’m pretty sure that the two two-story apartment houses in front of the duplexes were built by the same people that built the houses President Monson talks about.  It’s been kind of interesting to me, and I intend to find out from him if they were, somehow.  In answer to your question, Grandpa lived in that duplex after Grandma died for at least a couple of years, and my mother married Glen E. Tarbet when I was five.  And so, I’ve been Glen F. Tarbet ever since.  Glen Frank Tarbet.
JB	How old were you when your grandma died?
GT	I was five when she died.
JB	So, was that before or after your mom got married.
GT	It was after my mom got married, the same year.
JB	So, she lived with — Grandma lived with her parents up until she got married?
GT	Yes —
JB	To Glen E. Tarbet?
GT	Yes, Glen E. Tarbet lived in the same place for a while with my mother and me.
JB	So you still lived with Grandpa after they got married?
GT	Grandma and Grandma.  Yeah, they were all there, and Uncle Virgil and Aunt Edna used to come and go dancing every Tuesday at the Coconut Grove, which later became the Terrace, and it was the Terrace until it was torn down, I guess — wasn’t it?  Wasn’t it called the Terrace, honey?
AT	Coconut Grove, and then Rainbow Bridge, and then —
GT	Oh.  Rainbow.  That’s right.  That’s what I was trying to think of.  It was called the Rainbow Rendezvous.
AT	Yeah.  And then it was the Terrace.
GT	And then it was the Terrace.  You’re right.
JB	Where was that?
GT	That was on the corner of Fifth South and Main Street — Sixth South and Main Street.
AT	Wasn’t Coconut Grove — didn’t Coconut Grove burn down?  And they were — they put it in —
GT	I – I – I  I think . . .
AT	And they put it in another place?
GT	Well, uh, I think it caught fire some time or other, but I don’t think it burned down.  I think they just decided that it was obsolete and it became a car garage for a long time.  The Studebaker Agency was right there by it, and I think they had cars stored in it for a while. But, anyway,  uh, Grandma Cornia used to make wine.  She — you know, in the Doctrine and Covenants it says wine should be of your own make, and people did that for a long time, until President Heber J. Grant buckled down and insisted that people observe the Word of Wisdom completely.  But, anyway, Grandma — when my step-father and mother were living at their place in Alamo Place, Grandma kept a bottle of wine in her bedroom window.  And, the cedar chest that I slept on — that was underneath that bedroom window — and I saw Grandma take a little nip of that occasionally, and so I did too.  [laughter]  And, it got low faster than they expected, and my step-father got the blame —  [laughter] — until they found out that he was innocent.
AT	An early drinker.  [laughter] . . . He was a wino at an early age.
GT	But, that’s the closest I’ve ever come to being an alcoholic.  [laughter]
JB	What happened when they found out?  How did they find out?
GT	Oh, I think they just saw me doing it, as I recall.
JB2	Well, he sees his grandma do it, so he . . .
AT	[go get? 0:25:28.0] the snifter
GT	And after that Grandma kept it down in the basement.  [laughter] And there was a trap door in the kitchen that lead down into the basement.  And, Grandma also made root beer and had it down there.  And, uh, we would hear pops sometimes when the corks blew off the root beer.
JB	How would she make the root beer?  Do you remember what — I mean —
AT	They used yeast and a jug of some kind.
GT	Do you think she can hear — that can be heard.
AT	Oh, I’m sorry.
GT	That’s good.  I’m glad you know, ‘cause I don’t.
AT	There was root beer flavoring and some yeast of some kind, and it had to ferment.
GT	Root beer flavoring and yeast of some kind, and then it had to ferment, and it had a cork in it.  But, it was sweet and it was root beer.  It wasn’t beer.  It wasn’t alcoholic.  But, it was interesting when it would pop sometimes down in the basement because a cork would blow off.
JB2	So, was it done when it blew the cork off?
