I had the usual childhood diseases except I always chose a time when I was away from home to come down with them. When I was about nine years old, it was either late in the fall or early in the spring when we loaded up the wagon and went to the Dryside to work. That night I didn’t feel good and it snowed. There were cracks between the boards of the cabin and the snow blew in and I brushed it off my cheeks during the night. When I awoke the next morning I was broken out with measles and they had to take me home.
One of the most dramatic occurrences of my young life came when I was nine. For about a year I had been ailing. When the other children were playing, I went in the house and flopped on the ‘lounge’ as we called our couch. I was urged to get up and do something but just kept saying that I didn’t feel like it. Finally, my parents knew that something was wrong. I had always been exceptionally active and alert. They took me to a doctor and he said I had diabetes. My parents were terrified. This was in the days before insulin and there was no known help for diabetes. Not only that, but the daughter of one of the families on the ‘mesa’ had died with diabetes just a month or so before this.
The only thing the doctor could suggest was strict diet and medicine of some sort and my Mother worked hard at keeping me on this diet. It was hard, but I was frightened enough that I did it, but many times I sat at the table and cried because there was not much that I could eat that tasted very good. After about a year, they decided that I should have my patriarchal blessing and Brother Taylor, the Father of Leo Taylor who was later our bishop at Redmesa, was the patriarch and he gave me a blessing and promised that if I would have enough faith I would be healed. I had always had a great deal of faith in blessings, so I went home after the patriarchal blessing and threw away my medicine and said I was well. And from then on I was completely over the diabetes. When I had my children later, I always told the doctor about the diabetes and they watched me carefully, but I didn’t have a sign of it.
One of the people in my life in whom I had a great deal of faith was my Mother’s brother, Uncle Oscar. Whenever I was sick I always asked that he come and ’administer’ to me, and I always made a rapid recovery; except during the flu epidemic of 1917. I was about eight or nine and got this flu along with all my family. Shortly before this epidemic, I remember standing on the front porch of my Willden grandparent’s home and waving good-bye to Uncle Oscar as he went to World War I. I can’t remember very much else about the war. We didn’t have radios or TV to keep us constantly aware as we do now. But, because of this war my Uncle Oscar was not there to bless me, and I had it quite severely. Many on the Mesa had the flu and the schools were closed and Church was not held.
Mother made a couch in the living room into a bed and I laid their day after day with nothing to do. Time hung heavy on my hands. In the middle of the afternoon, Mother would take down her small stemmed wine glasses (of which I still have about five) and she opened one of her quart jars of grape juice which she had canned the summer before. She then took several ginger snaps from a cardboard box which resembled a barrel. This she served to the ’sickies’ each afternoon. Each of us got three ginger snaps. It made the day, but after I recovered from the flu and to this day I don’t like either grape juice or ginger snaps. I can’t remember that anyone in Redmesa died of the flu that year, but thousands were dying elsewhere around the world.
There was another occasion when I came down with something and inoculated (do you mean infected?) a whole room full of children and all the parents were very upset. I can’t remember any details other than that. (The Typhoid Mary of Redmesa!)