Shepherd Growing Up in the City of the Saints

Glimpses of America in Salt Lake City During the 1950s and 60s
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-0983-8893-5
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 444 Seiten

This book consists of over 40 memoir vignettes that capture significant learning experiences of identical twin brothers-Gary and Gordon Shepherd-as they grow up in Mormon Salt Lake City during the 1950s and 1960s. Their stories in the first part of the book feature shared adventures with a wide range of friends, family, and adult models who shape the brothers' appreciation for basic American ideals of democracy, equality, diversity, cooperation, and tolerance-especially as taught and modeled in the public schools they attended. Vignette stories in the second part of the book highlight later periods of time in the brothers' lives as they mature and assume adult responsibilities while maintaining and strengthening friendship ties and their youthful core values. Their stories in both parts of the book are peppered with humor, good will, indignation, sadness, and even tragedy but also with rays of hope for the preservation of American ideals in today's troubling times. While the twins' early lives were shaped by the Mormon culture in which they were raised, their memoir writings in this book are far from being devoted exclusively to Mormon or LDS Church topics. A broad audience of readers who enjoy incisively written memoir accounts -even if they grew up elsewhere and in different eras than the Shepherds did-will encounter universal coming of age experiences that resonate with their own.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Shepherd, Gordon

Shepherd, Gary

Leseproben

2.
REQUIEM FOR A BOYHOOD FRIEND

Gary quickly scanned the brief obituary notice our sister Susan had clipped for him. He and his wife Lauren were home for a summer visit to see family and old friends in Salt Lake City. Sue lived on H Street, high enough in the Avenues neighborhood so that one can view the wide expanse of the Valley of the Great Salt Lake from east to west and north to south, which Brigham Young had claimed for the Mormons (never mind the resident Indians) in 1847. The obituary was for Ronald Victor Swenson—our oldest boyhood friend. It said there would be a gravesite service at 11:00 a.m. in Wasatch Lawn Memorial Park at 3300 South and Highland Drive—about an eight-mile trip from Sue’s house. Wasatch Memorial Park is a sixty-five-acre cemetery grounds, just west of Parley’s Canyon (named for one of Brigham’s fellow apostles, who explored the possibilities of constructing a road—now Interstate 80—down the canyon in 1848). Rearing up like sharks’ teeth on adjacent sides of Parley’s Canyon are the fortress-like Wasatch Mountains that had initially given the Mormon pioneers a false sense of protection from Babylon America in the middle of the 19th century.

It was just a little past 10:30 a.m., so there might still be enough time for them to make it if they hurried. They had no map of Wasatch Lawn’s complicated burial quadrants, nor had there been any directions specified in the obituary. On this sunshine drenched day, however, there seemed to be only one active burial service underway—in a far-flung corner of the cemetery— and Gary, Lauren, and Sue drove toward it. They parked off the side of a curving road on a slight hill right above the burial service site and began trudging down the grassy slope toward a small knot of mourners clustered around the casket and freshly dug grave. They had arrived late and stood quietly unnoticed on the outskirts of the small gathering. A woman was speaking a few modest words in memory of the deceased, and her voice sounded familiar: it was Sondra Swenson, Ron Swenson’s oldest sister.

Ron Swenson became our first boyhood friend when our parents moved back to Salt Lake City from God-forgotten Cowley, Wyoming, following several of our dad’s unsuccessful business ventures in sales. It was the summer of 1949. We were five-year-old twin brothers and on the verge of starting kindergarten that fall at Liberty Elementary School on Third East, right around the corner from our humble, bungalow home at 312 Herbert Avenue. That summer was when we met Ron, who was a year older. Ron lived a half a block north of Liberty School on Third East, but we first met him in “the field,” a big, vacant lot between Herbert and Williams Avenues that abutted Ron’s backyard fence. In later years some apartments were erected in this lot. But when we were growing up “the field” is where we habitually joined with Ron and other neighborhood pals to play army or cowboys and Indians or even Robin Hood or Knights of the Round Table, depending on what movie we had seen most recently.

Left, our father, Alvin Shepherd (Shep), shoveling snow off the walk-in front of 312 Herbert Avenue circa, 1955. Right, a contemporary image of 312 with foliage and garden plots now sprouting in place of grass.

We remember, after we first met Ron in the field, going to his home and calling loudly for him on the back steps of his house in the prescribed manner of the times: “Rhaa-ahnnnn! Can you come play?!” Ron’s mother opened the screen door, and she was exasperated: “That little bugger!” she heatedly exclaimed. Apparently, Ron had made some kind of mess in the bathroom, locked the door against his mother, jumped out the bathroom window, and had headed for the field. Ron’s mother actually became one of our favorites among our friends’ mothers. She seemed a little younger and more candid than most moms, smiled easily, semi-cussed a little, and sometimes chatted good-naturedly with us while she drank her morning coffee. Most of the moms we knew would have looked askance at drinking a cup of Postum, let alone coffee.