AT	No, it would finish it.  It would spray out of the bottle.  [chuckles]
GT	I think that they could be pretty sure that the rest of it was ready to drink when the corks blew off.
AT	But, my mom and dad used to have a [follow? 0:27:05.7] press, and they put caps on.  Just some caps . . .
GT	Ann is saying that her mom and dad had a cork press, would you call it?
AT	No, they put metal caps on.
GT	Oh.  Metal cap press.  Well, maybe Grandma Cornia did too.  I don’t know.
AT	Some of them did.
GT	But, I thought it was a cork.  Anyway, Calvin used to come down with Aunt Edna and Uncle Virgil when they went dancing at the Coconut Grove, and Calvin would be my babysitter.  That was their [Virgil & Edna] youngest son.
JB	How old was he at that time?
GT	If I remember right, he was three years older than I was.  He was eight when I was five.
AT	But, didn’t he have you read to him?
GT	And, uh — not then.  I couldn’t read yet then.  But, he would — while he was babysitting me, he would sneak us down into that basement, and I think we got some root beer too while we were down there, sometimes.  [laughter]  But, Calvin also used to take some of the money he got for babysitting me —like, he’d get twenty-five cents, I think.  And, there was a place called the “Rainbow Confectionary” out in front of Alamo Place.  It was in one of those two-story places.  And, he would go and spend ten cents and get a package of French fries and share them with me.  That was my introduction to French fries.  They had an interesting of arrangement — to heat the Rainbow Confectionary, their furnace burned coke and they had a coke shoot in the garage right behind the confectionary, and once when I was still five years old, I was playing hide and seek with the little neighbor kids, and I found out I could crawl into that coke shoot, even though they had coke piled up above the place where they dug it out.  And, I got in there and it caved in on me.  And I was —
JB	How old were you?
GT	I was five.
JB	And they didn’t know where you were?
GT	And I started hollering “Help!  Murder!  Police!” [laughter] and one of my little friends went and told my mother —
JB	Was the furnace burning at the time?
GT	No.  It must have been the springtime.  It must have been after they weren’t burning it, but they’d left that little cavern at the bottom that I crawled into.  And, my mother went to the service station that was right there on the corner — a Shell service station — and got the operator to come over , and he could see my feet sticking out.  And, he was trying to get the coke out, and of course he would shovel it and it would cave in more.  And, he finally gave that up and grabbed my feet and pulled me out.  It didn’t really hurt until he did that.
JB	Dad, I don’t know what coke looks like.
AT	It looks like a cinder, almost.  It’s a —
GT	It’s coal that has been roasted, and it has — it’s just pure carbon.
JB	So, they’re about the size of a ping pong ball?  Or smaller?
GT	It seems to me it was maybe the size of a baseball, some of it.
AT	Eh . . .  Oh, of course we got pea coke.  That’s why it was only about that big, the pea coke.  But, it had to be burned in a hotter fire.  It made a real hot fire, but it took a lot to get the fire started.
JB	I bet it would burn a long time.
GT	It was used mostly to make steel.
AT	Yeah.
JB	Oh, because it would burn at a really high temperature?
GT	Well, what — actually, they would mix it with the iron to provide the carbon that —
BB	Makes the steel.
GT	That makes the steel alloy with iron.
JB	So, did a lot of people use coke furnaces.
AT	Not many people.  Mostly industrial —
GT	Not a lot.
AT	Some people had a coke furnace, but they were very few and far between.  The only reason I know is because Daddy a [0:32:38.1] and feed yard.
GT	Did he used to sell coke?
AT	Some.  The bakery used it and, uh . . .
GT	Well, it was a good thing for me that it wasn’t regular coal, because it would have killed me.
AT	Yeah, if that had fallen, you would have been in bad trouble.
GT	But, of course, it probably wouldn’t have been a cave there if it had been real coal, either.
JB	Was it more expensive than coal or less expensive?
GT	I don’t know how much it cost.  But, I’m sure it was more expensive.
