My account is is about events, dates, places, and people as I remember them, accurate in my mind, but who knows... I am not really into writing but my daughter Toni has been pushing me to write about the family and events that I can remember.

According to the stories that my mother (Grandmother) told me about my birth, I was born in Fruitland , Duchesne County, Utah. My Father, Clark L. Johnson, was a construction worker, operating road building equipment. He told me that he operated the first Caterpillar Bulldozer to be used in Utah.

My father and my mother, Mary Jane (Baadsgaard) Johnson, were living in quite primitive conditions: a tent. The day of my birth the weather was so bad that it was necessary for my father and some of the workers to park earth-moving equipment next to the tent to keep the tent from being blown away. A doctor was called from the small town of Duchesne, about 20 miles distant, and I was delivered.

After the birth, my mother did not respond well and within a few days my father brought us to her parents' home in Lake Shore, Utah. My grandmother, Margaret Beck Baadsgaard, took over the duties of caring for us. My mother's condition continued to worsen and she died a couple of months after my birth.

There are conflicting stories about the cause of her death. My grandmother, who I called mom, told me that my mother died of typhoid fever. My father told me it might have been cancer. My uncle Roy Johnson told me that he came to see her and she was having terrible chills and then fever; he thought that she was suffering from infection. Esbern and Alfred Baadsgaard have told me of the terrible fever and chills that my mother suffered through. It is my belief that she died from a childbirth infection brought on by an unskilled doctor and the use of dirty medical equipment. Doctors of the 1920s were not noted for being clean.

After my mothers death I remained with my grandmother. Of course I knew her as mother and always called her mom. She will always be mom. She was a wonderful person.

I lived with her and granddad Marinus Baadsgaard until he died. I was about two years old. I think that I remember seeing him but it is probably my imagination. To the best of my recollection Granddad died from cancer. I do know that he had one of his eyes removed because of his disease.

In the Spanish Fork area where he worked and farmed, granddad had the reputation for being a "mathematical genius." I have heard of his wondrous ability for years from people who knew him and worked with him. I have always been a little bit skeptical about the genius part but I think that granddad did have an education that was above the average and he was an avid reader. He did accounting work for several of the merchants in Spanish Fork, including the Utah & Idaho Sugar Co., and was involved in the organization of the Strawberry Water Project. He did accounting work for several fly-by-night mining companies and stock companies as well. For his labor he took mining stocks.

I recall looking through the stock certificates, books full of them, beautifully illustrated in gold and green writing. When I was about ten years old Mom and I stacked a large pile of them up and burned them. They had been left in the old shed behind the house and they were full of insect larvae. (,,,,,,,,,, tears) The books were beautiful. There were stocks from the Dream Mine and dozens of mines that were non-existent.

Buildings still exist from John Coyle's Dream Mine; they are located East of Salem. I have heard that some stock holder still believes in the vision of John Coyle.

Granddad was a hard worker but was not a progressive sort of a person. He would walk to Spanish Fork rather than ride a horse or ride in one of the few model "Ts" that were in existence.

I can recall Dr. Stoddard making house calls, coming to our house in a buggy pulled by a single horse. He would go wherever he was needed. We had one of the earliest telephones and people needing the doctor would come to our house to call him.

Living on the small farm of 28 acres in the 30s was a good life for us, but we were poor, very poor, and mom struggled from one year to the next just to survive and pay the taxes. She worried constantly about losing the farm and going to the "Poor House."

We had electricity in the house and a phone, but not much else. The house was not well built by today's standards. There was no insulation and no central heating. We had two stoves, one in the kitchen and one in the living room. We didn't use the living room much and the bedrooms were freezing cold in the winter. Mom and I spent most of our indoor time in the lean-to room we called the kitchen. In the winter we would build a big fire in the wood stove, pull up our chairs, put our feet in the oven then read or listen to the radio for entertainment. Indoor plumbing wasn't even a dream. I was twenty-one before I actually lived in a place with indoor plumbing and that was an Army Barracks.

I think the thing that made life bearable was the fact that all of our neighbors were poor. Being poor was a way of life for us. If we had been the only poor people, life would have been miserable. Mom had no refrigerator and no one in Lake Shore had one until much later.

Mom was a great cook who could make a good meal from almost nothing. We ate what we raised and what was available. We had chickens and raised hogs. We had lots of eggs, salt pork, potatoes year-round that we kept in a dugout cellar, and vegetables & fruit in season.

Mom "bottled" a lot of food and occasionly meat, especially in later years when I was old enough to shoot Pheasant and Deer.

Our clothes were not grand but mom would never let me go dirty. She would say "everyone can afford soap." Until I was in High School my clothes consisted of a pair of work shoes, a pair of Sunday shoes, a couple of pairs of bib overhauls with shirts, and one set of Sunday clothes. All of us went to school in our clean work clothes. Mom would never let me go barefoot; to her, only poor people went barefoot.