1952 Adrian Home

I was born in Nyssa, Oregon on July 1, 1952.  My parents are Richard Hyde Dalton and Mollie Rae Baker.

I was the second child in a family of seven children.  My siblings were in order of birth; Susan Louise, Roberta, Matthew Richard, Rex Wade, Barry Ross, and Nancy Lorraine. 

My first childhood memories are of life on Grandpa Dalton’s farm near Adrian.  My parents built a cinderblock house on top of a basement.  They lived in the basement for a while before they built the house but I don’t remember anything about those days.  I remember riding my tricycle on  a high cement porch.  I remember riding on the tractor with my dad.  He farmed the eighty acre place.

I remember the cows and sheep and chickens and I remember the kittens.  A horse stepped on my kitten one day.  The little gray thing screamed and ran and fell in a ditch.  I was so afraid to pick it up.  Somebody helped me.  I think we tied a popcycle stick splint on its leg.  I don’t remember that it died.

My sisters and I used to play with the kittens like they were our babies.  We dressed them up in doll clothes.  Sometimes we took a naked kitty and threw it into the ditch of running water so we could watch it swim frantically to shore.  It was such a wonder to me how really little each kitty was when it came out of the water all soaking wet.    

We didn’t always play nice.  There was this time when my sister Susan and I smeered axel grease all over a white stove that had been discarded by a woodpile.  There was a greasegun there and we had a wonderful time with our project.  Dad came along and found us in the middle of it.  He spanked us both.  Susan was first.  She got a really hard spanking and I cried real loud.  My spanking wasn’t as hard as hers.

I started first grade while we lived at Adrian.  My teacher was Mrs. Magard.  I didn’t finish first grade there.  We moved to Kimberly and lived with Grandmother Baker for a while before we were able to move to the Forestberg place at Bliss, Idaho.  This was a 360 acre farm.  We lived here until I was in third grade.  A series of events took us away from this home.  We spent some time living on the bank of the Columbia River near Pasco, Washington.  Then we were back to Kimberly and we settled on a place in Hazelton area east of Jerome, Idaho. It was the Quilecy place.  We lived there several years then it was back to Washington again.  That didn’t last.  We moved to Wendell, Idaho then we made our way back to the Forestberg place where we all were able to live and remain to grow up and graduate from high school.  I graduated from Hagerman High School when I was 17 years old in 1970.

The summer after I graduated I spent two weeks at my Aunt Emma and Uncle Vernon Hansen’s home where I did the job of caretaking their eight children while they went back to a distant state to get a bull for their dairy.  That job fortified me and gave me confidence to do my own mothering later on in my life.  After returning home I did waitress work to earn money for college.

In the fall of 1970 I went to Brigham Young University.  I selected to major in elementary education with a minor in music.  I went for four semesters.  I did really well with my grades keeping a strong B average.  It was between semesters after my first year that I went to stay with my Aunt Rachel and Uncle Paul in Salt Lake City.  While I was there an opportunity to work as a nanny for a couple who sang in the Tabernacle Choir came to me.  This was Dr. Robert Bliss Vance and his wife Marilyn.  They had six children.  They needed someone to take their kids to church while they were singing in the choir.  I lived with them and my duties compounded until I was also doing maid work cleaning house and doing laundry.  I even vacuumed the swimming pool.  They went on a couple of road trips that summer one to southern Utah and one up into the Craters of the Moon.  On the second trip they came to my home and met my family.  This was an experience not to be forgotten.  I was stretched but once again I was encouraged in my abilities toward motherhood and homemaking and this became my major career.

I went back to college and the next summer I lived at home.  I got a job at the Green Acres Terrace in Gooding.  This was an elderly care facility.  I gained new skills caring for these people. I took blood pressures, and pulse rates, but mostly it was a lot of cleaning up.  My mother helped me learn to drive this summer and I got my drivers license.  The most important thing that happened to me this summer, the summer of 72 was that I went on dates with Kevin Ellis, four to be exact and then we were engaged to be married. We were married in the Logan Temple on Nov. 15, 1972. 

Our first home was at the Rock Lodge on Billingsly Creek in Hagerman Valley.  Kevin’s parents and brothers and sisters lived only a few miles down the road where they were situated on a dairy farm.  It was a 300 cow dairy and 320 acres of land.  Kevin milked cows from 2:00 am to 10:00am then started again at 2:00 pm till 10:00 pm.  It was a rugged schedule and he became ill with irritable bowel.  I got sick too, excessively nauseous as I had become pregnant with our first baby.  After a few weeks we had a family fast and we all prayed for Kevin to get well.  He also received a priesthood blessing.  He got well at last.  It took me about three months to get over the worst of the nausea then on Aug. 19, 1973 we had a beautiful little golden haired girl weighing in at only 6 lb & 8oz.  She was born at the ST Benedicts Hospital in Jerome, ID.  We named her Leejean.