AT	Not a whole lot but —
JB	So, it took a special kind of furnace to burn it.  So, if you had that kind of furnace you had to buy coke for it.
AT	Uh huh.
JB	Huh.
AT	They also had furnaces that burned lump coal, but mostly they burned slag coal.  And, sometimes they’d mix oil with the slag coal?
AT	That’s coal that’s ground really fine.
GT	Coal dust.
AT	Like dust.
GT	Only, it’s not dust, it’s —
BB	Pulverized.
GT & AT	Pulverized.
AT	There you go.
GT	It’s —
BB	It looks like sand, only coarser [muffled 0:33:52.1]
JB	Huh.
AT	And then there’s pea coal, which was about like that.  Then, there was lump coal that was about like that.  And then there was, uh, you know, a mixed coal with big lump chunks, and then there, sometimes they — we would sell just big pieces of coal and people would break it up themselves.
GT	That’s the best kind of coal for a fireplace, is lump coal
BB	My mom liked Nat King Cole.
AT	Yeah, I liked him too.  [laughter] . . . He was a singer.  Not a cinder.
GT	Does that red light go off when it’s —
JB2	No, it should be off.
GT	Does it go off when it’s out of space?
JB2	Uh, yeah.  You’ve got like seventeen  hours, though.
GT	Oh, wow.
BB	You just got started.  [laughter]
AT	Looks to me like you’re going to be talking all night, buddy.
JB	So, did — so, living at your house, it was your grandma and grandpa, and you and  your mom —
GT	In Alamo Place, yeah.
JB	And, anybody else?  Because, I guess Corral had got married and moved out —
GT	And my step-father, Glen E. Tarbet.
JB	And Glen E. came and lived there for a while.
GT	No, what did you just say about —
JB	Because Aunt Corral had got married and moved away, right?
GT	Right.  She lived in California at the time.
JB	And all the other older brothers had their own dwellings by then?
GT	Yes.
JB	But, it seems like Grandma was pretty close to Uncle Virgil.  Is that right?
GT	Uh, well, he was — he gave us shelter when I was born.  Uncle Cecil lived right across the street, kitty-corner from Alamo Place, in a two-story apartment house next to the other service station across the street.  And, he had two daughters, Peggy and Sally, and then — let’s see.  I can’t remember when their third daughter was born.  I don’t think she was born until they moved someplace else.
AT	Was that Virgil or Cecil?
JB	I think I remember —
GT	What?
AT	Virgil’s or Cecil’s?
JB	He told us Uncle —
GT	Peggy and Sally and . . .  Patty —
JB	That’s what I thought.  Yeah, I remember —
GT	Were their children.
JB	I remember them from when I was a child.
GT	They’ve been to our family reunions.
AT	They were always at Aunt Corral’s birthday party.
GT	Yeah.  . . . Uh . . .
JB	So, how long did you live there, at Alamo Place with your grandparents.
GT	I don’t know exactly, but it was a few years — two or three years.  I started school there.  I wasn’t five years old when I started school.  I was only four because —
AT	Couldn’t you read?
GT	I could read a little bit then, when I was four.
AT	When did you start reading to your cousin?
GT	Oh, I didn’t start reading to him until I was seven or eight, I think — six or seven, maybe.  But, I used to — Uncle Virgil used to take me to their home in the summertime, and Calvin — uh, I would sleep with Calvin at his place, and there were always science fiction books laying around, that the other boys read, and I would read science fiction stories to Calvin — sometimes until two o’clock in the morning.
AT	Tell them about Little Egypt.
JB	So, Calvin was your —
GT	You mean Little Africa.
AT	Little Africa.  That’s right.
JB	Hold on. But, Calvin was your cousin who would come down and babysit you, right?
AT	And have your dad read to him.
GT	Yeah, he was my boyhood hero.
JB	So, tell us about Little Africa.
