Interviewee: Brenda Durtschi
Interviewer: Jon Duncan
 
Jon Duncan: Alright, today is August the 6^th 1997 my name is Jon Duncan. I am here with Brenda Durtschi. Brenda Why don’t you introduce yourself?

Brenda Durtschi: I am Brenda Adamson, Glenn and Rose’s daughter. I was born in Edmonton but my mom and dad got me when I was about eight weeks old. I think that their cousin helped them find me or something, he worked in the government. He called and said that he finally had some babies for them to look at and went up to Edmonton. It is not like today, they got to pick from several. They said no, no this isn’t right, there were basically no more babies to show them. The nurse said there is one more than we have never shown to anybody; she has been kind of sickly. They brought me out and my mother held me and she said Glen this is the right one and they brought me home.

Jon Duncan: When was that?

Brenda Durtschi: I was born January 21^st 1950 and I think I was about eight weeks old when they got me. Rotten weather and car trouble, they borrowed grandpa’s car and it died somewhere up by Lacombe and they had to leave it there for a couple of months before they could get parts for it. So they came home, I don’t remember now if it was a bus or a train but the planned on shopping in Calgary on the way home so they had nothing for me. The called Joe and Delight Brandley that lived right next door and asked them if they could come into Lethbridge and pick them up and they did. Uncle Joe, he is not actually related, he went to mom and dads house first. I don’t know if he had a key or if they just never locked it, I suspect they probably didn’t even lock the house. Anyway he got the fire going and had the place warmed up by the time that they got home. For the first few weeks or at least the first few days I slept in Aunt Delight’s clothes basket because they hadn’t been able to get anything in Calgary.

Jon Duncan: So it was an interesting start then.

Brenda Durtschi: It was my favourite bedtime story.

Jon Duncan: Alright, so were you the oldest?

Brenda Durtschi: Yes, They had been married nine years by the time that they got me.

Jon Duncan: Okay, how many brothers and sisters did you have?

Brenda Durtschi: One sister three years younger and she were adopted too.

Jon Duncan: Do you remember her being adopted too.

Brenda Durtschi: No, I was only three. I always knew that I was adopted, that was never something that I found out. I have pretty strong feelings about that. I think that if kids are adopted that is the way it should be. There was never anything wrong with it, it was never something that had to be explained to me, I just always knew.

Jon Duncan: Did you ever know you biological mother?

Brenda Durtschi: I guess in high school I guess there was a time when I was curious never enough that I really wanted to find her. Teenage rebellion you kind of hate your parents every now and again and sometimes I was curious of what would it have been like but never any big deal. I always knew that sealing in the temple was stronger than blood anyway. So it didn’t matter.

Jon Duncan: When were you sealed in the temple?

Brenda Durtschi: I don’t remember, you had to wait until all of the adoption was final. I think that takes about a year. I know I was a bit of a toddler, I wasn’t tiny.

Jon Duncan: You were still very young.

Brenda Durtschi: Ya

Jon Duncan: Let’s start with your dad Glenn. What was his occupation?

Brenda Durtschi: He was a farmer but I have always called him the jack of all trades, he worked at the factory in Raymond and apparently he worked there and it was that factory that got him out of the war. Grandpa needed him on the farm, he didn’t mind going but it was pretty hard for grandma to see him go. The sugar factory itself asked if he didn’t mind, they really needed him at the sugar factory. So he got out of going to war. He always worked there in the fall and because of work, I don’t know how young I was when I learned to milk cows, my sister never did, I was the one to help dad on the farm and Caroline would help mom in the kitchen. I always claimed to be my dad’s only son. I milked cows and I never had to do any of that kind of work when it came to hauling hay or driving grain truck I was asked to do it but I never remember feeling like I had to. I just enjoyed working with dad. There was once and a while even with nelson I didn’t really have to do it but there was one shift at the sugar factory. I think that it was four to twelve; it was just too early to milk cows before. Mom did it sometimes, but that was about the only time that I really had to do anything like that. I can remember needing to milk the cow when something was going on socially and I wouldn’t have time to have a bath afterwards. I would put my hair all up inside a hat and be really careful so that I wouldn’t smell the barn at all. You weren’t in there that long and I could usually get away with that really quick. That was one thing that I was paranoid about, I didn’t want to ever go out somewhere smelling like the barn. There were always guys that could do more than I could. I never felt unfeminine even with bales; I would go out and haul hay with dad. The guys could outdo me quite easily and it never made me feel unfeminine. When I got to BYU I hated it. I think it was after I had been at the Y a year and quit, worked a while and went on my mission. I think that it was when I was on my mission I finally recognised what I hated so bad about BYU. I didn’t feel feminine because “In BYU where the girls are girls and the boys are too” according to my roommate. That was kind of how I started feeling about it.

