Memoirs Part 1 - The Early Years

My earliest recollection must have taken place in the early 1920s. I was very sick with what was later described to me as pneumonia. It may even have been influenza because there was a flu epidemic about that time which killed many people. The only thing I really remember about it is that I was in a bed in the front room ( the one Grandpa and Grandma Peterson lived in), when suddenly (at least to me) my father and several other men appeared and began to pray. I was told later that it was a "laying on of the hands". I guess it worked.

*********

In about 1923 or 1924, before I started school, a group of the neighborhood children, including me, were playing around an old box elder tree which was part of a rusty barbed wire fence on the north border of what Dad called the vineyard. This fence ran east and west and was just about due west of the barn on the old Spry place.
I may have been showing off a little as I climbed up in the tree, and suddenly the limb I was standing on broke, and I fell feet first onto the fence. One of the barbs caught on my left calf and cut a long ragged gash. I still have the scar, and it is 3 inches long and about 1 inch wide.
I don't recall that it hurt much, but it was bleeding badly, and we all rushed up to our house. I don't remember in any detail what happened next, except that I was rushed up to Margaret Rydalch's (she was the town's practical nurse, we had no doctor) place and can vividly remember how much it hurt when she doused the wound with iodine. She bandaged it up and we went home to find all the children and some of the parents waiting on the bridge in front of the small garage which was then on the front left hand corner of the property.
By then, what with all the attention of both Dad and Mother and the neighbors, I had apparently begun to worry, and have been told that I asked if I was going to die. Everybody, some laughingly and some sympathetically, assured me that the answer was "no".

*********

Some time around 1923 to 1925, Dad took me to visit a very old man named Joshua Clark. He lived in the old adobe house where John Clark lived on Clark Street in Grantsville. I don't know why we went, but it was probably on Church business because Joshua was very likely the town patriarch. He was unimaginably old, at least to me, and the main thing I remember about his appearance was that he had a long white beard.
Joshua and Dad talked some, and Mr. Clark patronized me somewhat, as adults do to small children; when we left, he shook my hand. According to the history of Grantsville prepared by A. A. Gardiner, Mr. Clark served in the Civil War. Thus I can say that I have spoken to and shaken the hand of a Civil War veteran.