GT	Well, you know, Logan is an interesting town.  It has uh —Logan Canyon comes down into the town, and it — where it comes out down between — oh, it’s about Third South, I think — on south, they call it the Island, for some reason.  But, there’s a park down there, there’s Logan Park.
JB	Where the creek comes out of the mountain?
GT	Where the creek comes out of — or Logan River comes down into the valley.  There’s a canal from one of the dams right at the mouth of the canyon that runs along the side of that canyon down into Logan, and in fact, they had a lot of trouble there a couple of years ago with that canal breaking loose and flooding out and killing some people down below it.   But, along that canal were a lot of big trees with huge vines hanging down from them — vines two or three inches in diameter.  And, the kids would swing on those vines.  I don’t know.  I guess they were ivy vines or something.  I don’t know what kind of vines they were, but the kids would swing on them and they called it Little Africa.  That was when Tarzan movies got going strong, about that time, and they’d swing through those trees and yell like Tarzan:   Ahh-eee-ah-eee-ahh-ee-ah-ee-ahhhh.   [Tarzan noise] [self-conscious laughter]
AT	Didn’t you used to cook down in there too?
GT	We never did cook down in there, no.
AT	Oh.  Didn’t you cook down in there?  Okay.  I misunderstood that.
JB	Would you swing out on the vines and jump in the canal?
GT	I never did swing on the vines.  I was too little then, but Calvin did.
JB	And you thought that was pretty cool stuff, huh?
GT	Oh, yeah.  He was a great guy.  But I was scared to death of the hill going down to the canal.  Calvin would get on there just like a goat and go galloping down the hill, and tried to persuade me to do it, but I was always too scared.  I was too little and scared of falling down.  I guess I was still suffering from my falling down the stairs syndrome, for one thing.  But, uh, I fell in that creek — in that canal, I should say — a couple of times, when I was playing down there.
JB	Was there a strong current?
GT	Not very strong, no.
JB	Did you have any trouble getting out of it?
GT	I didn’t have any trouble getting out.
AT	It wasn’t near as big as it seemed like when he was that age.
GT	It never seemed very big to me. . . .   No, it was a good ten- or fifteen-feet-wide canal.  And, it had quite a bit of water in it.  It was nice clear water.  They used to get hellgrammites out of the rocks for bait to go trout fishing.
JB	They’d get what out of the —
GT	Hellgrammites?  [chuckles]
JB	What’s that?
GT	That’s a little bug that builds itself a shell of little tiny pebbles around it in the water.  It’s more like a worm than a bug.  [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dobsonfly]  But, it made good fishing bait.
AT	There must have been certain minerals in that water.
GT	Why?
AT	For them to do that and love that in there.
GT	I think — they’re pretty common in the freshwater creeks around here.  I uh — Another thing they used to do is — the canal went down and ran down I think just off of Second East in Provo —
AT	In Provo?
GT	In Provo — no.  Not Provo.  Excuse me.  In Logan.  And, in fact, later on, the house they lived in — the house the Cornias lived in at that time — at the time I was playing down in Little Africa was on the street directly east of the temple.  Right across the street from the temple.
AT	Tell them about your swimming pool you built in the —
GT	I knew you were going to come up with that.  [laughter]  I uh — I didn’t build a swimming pool.  I was — their house was right next door to the house the temple president lived in.  In fact, they were really close houses.  As I think about it, it surprises me to think of how close they were to each other.  But, uh, the temple president’s house was new.  It had just been built very recently, and it had window wells.  They were watering their lawn with their hose, and I thought it would be really fun to fill up their window wells with hose water.  Heh.  I flooded the temple president’s basement.  [laughter]  Got in serious trouble with that.
AT	What kind of serious trouble?
GT	Well, it was so serious that President Christiansen was sitting out in front of his house — oh, must have been a week or so after that happened —with his family.  He was sitting in the car with his family.  I think they were enjoying their new car.  And, he invited me over to sing him a song.  [self-conscious laughter]
AT	I figured it was serious to a boy.  [laughter]
JB	What song did you sing for him?