Jon Duncan: So that is when you realized what a girl really was.

Brenda Durtschi: It was really afterwards in the mission field when I didn’t feel home sick; it didn’t bother me there at all. But when I transferred to a smaller city I was lost, I was uncomfortable, and I was country sick. I dint know why because the other one was that much bigger but there were ten elders and two sisters. On Mondays we got together and have a planning meeting, basketball and other stuff that associated with the elders. A bunch of them were from Idaho. Bun in Greenville when I was really struggling with this Elder Norman who had been there came one Monday. We played basketball and what we always did on Mondays we would play basketball and the sisters never played the second game. Elder Norman came and sat on the stage beside us sisters. The two of us taught basically for a half hour and when I got home I told my companion it was so good to talk to somebody country. We didn’t say anything about the country. She just shook her head and I said well that is just life to me. That is when I learned it wasn’t the country that I had to have, it was people that loved the country, which knew the country life, and there was just some understanding of each other that just made all of the difference in the world. It was just about if not as important for me to marry somebody country as it was to marry someone who was strong in the gospel. Without it, it just wasn’t there.

Jon Duncan: So is Mark from the country?

Brenda Durtschi: Oh yes, a little Mormon town of Dregs Idaho, grew up just like I did. He can out do me, he can out mechanic me, he can out fix me, of course he is stronger than I am. I had to have somebody that can do more than I can and Mark defiantly can.

Jon Duncan: Alright, so it sounds like you helped your dad quite a bit on the farm. Did you help in the house at all?

Brenda Durtschi: Oh ya, Saturday morning we always had to do chores before we could go and play. Saturday house work always had to be done and there was always other stuff. My sister, three years younger, learned to cook before I did and was more capable and quicker at it than I was and would make fun of me whenever I tried. I grew up not liking to cook because of it and I still don’t. The only place that I cooked was at Cuckmere Chains, of course I have to cook at my own house now but I don’t do a very good job.

Jon Duncan: Okay, tell me about Saturday mornings, what would happen?

Brenda Durtschi: I know that Bev Hartley and I would, our mothers would let us because she had to do house work on Saturday as well, so we would both go to the other house and get the house work done there and go to the other and get the house work don there before we could play. We had to dust, vacuum, mop floors.

Jon Duncan: Was there any particular assignment that you enjoyed?

Brenda Durtschi: No

Jon Duncan: Just the house had to be cleaned?

Brenda Durtschi: Ya, it varied. One of the things that was mine, the reason I wouldn’t learn to make bread was once I learned to make a white cake from scratch which we often had for Sunday dinner. It kind of became my job to do it on Saturday. I wasn’t about to let bread making become my job so I refused to learn. When I was in the mission field the elders said they wanted some home made bread and I said that I would try it. When we got a recipe out of the cook book, back then the rules were not near as tight for missionaries phoning home, you could phone home every once and a while. So one day I was talking to mom and I said how do you make bread, I remember you talking about the feel of home made bread. I had kneaded bread, I had done bread, lots of times when mom did primary, we had primary after school. We would get out of school a half hour early and then go to primary. I don’t know how the kids made it to the bus. Anyhow we got out of school a half hour early for primary. Mom would be there teaching and not get away as quick as I would and often have to go home and hunt down the punch down the bread that was rising. We had an old wood stove, one of those black and white ones that had the ledge up on the top. Often the bread would be put up on that shelf, not where the heat might have been but at the other end. It was a little bit warmer spot in the house. So the bread would sit in a big bowl there to rise. Mom would send me home quick after primary and get me to punch the bread down before it was all over. Lots of times you would get there and the dough would be rolling off the side of the bowl and just about making a mess. One time I went home with a girlfriend and we decided that we would have fun with this, after we got it punched down we took a handful of dough out and squished it into a little ball and played catch. After we played catch with it for a while we were going to put it back in with the rest of the dough. When we went to do that we looked at it and they weren’t the same color anymore. I don’t know if it was dirt from out hands or if we dropped it on the floor but the dough didn’t go back in with the rest of it. Making bread was, I dint think that we ever bough bread. Most of the time it was white, it wasn’t whole wheat.

Jon Duncan: Did she make her own flower too?

Brenda Durtschi: No, although she did get a grinder later and did do it some, I think that dad liked the white bread better than the whole wheat so she didn’t really do it a lot. I had never really learned how to do it. All I had to do was punch it down. You would let it rise, you would punch it down then it rises again before you shake it into loaves. When I was away from home, in the mission field I said tell me how to do this so she sort of explained the feel of the dough so that I remembered a little. You would only add flower until it feels like that, no matter what the recipe says. Once it gets to feel that way then you are done adding flower. I made pretty good bread after that mission field.

