JULY
I spent a lot of the time outside beneath a large shade tree on A street next to the apartment where this black lab was chained up. He was owned by this young girl who lived in the apartment who bought him from the pound on Beck Street for $5. She was able to get him cheap by flirting. Anyway I spent so much time with the dog that I asked if I could walk him and spend time with him as he bonded with me and actually the girl was too busy with a social life to really spend much time with him. She named him Sam. When she heard that we were moving she asked if I wanted Sam as she was neglecting him and I jumped at the opportunity to have a dog once again in my life.
Fran was working at Monroc but was really unhappy there because she said the men there kept propositioning her and she felt really uncomfortable being the only woman on a man's job site. I was still the manager of the Huddle but I was getting bored with it as it didn't give me any real motivation to use my education. Fran had her friends for a social lie outside of me but I had no one but Fran and Sam.
Fran was insistent that we have a year supply of food staples as the church was really pushing members to comply as Spencer W Kimball had been harping on the issue for years but at April Conference it was taught if you followed the prophet you would have a year supply. Fran went to work some at the LDS food co-op and canned several cases of beef stew and purchased cases of dried milk and hundreds of pounds of un milled wheat. She was sure that President Kimball knew something no one else did about a disaster that was coming. Between paying tithing and food storage we were financially strapped especially when Fran quit Monroc and mine was the only income.
17 July 1977 Sunday
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| The Greylyn |
It is so hot in this apartment. I am sitting here this hot Sunday in Salt Lake City on our apartment 29 on 205 Second Avenue. The apartment building is called the Greylyn. It's an old building built probably in the 1930's or perhaps earlier without any air- conditioning. It's a pretty building and our one bedroom apartment is nice but we have out grown it. We have so much paraphernalia here that the place always looks crowded and cluttered. Besides we have really crummy landlords which makes it all the more hard to live here. I've been here since December but they have never fixed one thing that we have complained about. The cupboard drawers have broken just because the wood is rotted out. Our bed fell apart because of broken splints so since March we have been sleeping on the mattress on the floor. We wakeup all the time with back aches. Even going grocery shopping is a chore because since we live on the 4th floor of the apartment building with no elevator, just carrying the bags of groceries up four flights of stairs is tiresome. It is also so hot in the apartment because it has no air conditioning. We did buy a used fan off of Elaine Nychyk who I used to work with in the sandwich department. It helps a little especially at night when it is so hot and we are desperate to go to sleep. Especially Fran as she has to get up by 6 to get ready for work and there's many nights when she doesn't get to sleep before midnight. Elaine moved from these apartments around the first of July and the landlord's did her dirt refusing to return her cleaning deposit and some other things. The land lady Karen is such a Utah wimp.. She acts so sweet and innocent but all the time is ready to stab you in the back. In the middle and last part of June we had a lot of trouble with noise outside below our window real late at night. Like at 2 and 3 in the morning. We had complained to the landlord for them to do something about it but they wouldn't give us any satisfaction so I had to call the police on two occasions. There is a whore who loves in the apartment right below us who sleeps with blacks and about anyone else who comes along. She plays real loud music on her stereo at 2 and 3 in the morning or she will have a party that late with lots of shouting and general commotion. Fran and I aren't fuddy-duddies but enough is enough. And if this isn't bad enough there is this crazy lady who lives next door to us. When she is normal she is quite timid, soft spoken older lady but when she goes crazy, she screams the worse obscenities I have ever heard. She growls and speak in two voices and it is so clear at times you can hear her through the walls. But we have had some good times in the apartment also. It was our honeymoon home as well as the place i asked Fran to marry me. But we have out grown this place and its time to move on. We really don't have a lot of close friends in alt Lake City. Fran has Paulette Gasparac but I really don't have any friends outside of work. I guess we are going to take Sam with us to Texas. He's this dog that a neighbor girl down stairs said we could have. He's all black and beautiful and a smart dog.
I quite my job at the Huddle around the 30th of July. The kids there really hated to see me go as I am sure Mr. Chruch was. My crew gave me a going away party of sorts. Fran and I made up our minds to move to Texas to seek our fame and fortune. Almost everyone gagged when we told them we were moving to Texas. It's like they couldn't understand why anyone would want to live there. The hardest part of leaving was leaving Paulette Gasparac and Murray Van Wagoner . I didn't realize what an emotional strain it was for Fran and them for her to leave. Especially for Murray. It was especially hard because Fran might never see him again in this life time. We rented a U-Haul and made a midnight move from our apartment on July 31st. Richard and Piper Holmes more or less helped with the move. We didn't owe any money or anything, we just wanted to be out by the first of August. We had to take both car, my Pinto and Fran's Dodge station wagon which was pulling the U Haul. My Pinto would never have been able to pull the U-Haul trailer. Also Frans vehicle was a stick shift which I never learned to drive. After loading up the U-Haul there was no room from the sacks of Wheat and as it they were weighing the Pinto down, we gave most of it away to Paulette Gasparac and Steve and Meg Madsen. So that was a waste of money.