GT	Oh, I think I sang him A Capital Ship, if I —
AT	Sing that for us.
JB	Yeah.
GT	And O My Daughter Clementine
BB	Row, Row, Row Your Boat?
AT	Sing that.
JB	Sing A Capital Ship for us, Dad.
GT	What did you say?
BB	Row, Row, Row Your Boat
GT	Oh, I didn’t know Row, Row, Row Your Boat.
AT	He can’t sing without water.
BB	In your basement.  [laughter]
AT	Let me get you some water, honey, so you can sing A Capital Ship.
GT	President Christiansen was a very nice man, and he had a son living — their son was living with them there.  He must have been in his young teens.  I think he was the most alarmed with the flooded basement.  . . .  Thanks for the drink.  That helps.
JB2	Now you can sing to us.  [laughter]
AT	You’ve got to do that, honey.
JB2	The price of the drink.
JB	So, how old were you when you learned that song?
GT	I was in the fifth grade, I think — or, fourth grade or fifth grade.
JB	Did you learn it at school?
GT	I was ten, I guess.
JB	I remember you singing that song to me when I was a little girl.
GT	A capital ship for an ocean trip Was “Walloping Window Blind” No wind that blew dismayed her crew Nor troubled the captain’s mind. Let’s see —  I’m trying to remember the whole thing.
JB	The man at the wheel —
GT	There we go — The man at the wheel was made to feel Contempt for the wildest blow – o – o
JB	The hard solute to the —
GT	No, that’s not ‘the man at the wheel’
JB & GT	The man at the                 wheel was made to feel — Contempt for the wildest blow – o – o But it often appeared when the gale had cleared That he’d been in his bunk below                 Then blow ye winds hi-ho!                 A sailing I will go!                 I’ll stay no more on England’s shores,                 So let the music play – ay – ay                 I’m off for the morning train.                 I’ll cross the raging main.                 I’m off to my love with a boxing glove                 Ten thousand miles away. O, the gunner we had was apparently mad For he sat on the after rail As he fired salutes with the captain’s boots In the teeth of the booming gale And the cook was Dutch and behaved as such For the diet he served the crew – oo – oo Was a number of tons of hot cross buns Served up with sugar and glue [chorus] All nautical pride we set aside When we ran our vessel a shore On the Gulliby Isles with the poo-poo smiles And the rubbily ub-bugs roar And we sat on the edge of a sandy ledge As we show at the whistling bee – ee – ee And the cinnamon bats wore waterproof  hats As they dipped in the shining sea [chorus] Let’s see . . . “Did I sing all nautically pride we set aside?” All nautically pride we set aside When we ran the vessel ashore
AT	You sang that.
GT	On the Gulliby Isles where the poopoo smiles And the ruggily ub-bugs roar. And we sat on the edge of a sandy ledge As we shot at the whistling bee – ee – ee And the cinnamon bats wore waterproof hats As they dipped in the shining sea On rugabug bark from morn ‘til dark We dined ‘til we all had grown Uncommonly shrunk when a Chinese junk Came up from the Torriblee zone. She was chubby and square but we didn’t much care So we cheerily set off to sea – ee – ee And we left all the crew of the junk to chew On the bar of the rugbug tree.
GT & JB	[chorus]  [full lyrics http://bit.ly/njVky6]
JB2	That’s great.
AT	He was in [0:52:10.8]
JB2	He was.  [laughter]  That was [0:52:15.2]
GT	I think President Christiansen got a big kick out of that one when I sang that to him.
JB	And he forgave you for the swimming pool in his basement.
GT	He never did tell me he forgave me for that.  [laughter]  They never did really seriously punish me for it, that I know of.
AT	It looked like a good thing to fill up.
JB	So, you’d go spend the summer times up in Logan with your uncle.
GT	Yep.  Uncle Virgil would take me.  He was what they called a jobber for Salt Lake Hardware Company.  He went around to all the little hardware stores in the little towns in northern Utah and southern Idaho and took orders for hardware for them to stock their stores with.  And, he used to take me with him to keep him company, I guess, and entertain his customers.