We only lived at the Billingsly Creek Rock Lodge for a couple of months then we moved to a doublewide trailerhouse on the hillside property owned by the folks. Kevin continued to work with his parents until one such day as he got a chance to operate the farm that they had sold to a Mr. Patrick Gibons.  We took the job and moved to Blackfoot, ID at Moreland area.  This man sold the property after we had only worked for him for one season.  We moved back to Hagerman in the doublewide on the hillside.  I had a lot of help with this move.  The next month on Nov. 14, 1974 our daughter, Stephanie was born at the St. Benedicts Hospital.  She was slightly bigger than her sister weighing in at 7 lb & 11 oz.  I was so grateful to have her finally in my arms where I could love her and feed her.  

The farm in Hagerman wasn’t making enough money for us to stay and work there.  The next opportunity that came to us was to work for the people who bought the farm from Patrick Gibons.  Dean and Raymond Park hired Kevin.  They also had another farm which is the one we lived on and worked on.  It was also in the Blackfoot area out past a little town called Rose.  There wasn’t much in Rose but the church house.  One Sunday while we were at church someone walked into our house and stole a lot of our things.  I had just taken my wedding ring off and put it in the jewelry box that morning before leaving.  It was irritating my finger.  I had several little red bumps on it.  My body chemistry was changing because I was pregnant again.  The jewelry box is one of the things that went with the thieves.  We did a police report but I never saw my wedding ring again.  Kevin thought the thief was one of the Indians that worked for him.  I think this man disappeared and never came back to work.  We never got any of our things back.  Oh well, we did have our first baby boy while living at this location.  It was springtime and the Teton Dam broke and ran through the valleys.  My baby was overdue and we were separated from the hospital by the floodwaters but no matter.  Kevin David just kept on waiting to be born.  He arrived twenty days late on June 20, 1976.  He weighed 7 lb & 3oz.  The doctor said he had lost weight because his feet were wrinkled but I knew he had picked the right day.  It was Father’s Day.  We received a $5.00 gift certificate from the Bingham County Cowbells.

Dean Park got in an airplane crash and was killed.  This changed things and we were out of work again.  It was back to Hagerman again we go.  We moved back into the doublewide trailerhouse again.  I thought there were some terrible bugs living in that house because my little girl, Stephanie had what appeared to be bug bites all over her.  It turned out to be Chickenpox. 

Kevin went to work hauling eggs for Bob Evans.  He had to leave at 5:00 am.  I got up and fixed him a breakfast and lunch.  After he was gone each day I would have some time before the children woke up so I read the Book of Mormon and wrote all the really good scriptures onto recipe cards and put them in an alphabetized file.  It was the size of a shoe box and I filled it mostly up.  This gave me a great start on my day.  We moved out of the trailerhouse and into the house that was in the same yard as the big house where Kevin’s parents lived.  

The dairy failed and we all moved to Glenns Ferry.  Vonnie and Merthan moved into a house in town but Kevin and I moved into a small house that was up on the Black Mesa project.  We planted sugar beets, beans, hay and grain.  Before we harvested our crops we had another baby son on July 10, 1978.  He was 8lb. 6oz. born at St. Benedicts in Jerome ID.  We named him Mark Dalton .  He was a really good baby but I got really sick in the weeks that followed.  The Primary President took me to her house for about three days and took care of me.  In Oct. the roof blew off the house but Kevin nailed it back on.  It wasn’t a very good house for us but we stayed in it through the winter.  The kids were sick a lot.  We got an operation on David’s ears to put drain tubes in them and he had his adenoids taken out.  Stephanie did too.  One night when David was really sick I had been praying a lot over him.  It was late at night and I was kneeling beside my bed.  I had a dream .  I saw a curtain in the clouds.  I knew that Jesus was behind the curtain.  He had a message for me.  He said, “I am very near.”  I was comforted.

