Memories of Dad

Dad was a handyman’s handyman. He could fix anything and build anything. He built our house on Atwood Blvd. in Murray. I remember living in the basement while he finished the upstairs. I remember Mom telling about when she was setting nails and filling the holes with putty she was complaining to a neighbor or someone about how many nails she had to set. That person told her that Ed had used more nails than others would have because he built things to last. Dad built a doll house for Aaron and Merle Thueson to give to their daughter Ann as a birthday or Christmas gift. Dad had all his tools in a cabinet he had built and hung on the back wall of the garage. It was locked with a padlock and he enclosed the power switch for his table saw in a metal box with a padlock on it. He had a joiner with a dented break in its table that had probably been made by one of us kids pounding on it with a hammer.

Dad liked to sing and had a good voice. He was a member of the Olympus Male Chorus for many years. He sang songs to us kids like “Yo ho, I’m goin’ crazy. Don’t you want to come along. I live in a nuthouse over the Hill. Play all day ‘mid the dafodils. Yo ho, I’m goin’ crazy. Don’t you want to come along.” And, “I just got back from my mile high shack in that healthy, wealthy, wonderful state of mine. Its, stop, look, listen not a hill top missin’ and the sun just loves to shine. C.O. Hello, hip, hip huradio, I’m a mile high feelin’ fine.” And “When They Ring Those Golden Bells for You and Me.” And, “In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, stood a cow on the railroad tracks. She was a good old cow with eyes so fine, but how do you expect a cow to read a railroad sign. So she stood and she stood in the middle of the track. Along came a train and bumped her in the back. Now her bones lie on the Virginia mountains, with her tail on the lonesome spine.”

Dad loved us kids and was interested in our activities. One day he came home and asked where Alice was. He was told that she had gone with a neighbor family ice skating at Hygeia Ice in Sugarhouse. He quickly got ready and hurried off in the car for Sugarhouse explaining that he didn’t want some other dad to be the one to watch Alice on ice skates for her first time.

I bugged Dad for a long time about getting a horse and he kept telling me no because we had no place to keep a horse. Finally I said, “Well, if I find a horse can I keep It?” Dad, surely thinking that the odds of my finding a horse were acceptably miniscule, said, “Yes.”  It wasn’t many days later that he came home from work and there was a horse calmly grazing on our front lawn. He thought, “Oh, no! Tad found a horse!” He was very relieved to learn that such was not the case. It was a horse that had escaped from a nearby pasture and just happened to have wandered onto out lawn.