Living on a farm...

When we moved back to Utah, dad didn't want to live on base, or the waiting list was too long. Instead we ended up renting a farm house on Hill Field Road. It was a lot of fun and the farmer in dad came out. He loved to raise tomatoes. He planted a huge tomatoe patch. I remember sitting in the tomato patch and eating fresh tomatoes, right off the vine.

We also raised chickens. Grandma McNeill gave my mom a great recipie for Chicken Dumpling soup. Dad had about 10-15 chickens. When we were transferred to Fairchild A.F.B., we had to kill all the chickens, pluck them and freeze them. I still remember the chickens running around with their heads chopped off.

Dad spent a lot of time setting up the trains, again not letting us touch them. We got to help build the scenery, paint, and run the switches while he controlled the train.

Dad also let Dan and I raise rabbits. The Farm had chicken sheds and we converted one into a rabbit pen.

The guy that we rented the house from raised sheep. We used to play in the fields and in the spring we got to play with the newborn lambs. He let me help him cut the tails off the lambs. He also had a cow. Part of the agreement that dad and he had was that "I" would get up every morning and milk the cow. Guess you could say that was my first job. We had a large barn, filled with hay. We had a rope swing in the barn and we used to play for hours and I can still smell the sweet smell of the barn.

My aunt Charlotte (dad's sister) and uncle Earl lived in the same area. They raised banty chickens. Easter of 1957, they, along with my cousin Sharon, came to visit. They brought colored banty eggs. They were tiny and really cool.

The first Christmas that I can really remember was in that farm house. Charlotte, Earl, and Sharon came over.

I remember going to school in either Layton. I remember that it was a large 2 story building. Out side was a great swing set with a fence behind it. During recess, we used to swing as high as we could and then bail out and land on the other side of the fence.

Thinking back, my first memory of a friend was here. He lived across the highway from us and we used to play in the irrigation ditches, roam the fields, and catch frogs, snakes, and anything else that we could find.

We lived in Layton for about 1 year before being transferred to Fairchild A.F.B., near Spokane, Washington.