# 3 - Bucking Bales and Lemonade

Of all the stuff Butch Farley is reported to have done. One is for sure. I was there and have felt guilty ever since.

We were bucking bales for Pop Wardley up near the canyon. Hot, sweaty, hard work it was. Especially if you were a skinny kid like me. Every afternoon at quitting time Pop would ask us what time we wanted to start in the morning. We would all go for six when it was cool. Every day Pop would reply with, "Too many tireds, how about nine." And so we always hauled hay in heat of the day. At noon we'd skinny dip in the canal so we'd be all cleaned up and cooled off for lunch. Aunt Marge always fed us a great lunch. We'd work about six hours a day for $1.25 an hour. The older kids and some of the younger city kids got work in town for more than that. If you were 14 though, it was bucking bales or nothing.

Pop was a favorite to work for though, mostly because of Aunt Marge's cooking and because Pop slip stacked. Lots of folks had given up slip stacking after Bobby Roberts' accident, but not Pop. He was just too set in his ways. Someone drove the tractor (usually one of Marge's girls) and one of us rode the slip. It was a large sheet of steel dragged by a chain behind the baler. The slip stacker (one of us) stacked the bales on that sheet of steel as they came out of the baler. At the end of the field all you had to do was step off the slip, stick a hay hook in a bottom bale and hang on. The slip would slide right out from under the pile of bales. Now the guys on the hay wagon would load them up and haul them off to the stack yard. It sure beat walking all over the field gathering up the bales. Bobby Roberts managed to get under the slip with a stack on it. It killed him and the thoughts of it kept us on our toes.

Usually, we shut down for a break midmorning and again midafternoon. We didn't need to bring food but we always brought plenty to drink. On the day I'm thinking of Pop was driving the hay wagon and Mirtle was driving the baler. Butch was slip stacking and Delin Perkins and I were loading the wagon and stacking the hay stack. When we stopped for a break, Mirtle and Pop went to the yard for more baling twine and Delin was finishing up on the big stack. Butch got shaded up and noticed Delin's thermos full of lemonade. Now, you've got to understand that, though we were the same age, Butch was two of me. I hadn't quite cleared 100 pounds yet and I stood 5' 10". Butch on the other hand was a good 190 pounds and was already shaving every day. He didn't really look like a bully, but his reputation and a particularly cold glint in his eye on top of his size kept me in my place. Anyway, Butch picked up the thermos and looking right at me, drank half of it down. Though I said nothing, I'm sure the glint of terror in my eye made it clear that I wasn't going to say anything. I did wonder what Delin would say though. I glanced up at Delin on the stack and when I looked back, there stood Butch peeing Delin's thermos back full.

I have never had a more confusing gumbo of emotions in my whole life as I did that day when I silently watched Delin Perkins down that entire thermos. He never noticed a thing and Butch never even flinched. Today the fear, revulsion, shame, awe, anxiety, delight and bewilderment have all boiled down to a thick greasy guilt. And every time I see old Delin I wonder about that facial tic he's developed.

# 2 - Of hippies, produce and making a living

One summer in the mid-sixties the Hippies had a rendezvous in Boulder, Colorado. Most of them hitchhiked through Himni on their way from California. There wasn't a male in town who had hair over his ears so to us they were quite a site. Most folks just gawked, a few mothers kept their kids indoors, but life didn't change all that much.

Butch Farley and his buddies rolled a few of them, or so we heard. They claimed to have even taken a load of Hippies into the back of Butch's pickup truck ostensibly to convey them on towards Colorado. Instead they took them up on Pine Top and impolitely dropped them off in the middle of nowhere. Butch loved the reputation, but I don't really know if he ever did half the stuff his minions bragged about.

I was working at the local IGA that summer. My first town job. We had the usual crew; a few sweet old ladies in the bakery, a trio of young mothers running the check stands, a bunch of high school kids bagging groceries and stocking shelves. We had an ambitious out-of-towner for a manager who's name was Lester Moore. A smooth ladies man in the meat department called Tuff. And we had a scrawney little manager wannabe running the produce department. His name was Mark Wilson, who was also from out of town.