Jon Duncan: Okay, one thing that I am curious about, as you were growing up with your sister, how did your parents punish you?

Brenda Durtschi: There was absolutely no contention allowed in my home. The sad part about that was that nothing got worked out. It was like if there was some kind of problem between Caroline and me, we were separated, put in different rooms or say in different chairs. We never worked it out. I believe that is part of the reason that Caroline and I aren’t close. Maybe part of it is because we are not biologically similar and so there are a lot of differences. One of my mission companions ended up with my sister for a roommate after our mission. They were together for a long time, they didn’t discover and she has got the same last name. She never even thought to ask her if she knew me or was related because we were so different. Maybe that is part of why we are not closer. I think that lots of why we aren’t closer is because we didn’t work out our differences, we were kind of forced to be together sometimes. I had to tag her along when I didn’t want it. I should have learned to handle that better and not resent it. But I did resent it. Caroline could feel it even though she had to go with me. We really weren’t close all through high school. By the time that I got home from my mission I really wanted to improve that relationship. I had hoped that Caroline and I could be roommates in Lethbridge because she was up there working. By that time she had a good life and she didn’t want to bother, pretty soon she was married and moved away. We never did get close.

Jon Duncan: Something that I want to ask you too. Did you play lots with your sister?

Brenda Durtschi: Some Bev and Cindy Hill lived half a block away. Cindy was Caroline’s age so she was three years younger than me. Lots of times all four of us would play together, I would play with Cindy and Caroline would play with Bev, Bev was a year younger than me. So we played together some, we certainly enjoyed each other when we went camping because nobody else was there. We always went down to Kalispell, every fall, once and a while maybe great falls. But we usually went to Kalispell once every fall and got peaches and pears. The exchange rate was in our favour back then. Cotton goods were cheaper in the states then they are up here anyway, then with the exchange rate. We went down, I think we came after Labour Day when we found a fruit truck that we would usually need to get peaches and that is when we would get school clothes for us kids and we would usually have some of our own money to help do that. I remember I was about eight the first time, I don’t remember if I paid for the whole dress or just part of it. In fact I still remember that dress; it was a hot pink one with three pockets down the front. I either helped or completely paid for that myself. They bought school clothes; they buy work clothes for dad like overalls. Of course they were cotton, which was before polyester. Of course cotton was cheaper in the states. Mom’s house dresses if she bought any, we would always do that down in Kalispell in the fall. On those trips no body else was around so Caroline and I played together then. Although even then I followed Dad around. Dad and I would get to know everybody in the campground and mom and Caroline wouldn’t get to know anybody.

Jon Duncan: Did you play a lot with your dad?

Brenda Durtschi: Yes, I can remember him playing ball with us. Once and a blue moon he would get in quick enough on a summer night that we would talk him into go swimming. Back then the pool was open from two until six in the afternoon and from seven until nine. That was the schedule all the years that I remember growing up. So once and a while Dad would come home early enough from work that we would talk him into going swimming with us at the pool. That was really cool to going swimming with Dad. Mother never did go swimming; she was scared of water and never knew how to swim. But Dad would go swimming with us sometimes.  We would both took swimming lessons, I think it was four or five years worth. I think that it was beginner, intermediate, advanced, and senior, something like that. I know that there were four years worth and we did this before you get to lifeguard training, I never did that.

Jon Duncan: Okay, before we go too far, let’s talk about your mom. What was her occupation?

Brenda Durtschi: She just stayed home, she was a homemaker.

Jon Duncan: Alright what did she do at home?

Brenda Durtschi: I don’t know, she didn’t do as much as some moms as far as being involved in the community and the church. She couldn’t take much pressure. Her nerves were always bad she would get in over her head and she couldn’t do it, she felt sick and wouldn’t pull through for whatever it was she was suppose to do. I remember once being frustrated with this and a little upset. You never talk back with mother with dad around or there was trouble. I remember being frustrated with her one day and really knew I was pushing the limits and figured that I would get called out. I told my dad well you can hear the emotion in my voice can you. I told my dad that mom’s headaches were all in her head, that it wasn’t real. He didn’t chew me out or get mad at me for it, he said but if they are can she help it. But he was awfully tolerant of her; he was really good to her. Sometimes I wonder if he had pushed her more could she have been more capable and done more. But probably not, she probably just needs his understanding. He was really good to her. They brag about never having had a fight. I have never heard them fight. One time when we went to Great Falls we were staying in a motel room all five of us, grandpa was probably there too. There was some kind of a tension between mom and dad. I have no idea what it was but I could feel it. By morning it was gone. Years later I made a comment about it to them and they can tell me what it was about or at least mom has. Apparently Caroline wanted another pair of shoes that kid loved shoes. She talked her dad into this pair of shoes and mom didn’t think that she needed him. That was a very big deal in our house. You didn’t get it if you didn’t need it. I learned that when I was quite young. I can remember walking home on gravel roads or being in the swing and my shoes weren’t looking good anymore. I wanted a new pair but they weren’t worn out, there were no holes in the bottom. There was no way I could get a new pair yet, I didn’t need it. I would scuff as I walked down the road or drag them as I swung t wear a hole in the bottom of my shoe and then I could get a new one. That was very much a part of our lives. My mother always felt poor. I didn’t realize until, I don’t know when but she probably always felt poor growing up and defiantly wasn’t. From things that I hear from other people Charles Romeril was not that poor and had one of the first cars in Stirling. We always had what we needed; we never went without any kind of need. There was always food in the house and if I could convince them that I needed it I could have it, whatever it might be. I certainly didn’t need things like hamburgers or pop after a basketball game. If we were in Magrath or Cardston for a game we would always stop afterwards to buy something.  I remember being frustrated because I couldn’t have one or the other, I could have pop or fries or a hamburger but I never had enough to have both. I know that kind of seems silly but because they sort of imposed it on me it made me feel poor. Other kids like Bev Hartley, I certainly don’t think that they were better off then we were. I grew up feeling poor.