Ron’s father was a WWII vet who worked on the west side of the city for the Rio Grande Railroad. Of Swedish ancestry, Mr. Swenson was darkly handsome instead of blonde, quietly observant, and, unlike our father and the fathers of our other Mormon friends in the neighborhood, smoked Camel cigarettes. He had mechanical skills, tinkered with car engines, and built elaborate model train sets as a hobby. Barely noticeable, unless you looked for it, his right thumb was scarred and deformed from a battle wound received in the war. He let Ron’s mother take charge of the house and kids but reprimanded with quiet authority when he deemed it necessary. We liked him, too.

A year ahead of us in school, Ron was stricken with Rheumatic Fever when we were in first grade, and he ended up being “held back” a year. For us, however, that misfortune had its positive side: we were best friends, and it meant that Ron would now be a member of our grade cohort at Liberty for the duration of our elementary education. That Halloween, with Ron restricted to bed rest at home, we trick-or-treated for him and brought him back a big bag of candy, which Mrs. Swenson eyed warily before telling us it was okay for him to keep. Later, when we were nine, Ron suffered a relapse. This time his parents obtained a tutor for him to keep him abreast of his studies at home, where he was confined strictly to his bed. We remember the big black and green “horse pills” (as he called them) that he struggled to choke down every day.

For six months we made almost daily, afterschool visits to see Ron. He had Lincoln logs and a metal erector-set to play with, and he began, painstakingly, putting together plastic WWII model planes. From our visits with Ron, we learned all about British Spitfires, Japanese Zeroes, and American Mustangs as he carefully glued the parts, positioned the decals, and painted the fine details. When we talked about what we were going to be in life, Ron said he was going to be an engineer.

Ron was well enough to return to school in the fourth grade around Thanksgiving time, 1953. Mrs. Lawrence had given the class a poetry assignment to write about what Thanksgiving Day meant to each of us. We were anxious for Ron to do well, and he did, sort of. That is, he had rehearsed the lines he composed and recited them to the class in a resolute voice when it was his turn: “On Thanksgiving Day we work and work, and we never shirk, on Thanksgiving Day.” We all applauded.

A few years later, both of us became obsessed with sports, especially baseball. We spent hours poring over Hall of Fame batting and pitching statistics and could quote verbatim the names and lifetime records of baseball’s immortals. We got a baseball bat and mitts for our birthday in the fifth grade, and, when spring arrived, we learned how to both pitch and be a catcher, taking turns to catch the other’s fastballs with an opposing team’s batter swinging away six inches in front of our young, scrunched-up faces.

A year older, a little taller, and a little bigger, Ron had decent shoulders and what we enviously thought was a good build. We thought he looked a little like the Yankee’s famous Iron Horse, Lou Gehrig—like a first baseman—so Ron got a mitt for his birthday too, a first baseman’s glove. We spent time showing Ron how we thought he should field his position at first base, how to switch his feet to cover the bag and maximize his stretch when a baserunner came charging down the line. He in fact began playing first base on our little league team while the two of us were “batterymates,” switching every other game as pitcher and catcher.

In the summers we played baseball, drank Dr Pepper at Ron’s house (forbidden at home by our parents because of its caffeinated contents), and slept out most nights in sleeping bags with Ron and some of our other neighborhood friends: sometimes in Ron’s back yard, sometimes in ours, and sometimes on Liberty School’s old playing field. Lying on our sleeping bags at night we vividly remember gazing at the cloudless, black diamond Salt Lake City sky and gratefully thinking that we were the luckiest kids on the planet.

One Friday summer night, we, Ron, and two other school buddies—Udell Stones and Alvin Ebert—were walking home from watching a WWII war movie that had been shown in the amusement hall of the old Liberty Ward chapel, a half block west of Liberty Park. At the corner of Herbert Avenue and Third East there was another vacant field-lot, within equidistant shouting range of both Ron’s house and ours. The lot was filled with large, tall clumps of grass which, when grasped firmly and yanked stoutly up by the roots—with a heavy, clinging clod at the end—could then be hurled at an adversary, exploding in a satisfying burst of dirt and grass when it hit its mark.

Sweaty and satiated with our WWII combat games of throwing grass-clods at each other, Swenson (we had commenced calling one another by our last names), Ebert, and Gordon left the field and began strolling north on Third East. In the meantime, Gordon had yanked up the biggest grass-clod yet and was dangling it by his side as they walked. “Hey, Shepherd,” Ebert called out, “see if you can hit this car.” Two hundred feet in front of us shined the headlights of an approaching vehicle. “Sure,” Gordon said, and anticipating the exact moment of intersection, launched his weighty grass-clod missile on an arc toward the...