JB	To keep you out of trouble, probably.
AT	He probably was helping your mother, too.
GT	Something like that.  And probably keep me out of Aunt Edna’s hair.  [laughter] When I was — when I graduated from high school, somehow or other my mother talked Uncle Virgil and Aunt Edna into having me come and live with them while I went to Utah State University for my freshman year.  I spent those nine months in Logan as a freshman at Utah State.
JB	What was Calvin doing by then?
GT	Calvin cut the grass at the temple, and he was a gardener for the temple for several years, and he finally became the engineer for the Logan Temple.  As far as I know, he never did do well at reading.  But, he was the engineer at the Logan Temple until he retired.  He was the oldest — he had been a Church employee for longer than anybody else when he retired.  He never did marry.  He is still living in Logan, as far as I known.
AT	Wasn’t it Aunt Edna we went down to stay with — her and her kids down in Bloomingdale?
GT	No.  That was Aunt Mariba, Uncle Ken’s widow.   As far as I know, her daughter and son-in-law still live in — was it Bloomingdale?
AT	Bloomington.
GT	Bloomington.  It’s right next to Saint George.  In fact, it’s a Saint George subdivision, isn’t it?
AT	Kind of.  It’s a little town on its own, now.
JB	Well, you skipped over a whole big chunk.  You went from Little Africa to graduating from high school —
AT	And going to college.  He matures fast.
GT	Well, uh —
JB	And you were living in Salt Lake with your grandma and grandpa.
GT	I started school in kindergarten when I was four years old, at the Washington Elementary, which is about a mile from Alamo Place, on —between Second and Third West, on Eleventh North, or near Eleventh North — in that vicinity, anyway.  I think it was between Seventh and Eight North, if I remember right.  Because, Wasatch Springs was on Eleventh North.  After I started kindergarten, Peggy Cornia who lived across the street, kitty corner, walked me to school.
JB	How much older than you was she?
GT	She was, I think, three years older than me, if I remember right.  Something like that.  Or, maybe three or four years.
JB	Was she going to the same school?
GT	I think she was in the third grade at the time, so that would have meant she was two years older than me then, or something.  I don’t remember.  That doesn’t seem right.  It seems like she was more like three or four years older than me.  I don’t know why she was just in the third grade.
JB	Well, if you were in kindergarten, then first, second, third grade — that would be right, right?
GT	Yeah.  That would, wouldn’t it.  But, she would — if I could find her after school, she would walk me home —walk with me coming home.  She claims she stuck up from me and kept me from getting beaten up a few times.  We got along alright.  She really loved my mother, and so did Sally and Patty.  In fact, when we lived in Chesterfield, they came and spent some summers with us out there.
AT	Tell them about your ringing the bell at school.
GT	When I was in the fourth grade at Oquirrh Elementary on Fourth East between Third and Fourth South, I was selected to be a bell ringer.  I’d push the button to ring the bell to change classes.  We had six classes a day.  And, also I would ring a little thing like a cowbell at recess and in the morning —a hand bell, to bring the kids in to start school.
AT	Tell them some of the places you visited on the way home from school.
GT	[chuckles]  I used to — before I went to Oquirrh, while we were living in Alamo Place, I went to two different schools — three different schools.  I started at Washington, then I went to Jackson in the second grade, and then I went to Lafayette in the third grade.
JB	Why did you switch schools so much.
GT	Well, it turned out that they were all closer, than the school I had been going to.  And, I guess we just didn’t realize that at the time.  But, then —I also went to Grant Elementary.  Mom and — Dad — Tarbet — moved in with the Tarbet family, with Grandma and Grandpa Tarbet, and Phyllis — their daughters Phyllis and Joyce and Eunice.  And Eunice was married and had two girls at the time, and later had a little boy.
JB	How old were you when you moved in with them?
