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Show Volume XV Issue X The Ogden Valley news Page 11 May 1, 2008 Note: This story is from Valley Elementary teacher Mrs. Jane McVaugh’s 1996-1997 fourth grade class that collected and typed up a number of historical accounts from Valley residents, then compiled them in a book called “Tails, Wings, and Other Things: A collection of animal stories.” The following account is by lifetime resident of Ogden Valley, Lula Hill Jensen. We had many animals on our farm. We always had horses because we had cattle to herd and round up. We had to bring them in from the pasture, which was by River Road. My grandfather and father owned that land. My brother, who was older than me, loved to hear me scream. He would get me on the back of the horse when we would go to heard the cows and go just as fast as the horse would go. I would be screaming all the way because I was so afraid I was going to fall off. I was behind the saddle and holding on for dear life, but he still loved to go fast. One day when I was seven years old, I did fall off. I fell off as the horse jumped a ditch and it gave me a bloody nose. My nose bled for hours. My mother was absolutely frantic. She sent for my grandmother to come and help get my nose to stop bleeding. We didn’t have hospitals to go to then or doctors to call. You just had to help yourself. Luckily, they were able to get my nose to stop bleeding before I bled to death. Since that very day, I’ve been scared of horses. When I was about twelve years old we had a coop full of chickens that was a half block from our house. Our house was sitting on the low ground and up on the top of the hill was a shed where we had chickens in one part of it and we kept our little calves in the other. Down in the field was a big barn where we kept our milk cows and milked them. We took turns feeding the chickens and watering them and this was at noontime. We had a great big brown and white Guernsey bull and his name was Lucky Lindy. He was born on the day that Charles Lindbergh made his successful flight across the Atlantic Ocean. We raised him and as he became older he became very mean. This day my mother sent me out just before we had dinner. She said, “You have time to go up and water the chickens and gather the eggs before your father will be in to have lunch.” My father was a remarkable man. He never had a wristwatch, but he never missed coming into dinner five minutes one way or the other. We had dinner at twelve o’clock noon every day of my young life. He would look at the sun and know by the position of the sun in the sky that it was twelve o’clock noon. This day he was a few minutes late The Trouble withcalf.Farm Animals Russell Wayment, who lived down in coming. I was up on top of the hill and here came that mean bull. He had gotten out of the fence and had seen me going into the chicken coop and had come to that door. Needless to say, I locked the door from the inside and stood there absolutely petrified. He bellered and he pawed. I was watching him through the window and wondering how in the world I was ever going to get out of that coop. Everyone knew I was there, but I had been there so many times before nobody came to help me. He bellered and bellered for about five minutes and when he saw that I wasn’t coming out he backed away and started going back down to the pasture. I very quietly, with a bucket of eggs in my hand, mind you, went through that door and started down the hill. He heard me, and he turned as fast as he could go. When I went into the kitchen door that bull’s horns hit the door as I slammed it. You wonder why I don’t like animals! That frightened me to death! I never, ever, wanted to go up to feed the chickens anymore, but of course I had to. When we would go to herd the cows we had a creek called Spring Creek. We used to take the cows up the trail and then over to River Road. There was a very high bank. Through the years the water had made this high bank. When the cows would go through there, they would just keep pulling it down and make it a little deeper. One day my brother and I were going through this creek with the cows and we both slid off the back of the horse. I could not swim and it was very, very deep. If my brother hadn’t been there I would have drown. When I was fifteen, it was my job to ride the derrick horse and to pull the hay up into the barn with a Jackson Fork. Our barn was situated between two hills. Because that horse could not pull that Jackson Fork without having a lot of encouragement, my father used to holler at me and if I couldn’t make the horse go then he would come around and hit the horse on the back. The horse would just lunge. I was scared to death! I have not ridden a horse since I’ve become an adult because I was just so frightened of animals so many times in my youth. Then I grew up and married Keith Jensen. We moved to Huntsville. We had four children and as they were growing up, they loved animals. Marlin belonged to a Calf 4-H Club. Verns Wangsgard spent all of his younger years with younger boys teaching them how to take care of animals, and how to train them, how to get them ready to go to the fair, and to show them. Marlin loved doing this. He was so good at doing this that he won a purebred Warren, always gave a Holstein purebred calf to the best 4-H boy in the county. Marlin won this calf and he loved it so much, and he trained it. He spent hours and hours leading it back and forth so that when he took it to the 4-H Club Fair it would know how to show. You had to get it in the ring and compete with all the other boys who had calves. Your calf had to lead the best and know how to hold its nose up in the air the best. It had to be scrubbed the cleanest. I remember this one day we were going to the fair and Marlin always got up at six o’clock. He went to the barn and got his calf. We had an irrigation ditch that ran in front of our home. He brought it down into that ditch and came up and got a bottle of Clorox. The calf was black and white and he had to have all the white just perfect, so he used just a little bit of Clorox to get the yellow stain off from the back of the calf. Well, he scrubbed that calf until it was so tired. When he got it in the ring to show it, it laid down. Do you think he could get it up? No! It was absolutely exhausted. He learned a great lesson that day—animals get tired too, as well as people. When Richard was about sixteen he wanted to take guitar lessons. We gave him guitar lessons for quite some time. He got some friends together and they used to practice because they were going to have a rock band. These boys used to come down in our basement and practice. There was Halvor Bailey’s boy, he played the guitar. Floyd Hogge’s boy played a guitar, and Richard played a guitar. A young man from Ogden played the drums. One night they were practicing down there. It was about ten thirty and my husband and I were tired and wanted to go to bed. Keith told the boys to take their instruFARM AnIMALs cont. on page 12 Historical Photo 1930’s 1970’s EdEn’s OLd BLACksMITH sHOP THROugH THE yEARs. Celeste C. Canning PLLC Attorney at Law 2590 Washington Boulevard, Suite 200 Ogden, Utah 84401 Local: (801) 791-1092 Office: (801) 612-9299 Email: ccanninglaw@aol.com Meeting the Legal Needs of Small Business and Their Owners FREE Initial Thirty Minute Consultation. Appointments in Ogden Valley upon request. www.iversondental.com |
