by

Ivin Laurence Gee

(May 25^th 2002)

To really understand people one needs to experience the circumstances that form the personalities. Our world has moved so far and so fast in the last 100 years that it’s almost impossible for us to really understand how things use to be. In order to understand Mother and Dad you need to picture life without electricity, indoor hot and cold water, indoor bathrooms, home heating, air-conditioning, television, microwaves, washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, personal computers and the list goes on. Also without satellite communication, jet air travel, freeways and e-mail. Instead think of lanterns, outhouses, Saturday night baths in the kitchen, ice boxes, tubs with washboards, a hand pump just outside the back door where water for the house was acquired, coal fired stoves, and silent movies. At the time of their beginning there were no jet trails in the sky, most of the roads were dirt and snail mail was the only choice.

Dad and mother were born into less than affluent circumstances. Every one of their grandchildren and great grandchildren has more wealth than they had as children, more wealth in fact, than they had until most of their children were grown. As a result they were like most of the people of their day. They made their own clothes; they made their own soap, and their own bread. They butchered their own meat, raised chickens and sold eggs and they raised gardens with vegetables and berries. Even though their circumstances were not affluent, as we know affluence today, they were able to get an education and have never stopped learning.

My parents always enjoyed and appreciated good music and they taught their children to enjoy good music. This is a legacy that has now been passed to three generations. Even though radios were scarce and the variety of radio stations were at a minimum, they still managed to listen to good music and were interested in the arts. As the years passed, availability of the arts improved. I remember that they would listen to a radio program and try to guess the name of the song that was playing. If the announcer did not give the name of the piece dad would often call the radio station to enquire after the name and the composer.

I remember going to the opera house in Denver on the streetcar and we saw our first opera, Carmen with Risa Stevens (a famous soprano of the day). But most of the time they had to listen to the Opera on Saturday afternoons on the radio. I have probably seen more operas and ballets in 6 months in Moscow that they have seen in their entire lives, but it was not because they did not have the desire. Live performances were rarely available to them. Today with the miracle of television they are able to enjoy in the comfort of their home, and see as well as hear the things that were denied them in earlier years.

I remember Dad buying a 45- rpm record player and we listened to Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. I still remember and sing some of the songs from those operettas. They will always hold a special memory for me. We enjoyed some lighter entertainment also, my brothers and I memorized the Spike Jones records as well as others that Dad bought and we still perform them at family functions. You are spared today because I am away.

This was the introduction that stimulated my desire for good music and the arts. This introduction to the arts has always governed my choices and so when I had money of my own, the first recordings that I bought were compositions by Tchaikovsky: Caprricio Italiane and the 1812 Overture.

When we lived in Denver we had a large garden and we tilled the land by hand. A man who had a store in downtown Denver owned the land. When the garden began producing it was my job to bicycle downtown and take him some vegetables from the harvest. We ate fresh vegetables from our garden and bottled the surplus for the winter. Not many people today would look for a vacant lot to raise a garden. We even had a chicken house and raised chickens and eggs when I was gong to high school in Lander. When they were growing up they worked long hard hours for very little money. When I was growing up there still was not an abundance of money. When I finished high school, I got a summer job with the Bureau of Land Management and I earned more money in a month than my mother did. My parents learned to work and they taught me to work, perhaps that is the reason that I enjoy working and have an appreciation for the affluence.

My parents were proactive in their children’s education. I did not obtain all my education in school. I remember sitting at the dinner table and Dad would have us mentally add, subtract, multiply and divide a series of numbers and then at the end ask us the answer. My parents drilled me on my spelling words, until I knew them. My parents stimulated my desire for learning and education. We read books together, one of the common family activities of the day. One can never be too appreciative of that influence in one’s life.

From my earliest days the church has always been central to our family life. As far as I know that was the case with my parents before I came into their life. I have never known a period of inactivity in their lives as members of the restored gospel. My life growing up was centered in church activity. There were many meetings in those days and we attended them all. In Denver we went to Stake conferences in the high school auditorium and after the meeting the people would line up to shake the hand of the general authority who visited the conference. The church was relatively small in those days. We were acquainted there with people who were later called to serve as general authorities. John H. Vandenberg who became the Presiding Bishop lived in our ward with his family. Victor L. Brown who also became the Presiding Bishop lived in Denver as well as Gordon B. Hinckley who also lived in Denver and was acquainted with my parents. Elder Joseph F. Merrill of the council of the twelve came to Denver and ordained Dad a high priest and had dinner at our home on his visit there.

Dad always went to general conference; Mother and Dad also attended the June MIA conferences each year. Seated around the table after supper, we read the Book of Mormon as a family, Strangers who came to church were often invited to our home to eat Sunday dinner and we often had the full time missionaries in our home to eat whatever food we had on hand. We always seemed to have something to feed them. From this background I learned to keep the church and the gospel foremost in my life, to be hospitable to those who were strangers and to enjoy the scriptures. Our food was simple. We had the basic foodstuffs and our ability to prepare them was limited by the times in which we lived. When they would find some new way to prepare food or cook some new dish, my parents would adopt it into their repertoire. Bread and milk was not an uncommon dish in our home and milk toast was reserved to be eaten if you were sick. I suppose that was stimulus for me to develop my interest in the kitchen and in food. My mother was patient and let me learn to bake cakes and do simple cooking tasks. I still enjoy cooking.

Life for them has, as for all of us, been sprinkled with disappointments and frustrations and unfulfilled dreams. They have not generally shared those with their family. I was ambitious for my father. I wanted him to advance in the government employ and as I understood it at that time he reached the level that his education would allow him. I thought that he should go back to school and get a graduate degree. As it was, he blossomed where he was planted and made lemonade of his lemon in life. I once asked him if he had any disappointments in his lifetime and he said that he did, but he never enumerated what they were. He has kept a faithful record of the proceedings of his life. Perhaps one day we will have enough time to read the volumes that he has produced and discover what those bumps in the road of life were. In Lander Mother and Dad became pioneers. Their parents and grandparents were pioneer settlers of Utah and Idaho. We came from the largest city in the intermountain west and moved to Lander. We moved from a Stake and ward to a mission and no branch of the church, just a Sunday School. We moved from a relatively nice duplex apartment to two mining shacks hooked together with a log cabin on the back and no hot running water. All our furniture came three months after we arrived in Lander. It was discouraging to mother to have to move to such a small desolate place after living in the big city. She walked the streets of Lander in below zero weather, because we did not have an auto, to find a more suitable dwelling for her family, but was unsuccessful. They did what they had to do to build a home and strengthen the church. Pioneers build and they built. They built a reputation for dependability and service to the church and the community. They had to walk everywhere they went until mother went to Denver and bought a car and drove it back to Lander. This was a bold thing to do because my parents did not believe in going into debt. There was some discussion, but eventually things worked out and we had the luxury of automotive transportation. We have a chapel in Lander due in part to the perseverance and vision of dad and mother.

When one looks at people we see them from different angles and perspectives. The whole person is rarely viewed, not because the view is not there, but our ability to view is not at once three dimensional and multi-sided. We may get a pretty good idea of the whole, but never the complete picture. Often biased by our own near-sightedness, we fail to catch everything that is available. I believe that living as close to them as I have, I can appreciate them in spite of their faults, and remember them for their strengths. I hope that in future years I might look back and have the great pleasure of living with my spouse for as many years. Happy wedding anniversary, Father and Mother.