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Show Dad entered the feed and grain business utilizing an existing small store on main street. While there, he joined an older Dad’s rural he built a large also built a log house across the street from it where I was born in 1929. I sister, Maxine. business prospered and he began making money. Able to obtain financing, warehouse to store the grain and to provide the necessary services. During this time our little log home burned down. Dad met this awful disaster by quickly converting a part of the new warehouse to a "temporary" upstairs apartment. This was to be our frugal home for the next ten years. Trouble loomed on the horizon however. On October 24, panic spread in the eastern money markets. The terrifying "Black Thursday” shocked the nation and the prices of stocks and bonds crashed. The following Tuesday the market collapsed completely. There were many bankruptcies, foreclosures, and bank failures. Millions were unemployed and lost their life savings, homes, and farms. The depression spread worldwide. Bear Lakers were not immune as it hit businesses throughout the valley and some went under. Dad’s business was also in serious trouble. He had extended himself financially as far as he could, and with a growing family the crash placed a growing hardship on all. However tough the conditions, he found the ways and means to stay afloat and convince his lenders to stay with him. AROUND THE BEND AGAIN... In this setting in 1929, I started on my own life’s journey--a varied one indeed. A harsh disciplinarian, Dad tried not to allow any of us kids to stray. He did this by By Ken Sleight keeping us busy, and the jobs he assigned us created even more jobs. At my young age, I often aided the hired-help with the dirty job of hauling coal. We shoveled the coal from the rail cars in Montpelier, loaded it onto the truck, delivered it to our customers, and dumped it in their coal chute. I helped grind, clean, and bag the grain. Many hours were spent in mending burlap sacks--by sewing or by mixing up a flour paste and ironing burlap patches onto the grain sacks, THE ADVENTURE In January 1931 my busy mother bore twin boys, Ray and Roy. She labored long hours in rearing the four of us while also helping tend to the demanding business. Relief problems persisted. The caring of human needs centered mainly on our church, private charities, and the government. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the OF NEW BEGINNINGS We didn’t enter this world voluntarily; we each entered it guiltlessly alone. New and fresh beginnings now await us in our new millennium, and a brief historical reflection might be in order before we begin that journey. And so I pause to celebrate and share my own rustic beginnings with you knowing that we each have a most unique connection to our blessed earth, ourselves, our family, and our community. My reflection begins with Thomas Sleight, a low-land swamp farmer from Lincolnshire England, who converted to the Mormon Church and sailed to the states in 1854. He settled Genoa on the old Mormon Trail in Nebraska in 1857 until burned out by the Sioux; traveled by wagon train to Utah in 1860; helped colonize Cache Valley; and in 1863, after the Bear River Massacre had lessened the Indian threat, he uprooted again at the direction of Brigham Young to help settle Bear Lake Valley. Of the original pioneer party, Thomas Sleight built his one-room log cabin in Paris, Idaho. [The house is a tourist attraction today across from my dad’s old warehouse, now housing the Idaho State Parks.] Paris is located in the most southeastern county of the state. * There he set up a farm on Paris Creek and with others grubbed and cleared the sagebrushcovered hills and valleys. As Thomas’s first wife had recently died, he married the fourteen-year-old daughter from the polygamous family of Solomon Wixom. From that arranged marriage came my gentle grandfather, George Sleight, who had married the feisty Emily Miles, the daughter of a former sailor, London pub owner, and polygamous prisoner, John Horne Miles. From that contested marriage, my father was born in 1903. He also made his home in Paris, a small town of about 700 people or so. In the prosperous decade of the exciting twenties, industrialists and the government were having a heyday. The enormous factories could not turn out consumer goods fast enough, producing more than the American people had money to purchase. It was an age WPA program also brought needed jobs to the county. I remember the workers gathering at our warehouse with their shovels and tools in hand for transport to the road-building projects. Many of the dirt roads had not even been graveled, yet alone paved. My first years were spent in the act of growing up. But not all was rosy. At the age of six, in 1936, just before starting school, I contracted pneumonia and was in the Soda Springs hospital and ill for some time. Pneumonia was usually fatal as sulpha drugs or antibiotics were not yet available. I think my folks had given up on my pulling through. My family once came all together to see me, and they seemed sad-eyed. The solemn-looking church man prayed over me. Dad gave me an erector set; the elation I felt on receiving it probably pulled me through, fooling them all. The effects of the pneumonia stayed with me. On entering school the teachers found I ° couldn’t see the writin’ on the chalk board so well. It all looked fuzzy. Dad took me to Pocatello where I was tested and fitted with eye glasses. My first trip out of Bear Lake Valley proved successful. On my return, my classmates taunted me for a long time asI was the only “four-eyes" in the school. Soon after getting the glasses, I broke them in a hellish fight and got further hell whenI got home, but from it I won another trip to Pocatello. I’ve worn glasses ever since. School continued to be tough. One day, I my forgot my book and assignment, and the teacher ordered me to go back home to get them. I left the school but didn’t go back home. Instead, I took off for the hills. Above Stucki Hill, where we sledded on our Flyers in the winters, I roamed about the old burned-out Fielding Academy, a Mormon high school where my folks had attended. My infamous and harsh great grandfather John Horne Miles was superintendent at the time it burned. Hiking about all day and enjoying the short period of outdoor freedom, I returned home in the afternoon when dutifully expected. This escape mechanism was repeated on special occasions when needed. As my mother had so much to do, she handed me over to my loving and aging grandparents Peterson in nearby Ovid for them to help raise me. Over the decade, I came to be as much a part of the Peterson family as the Sleights. Grandpa was of Danish stock of bigness, prosperity and optimism—the era of J.P. Morgan and David Rockefeller. However in Bear Lake and many other rural areas, farming had been in a deep and prolonged depression for some time. My father, his bent to the commercial, looked forward to a hoped-for prosperity. He and Grandma a mixture of Swedish and Norwegian. Their sparse income derived mainl .‘ from egg and milk production. Though they worked hard, they were very poor. I didn’t had married Orletta Peterson, an attractive farm girl from nearby Ovid in November 1925. ’ realize that then. 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