George Hyrum Hansen

Reflections of Mother and Dad

-By Richard Hansen

Mother and Dad, George Hyrum and Erna Mary Hall, were married in 1934 at a double wedding with Uncle Reed and Aunt Marie Allen from Teasdale. They came to Salt Lake in November, the 10th, and had a double wedding. I was born the following August 26th, and cousin Jody (JoAnn) in September 8th of 1935. There was another double wedding that year with Aunt Esther Hansen and LaFayette Jones, and Christella Hansen and Allen Naylor had a double-wedding in December of the same year, 1934, and their daughters Sky (Kathleen) and Helen were born the following year.

Mother and Dad built their house, started building it in 1933 and didn’t get it finished until after the war. They built the lower half of the house, but Daddy was afraid of being drafted in the army so he moved us to Richfield for a few years so Mother wouldn’t be alone in Boulder. We then moved to Provo for two years until the end of the war, and then went back to Boulder and they finished the house. We were ranchers, and Dad built a small general store and Mother clerked in the store a lot. Grandma Hansen had the Boulder post office for 35 years, in one room of her home, which was adjacent to our house.

Mother was a hard worker, they produced most of their own food and canned it in jars. The goal was usually a thousand cans of food to get them through the winter. Most of what they bought was flour and sugar that they couldn’t produce, but they produced most of their own food, so they had big orchards and gardens. They would even bottle the chickens and fish and beef, pressure cooked, because before 1948 there was no electricity in Boulder so there was no way to freeze anything. In the summer the farmers would take turns killing a cow so we would have fresh meat but in the winter all we had was the preserved foods. Let me put a little note in here about how in the winter, when the pond would freeze, the men would cut big blocks of ice and store it buried in sawdust. Every morning we would take two-quart jars of milk and dig down into the sawdust and by supper-time it would be ice-cold. On the fourth of July we would take enough ice out to make homemade ice cream for the town celebration. This was the only time of the year we had ice cream.

Mother was a great fisherwoman, she would do about 40 or 50 quarts of fish. We loved to fish, every summer after we got the first crop of hay in, we took the team and wagon and would go up in the Boulder mountains and we’d stay a week or more and fish, keep them in the cold water, and the day before we left they’d catch a bunch more and we’d go home and bottle them. Those were in the days before roads, so we would go up there in the wagon and camp and eat fish three times a day and dutch-oven biscuits. But mother was famous for her fishing, that was her passion. Later she learned to fly-fish, and she was an excellent fisherwoman. We just had little willow poles with our worms, but when she got a bamboo pole she learned to fly-fish.

Dad was an excellent farmer and he brought the first irrigation sprinkling system to Boulder in 1949. Instead of flood irrigation, he brought a sprinkling system in. Now everyone in Southern Utah uses sprinklers, it’s much more efficient, to sprinkle the alfalfa and the wheat, but he had the distinction of being the first man to buy a sprinkler unit and bring it in.

When I went to college, in 1953, she was afraid of not being able to go anywhere, Boulder was pretty dull and she wanted more social life, she didn’t want to spend her old age in Boulder so she talked Dad into selling the ranch and moving to Cedar City and they built a nice house. When Dewey got married, after Dad had died, she wanted to be closer to her three boys in Salt Lake so she moved up here and lived here until she passed away in 1987.