Chapter 9    SALT LAKE TEMPLE TO 1465 E. ROOSEVELT

We were in Fort Wingate and had been married about two years when our oldest of four sons arrived. This brought happiness into our home. At that time, my mother and one of my sisters were living with us. This was not too goo,d a place to move a young wife, in with two or three more cooks and to see who was going to be cook around the kitchen. But we got along real good.

In Fort Wingate we decided we better make arrangements to go to the temple. In October, 1925 my mother and sister, Harriet, Verma and I headed for Salt Lake City to be sealed. We made the trip to Salt Lake in a Chevrolet touring car (purchased new in Gallup for $935) with five of us in it. It took about three days to travel from Fort Wingate to Salt Lake after many flat tires. We were sealed in the Salt Lake Temple on our oldest son, Robert’s birthday.

It wasn't too long after that till my brother Willard's wife died. Then my mother and sister moved back to Ramah with his family. (In the meantime one of my sisters had been married.) That left Verma and I alone then for the first time since we were married.

Not too long after this we took a short assignment in Gallup in a garage. I worked in the Dodge garage there for about six months. While living in Gallup on this job our second son was born.

Then the army officer out in Ft. Wingate, the man that took over the Fort and made an Indian School out of it and the head of transportation for the Indian Service, came to Gallup and wanted to know if I’d take my old job back now with the Indian Service at Ft. Wingate. This was the same job I had had with the War Department.

The man who was in charge of the department where I worked couldn’t live at the high altitude of Ft. Wingate. He had tuberculosis so they moved him and his transportation branch of the Indian Service to Phoenix, Arizona. Here he could get better service for his tuberculosis and have better access to the doctors in that area.

So the next spring we were transferred down to Phoenix. We worked in Phoenix then for the Indian School for about a year and a half.

Just after I got to Phoenix one of the boys that was working there said to me, "Say, I saw some houses for sale. Let's buy a home here."

And I said, "Well, come Saturday afternoon when we're not working, we'll go take a look."

So Saturday afternoon we went up and looked at these houses. They were close to where we were working and we talked to the man that owned them.

He said, "Well, we'll sell you these houses for fifty dollars down and fifty dollars a month or we'll rent them to you for thirty-five dollars a month."

At that time I had fifty dollars, that was all I had, so I made a down payment on the house. I lived in this house for a month by myself since Verma and the children were living in Rocky Ford, Colorado, helping with the Indian boys. Come school time, we moved the Indian boys out of the beet fields, back to their schools on the reservations, and we came to Phoenix.