GT	I think I was six or seven.  Uh.  But, that was down on Second West, which is now Third West, and Fifth South.  I’m pretty sure that the house we lived in was one of the houses that President Monson’s uncle built . . . from the way he describes it in his book, To The Rescue, and President Monson grew up just around the corner from where I lived then.  He went to Grant Elementary.  He’s four years older than me.  But, he might have well been at Grant when I was there.   I think that’s interesting to me.  It might not be interesting to anyone else.
AT	I think it’s interesting that you lived so close to where my aunt and uncle lived, too.
GT	Which aunt and uncle were those?
AT	Aunt Irene and Uncle Babe.
GT	Where did they live?
AT	His name was Charles, but they called him Uncle Babe for some reason.  They lived down — Monty told us, and I can’t remember the exact place, but it was about Third West, and I don’t know which South — Five or Six South, right there close.
GT	Hmm . . . They might have been our neighbors.
AT	Could have been.
GT	There was a string of duplexes along Second West —
AT	They had their own home.  It was a red — it was covered with that red graphite — no graphite but kind of tar shingles.
GT	Shakes?
AT	Uh-huh.  Shakes.  That’s what I was trying to think of.  Shakes.
GT	Hmmmm . . .  Well, I don’t remember  —  all I remember was there were at least two other duplexes besides the one we lived in.  But, it was — when we moved in there — let see — Aunt Eunice had Patsy and Jeanie, and Aunt Phyllis had Dickie —or, Freddie — I guess she didn’t have Dickie yet.  At least —  I think there were ten of us living in that one-bedroom duplex.
JB	Oh my.  Where did everybody sleep?
GT	And we had a cot in the living room — my mother and I — and Dad Tarbet was gone somewhere, as usual.  He was an inveterate [01:04:31.7] miner.  He was always trying to find gold.  In fact, you may remember a picture we used to have hanging in the house that said, “There’s gold in them thar drains” because he was looking for valuables in the Salt Lake City sewer.  And, he got his picture in the paper with his partner, with the caption, “There’s gold in them thar drains” and a little article about what they were doing.  And, he found a few things like diamond rings, a lot of dental gold got washed down the drains then.
JB	What prompted you moving out of Grandma and Grandpa Cornia’s house.
GT	Well, I think it was because the place — room became available with Grandma and Grandpa Tarbet —  down on Second West.
JB	Well, and Grandma had died, right.
GT	Yeah, and Grandma had died.
JB	So, what did Grandpa do when Grandma died.
GT	He got married again, a few years later.  His wife was Emma James at the time, and she lived out on 64th South and about Fifth East and 64th South.  And her house is still there.
JB	Did he move to her house.
GT	And he moved to her house.
JB	Do you think that’s why you guys moved in with the Tarbets — because Grandpa was moving away?
GT	No.  That was quite a while before he moved away.  In fact, I used to come and visit him — or try to visit him.  One time I came to his house in Alamo Place and I pried open a window and crawled through the bedroom window.  He got very upset with me for doing that.
JB	How old were you when you did that?
GT	I must have been six or seven.
JB	You told me about one day when you went to Conference by yourself.
GT	Oh, yeah.  I used to  — a couple of times I went to Conference because Alamo Place was just a couple of blocks away from Temple Square, and I spent a lot of time as a child playing on Temple Square and various other historical places around there.  But, when Conference time came, I  —  one time I remember very clearly was when, for Conference, I got a seat in the balcony and people came in and sat around on both sides of me.  And a man came in and sat right on me.
JB	That’s so mean.
GT	He made me bawl.  I cried and got up and moved.
JB	How old do you think you were when that happened.
GT	I think I was about six.
JB	I think that’s just awful.
GT	He was a young man.  I think he was — he seemed like a man to me, but he was probably just a teenager.  But, uh, I stayed for the rest of Conference.  I think I went and sat in one of the choir seats that wasn’t full to the top.  I got a . . . [end]