Mark was always having problems. I think his ambition far outstripped his brains, but he was a nice kid and we all liked him. One day, for example, we called him to the front to help check groceries. He never came. We called again with the same results. When the rush was over; Les sent me over to the Pine Top Cafe' to see if he was sitting in the coffee shop. Nope. We made a cursory search of the store with no results. We even called his house to see if he'd gone home for some reason. No luck, but his wife Leslie, hurried down to help with the search. They'd been married just a few months.

I personally had checked the produce cooler a couple of times. The light switch was on the outside of the door. Both times the light was off. On my third trip around I looked in the cooler again, nothing. Just as the door was closing, though, I heard something and opened the door and turned on the light. A wall of lettuce boxes had collapsed and fallen on top of poor Mark. He'd been there under the pile in that cooler for over three hours. He was shivering uncontrollably and Leslie took him home for the rest of the day.

Another time we had a late night stocking project. Us kids went home at midnight and Les and Mark stayed behind. When we got to the store in the morning it was locked up. We rattled the door and Nellie from the bakery, who had been inside for hours making bread and doughnuts and stuff, let us in. It was dark up in the office so Sue Connor, the head checker made me go up with her. There we found Les and Mark passed out after polishing off a bottle of Jack Daniels. As in the rest of Utah, a bottle Jack Daniels isn’t available in a grocery store and I had never even seen one. Mark had fallen asleep with his neck propped between two coke bottles in a 24 bottle crate. We let them sleep. When they finally came down about eleven, Mark couldn't hold his head up and he stayed that way for about a week.

One Friday morning we got this huge shipment of cantaloupes. Les was livid. We’d never sell that many in a million years. Desperate to prove him wrong before the cants spoiled, Mark put on his thinking cap. Where he got his stroke of genius we’ll never know.

Rarely, had the hippies actually stopped in the store, but on this particular day they were swarming the place. Oh, they bought the usual stuff and tried to look casual but it soon became apparent that it was cantaloupes they were after. Every sale included several! By Saturday night they were almost gone! We had nearly sold the entire stock in two days!

Now, in those days the most common advertising method in the grocery business was the painted sign. Poster paint on butcher paper was the medium. These were usually stapled on a wooden “A” frame out on the sidewalk for the passing traffic to see. It was two days before anyone in the store noticed what Mark had done. There on an ordinary “A” frame was this message. “NOTICE - IT HAS COME TO OUR ATTENTION THAT PEOPLE HAVE BEEN DRYING THE RINDS OF OUR CATELOUPES AND SMOKING THEM – WE ABSOLUTELY REFUSE TO SELL OUR MELLONS FOR ANY OTHER THAN THEIR INTENDED PURPOSE!”

Sometimes we get so desperate to find happiness, we'll try anything.

# 1 - My how the place has changed!

I wasn't born in Himni. It had plenty of history, by the time I got here. I've learned some of the past, but mostly, I'm just going to tell you about the stuff I've seen in this little town since my family arrived. Even so, you ought to know a little about Himni for reference purposes.

Situated in a lonely valley in Eastern Utah, Himni has always been a bit out of the way. When Brigham Young was sending folks into the far reaches of the Intermountain West, this must have been one of the last places he thought of. Himni was hard to reach, dry and pretty much inhospitable. We've always wondered if the first pioneers who came here weren't chased rather than directed to come to such a place. The old folks somehow scratched out a living, but by the looks of things when I arrived, just barely. Then the gentiles started showing up. They were chasing minerals and oil and didn't care much for cows and sheep. They prospered and the rest of the community began looking in their direction.

There never has been much of a quarrel between the Mormons and the gentiles out here, but the mixture has been interesting to see. That's about all you need to know.

I arrived in 1962 and entered the seventh grade at Omner Valley Jr. High. That was about the time of Himni's transition and I thought I might like to share some of those days with you. It was a different time. One today's youngsters may even find hard to believe. I had just turned 12 and was pretty confused about life and living. I had lived in Salt Lake and Provo during my formative years. Not exactly big cities, but really something compared to Duchesne where I'd spent the past two. Now we had uprooted once again and moved to Himni, at least four times the size of Duchesne. The streets were paved. The library didn't have wheels. They had a swimming pool.

Once when my kids were little they wondered how come I knew so much about the 50's when I would have been too small to remember much. It was simple. The 50's didn't get to Himni 'til the 60's. In many ways, thank goodness, the 60's never did get here. There was that couple of weeks the Hippies were passing through town...which makes a great jumping off spot for a first story.