In the spring we found a house in town and moved to it.  It was a lovely two story red brick home with a nice basement.  Dad and Kevin bought a truck to haul our grain to market in Portland Ore. but found out they could make more money hauling grain from Montana to Calif.  This was a time of loneliness for me because Kevin was gone on the truck so much.  Spring came again a couple of times and new crops were planted.  We had a new baby again, another baby boy on Mar. 2, 1981.  He weighed 8lb.8oz. born in Mountain Home ID.  We named him Derrick Richard.   Baby was about a year old and he developed a cough.  He coughed a long time and I became concerned about him.  I finally took him to the Dr. and the doctor admitted him to the hospital.  He said he had pneumonia.  They put Derrick in moist mist inside a little tent on his bed.  At last he was able to sleep without coughing.  I would reach my hand in and touch the top of his covers and they were wet but he slept on.  I sat in a chair beside his bed and went to sleep too.  Kevin came in to be with me.  He had some news for me.  He told me they had sold our house.  We had been trying to buy it but some other people were too.  They were able to get a loan before us.  Furthermore, we were not able to afford the Black Mesa property anymore.  We had to give it all up.  Kevin’s parents moved to Texas to manage some apartments and we moved to Jerome, ID. where Kevin went to work driving a local delivery truck for Bailey Oil Company.  I began a day care service at my home.  After while the subject of over land trucking came up again and Kevin went to work for a company named Land and Sea.  He started driving all over the western states.  He wasn’t home on weekends.  For awhile it was like two weeks out then home for a couple of days and out again then one night he called me after a two week run to tell me he was headed to Texas or somewhere and I figured out that I was not on the way.  I began to take issue with the truck driving.  We had five children and I was raising them by myself.  This wasn’t what I signed up for.  I told him he couldn’t be married to the truck.  He married me first.  I reminded him that what he really wanted to do was be a farm/ranch manager.  We had a disagreement and he went back out on the truck but a little while after that in Feb. of 1983 we packed up and headed for Rexburg and Ricks College to seek the farm/ranch management degree.

Kevin went to work for one of the professors in the agriculture dept.  His name was Glen Dalling. We got on a waiting list to be dorm parents to facilitate our housing need.  I went to job services and found a list of housekeeping jobs and started to work doing them.  We got into a house not far from the campus.  Then we got a phone call from Kevin’s brother, Randy.  His boss was wanting to hire a manager for his ranch in Carey, ID.  Did Kevin want the job?  Our prayers were answered.  We moved to Carey before school started.  We lived and worked on the ranch for the next ten years.  Mollie Mae was born at the Peterson house on July 24, 1984.  I had her at home with the aide of a midwife, Janet Bingham.  

The ranch was really two ranches together.  We moved to the Surgener place at the time when Mr. Andreason’s son was selling everything he could on the ranch to get more money.  He fired Kevin because Kevin wouldn’t hide irrigation equipment and a tractor so the creditors couldn’t come and reposess them.  Mr. Pardue, the other partner of the ranch rehired Kevin.  Lynn Andreason moved out of the better ranch house and we moved into it.  On Jan.23, 1986 Janet was born in this house.  We named her after the midwife who came two more times to our little house on the Austin Road.  On Dec. 29, 1988 Johanna was born and on Sept. 15, 1991 Matthew Merthan joined us.

Life on the ranch was good.  The children got to experience a lot of things.  We always had them in 4-H clubs and then they took their animals to the fair.  They did dairy heifers and sheep and steers.  I liked to raise a vegetable garden every year.  I was particularly fond of my raspberry patch.  There were horses to ride and a cow to milk.  The ranch was near to the highway and whenever a car wreck happened Kevin  would go to it.  He would help the law enforcement take the measurements.  He even took the EMT class.

Mr. Pardue sent his cousin to work with Kevin and in two or three years he took over and we had to move.  We moved to Richfield where Kevin became resident deputy in the County Law Enforcement.  This happened in Feb.1993.  We lived on West Bannock Street for less than a year then the house sold and we moved to a small trailer house out on the 4 mile road and Kevin took a second job working for Steven Damalle as a cowboy and farm help.

We found a nice double wide Guerdon mobile home used which we moved onto some ground owned by James (Jay) & Elaine Henson on Marley Road.  We lived there for about five years.  We then bought three lots in Richfield from Alice Behr and on July 11, 2000 we moved our house into town.  Kevin became Chief Deputy for Sheriff Southwick from Nov. 2003 for fifteen years.  In 2008 he was elected Sheriff of Lincoln County.  In 1997 I began working for the Richfield School as a paraprofessional in the resource room.  I did this job for four years.  Then I went to work for Lincoln county Housing.  I retired on July 1, 2015 after fifteen years of employment. 

We have always held callings in the church mostly in the Primary and in the Scouting Program.  Kevin was recently called into the High Priest Quorum Presidency.  I am finishing this writing on the fifteenth day of Nov, 2015 on our 43^rd wedding anniversary.  On this date we have 27 grandchildren.  We are expecting number 28 in the middle of Dec.