AUGUST
We stayed with Murray Van Wagoner for a couple of days before leaving for Texas but first we went down to Provo to help Piper and Richard Holmes move from Spanish Fork Canyon back into Orem. Richard really wasted a lot of our time and Fran and I were both mad at him. Back at Murray's we left around the 5th of August with Fran getting lost at the very beginning. She was suppose to stay up with me to travel together but we got separated and I had no idea where she was. I went back to Murray and waited there for her to call me to tell me where she was and I was so anxious I was almost ready to panic. She finally called me after several hours when she stopped in Green River and I told her to stay there until I could come for her. I was so worried about her. It was late in the afternoon when I finally reached Green River and we spent the night in Moab, exhausted and frustrated. I had Sam the dog with me the whole trip while Fran was alone although she did have a radio. At Moab I paid $30 for a motel room because of the time of night and that its was in the middle of vacation time. We felt robbed but we had to get a good night sleep. The next day on the 6th we drove into Gallup, New Mexico and spent the night there in a sleazy place which wasn't worth the $22 it cost to stay there. By this time we learned we had to make reservations at Motel 6 way in advance if you wanted cheaper accommodations. After three days on the road we finally made it into Grandpa Johnson's farm around the 8th of August. We stayed with them about a week. We even went into Lubbock to look for work applying at Texas Tech's Food Service operations. But the thought of living in Lubbock after leaving beautiful Salt Lake City was really depressing. I was so worried about Sam being left in the car at night that I once sneaked Sam into the house but when Grandma saw him she was not pleased so out Sam went again. Grandpa suggested that I find work at the levi plant in Littlefield but the thought of being a factory worker was also too depressing. Fran was also complaining of the constant buzzing and clicking noise of the giant katy-did swarms and that was the clincher to move on. We left Fran's car and unloaded the U-Haul which was mostly food storage, dried milk, returned it to Littlefield before taking off in my car and we drove into the Fort Worth-Dallas area. We spent the night in Dallas but the city was just too big for us so we decided to settle in Fort Worth instead. The day we looked for a place to live, it must have been the hottest day of the year and so humid. Poor Sam. Poor us. We found an apartment on Ridgemar Blvd.. called the Gates of Spain. The rent was really more than we could afford $285 a month but we were so hot and tired and miserable we wanted any place that we could get into and settled. After signing a six month lease, we drove back to West Texas to retrieve our things from the farm. Since we left the food storage items on the farm we were able to fit the rest into the Pinto and Fran's Dodge station wagon. Barely. We drove back into Ft. Worth and we heard on the radio that Elvis Presley had died and that was really upsetting for Fran. Our new one bedroom furnished apartment was really nice and had a pool. We never got to know any of our neighbors except for one single kid who lived above us and a married couple next door although we had nothing in common with them. The apartment complex itself was situated just to the east of the Ridgemar Shopping Mall but for grocery shopping and laundry the complex was really inconvenient. The closest grocery store was Albertson's on Camp Bowie which is where we almost always shopped except occasionally at Buddies. All in all the apartment was a burden for us financially and it kept us from getting ahead in Ft. Worth. We knew we were in the wrong neighborhood when we saw all our neighbors driving Cadillacs and coup deVille's. It was also very difficult for Fran to find her way around Fort Worth after living in Salt Lake and I had to go with her always for her to look for work so she wouldn't get lost. Her first job was at Texas Sand and Gravel as a dispatcher. TXI was about 17 miles from where we lived, clear on the other side of Ft. Worth near Hurst. She had had to drive though this terrible freeway overpass called the Mix Master where cars entered and exited in a huge conglomeration in the heart of downtown Ft. Worth. It was a nightmare to drive through because you have about 12 lanes of traffic merging and crossing over into every lane. I got a job as a manager of a Taco Bell with a supposed salary of $800 a month although I never made that much even though I was on salary. I worked at a Stand on Mansfield Highway near the South Campus of Ft Worth Jr. College. I took over running the stand after a week of training, responsible for all aspects of the operations. My immediate boss was a man named Jack Hammer a Chicago Jew and a real jerk.
SEPTEMBER
I took over management of the Taco Bell on 3rd September. Fran quit her job at TXI shortly after I was hired at Taco Bell because it was too far to travel everyday for her and one of her tires had a blow out on the freeway her Dodge Wagon was just too old of a car fir that kin of daily abuse. Besides with us both working high pressure jobs we were fighting a lot an when Fran quit her job it took the pressure of and itw as nice coming home to dinner ready and a clean place. Since she only worked 3 weeks at TXI we never really goy a head on my salary. It was a difficult time for us because Lois Draper from the U of U Food Service held up my last paycheck for so long that we were really in a financial bind. We had to come up with close to $500 for our apartment in depots and two weeks rent, then one month rent so that wiped us out of our cash. Until Fran had her first paycheck in the middle of September we were reduced to living on the food supply we bright with us mainly Peanut Butter and Canned Beef Stew
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