Jon Duncan: So you argument that your parent had was over the shoes?

Brenda Durtschi: With Caroline yes because she didn’t need them. Dad wasn’t near as much that way as mom was.

Jon Duncan: Who did the cooking in the home?

Brenda Durtschi: Mom

Jon Duncan: Who did the cleaning?

Brenda Durtschi: Mom, us kids helped, Caroline more than I did. When it was harvest time and there was corn, peas, beans, and peaches, whatever else that would be a busy time for her and she never got sick, she always got it done.

Jon Duncan: How much food did she put away?

Brenda Durtschi: I don’t know we had a food room downstairs; we always had that kind of stuff to eat and often ran out. Often stuff would be two or three years old.

Jon Duncan: Did you have a garden?

Brenda Durtschi: Oh ya

Jon Duncan: Who worked it?

Brenda Durtschi: All of us, mom and dad and Caroline all worked out there. That was the one thing. We could always get out of work here and there, but the one thing that you were never allowed to get out of was potato harvest. We planted a bunch of potatoes out at the farm in the old garden that they had out there. When it was time to dig potatoes we had to help. They may give in and does it a different day if there was something going on but we would never talk them out of digging potatoes. More than once I can remember having a babysitting job and I had taken their kids out there with me to help dig potatoes. They said well you can babysit if you want but you need to bring the kids with you. That was fine, and then we had extra help to dig the potatoes. That was the one thing that we couldn’t get out of. I was around home for a long time after high school before I got married, I worked in Lethbridge and I just really felt like I had been kicked out of the family because I worked shift work different days of the week, I didn’t always have weekends off. But I was there in Lethbridge and I came home often and mom and dad did not arrange potato harvest around my schedule. I just felt like I wasn’t part of the family anymore, they could do potato harvest without me.

Jon Duncan: Where did they store their potatoes?

Brenda Durtschi: We had a pit put to the farm back then. We had a little tractor, still have it, and they had this old plough, I guess it would normally be a plough that was pulled behind a horse. They would hook up this little plough behind the tractor and mom would drive the tractor and dad would drive the plough. That is how they would dig the potatoes up and we would go behind and pick them up and put them in buckets. Put them in the back of a pick up and drive the pickup around to the house. We had a pit which was basically just a hole in the ground and they had a cover, I don’t know how they braced it but anyway they had this hold in the ground and I can remember handing the buckets up to dad and he would dump the potatoes. In fact we had a metal trough that went down in the pit and that directed the potatoes where they were going so that you didn’t drop them right down where the whole was. You needed to be able to climb down the hole and get into them and bring potatoes up. I didn’t go down into the pit. I don’t like mice. I can handle bugs but I don’t like mice. So I didn’t ever go down in the pit, which gave me the willies. That is where we stored them all year and we had potatoes until next fall and we are doing it now. Mark and I are still doing that, dad has got a new pit; I don’t know if that one is even workable at the farm anymore, I haven’t looked for it lately. But he has got a new nicer pit dig behind the house here in Stirling so we are using dads pit now. We still have potatoes and these ones are just about on.

Jon Duncan: Who did the laundry?

Brenda Durtschi: I am sure that mom did the most of It but I sure remember running that ringer washer. You would wash the clothes and start with whites because you didn’t change the water.

Jon Duncan: So with this ringer washer was it electrical power?

Brenda Durtschi: I don’t know what made it agitate. It must have been because it did have an agitator in it. Then I guess you would turn it off, it had to be electrical to do that.

Jon Duncan: Did you always have electricity in your house?

Brenda Durtschi: Yes, as long as I can remember. They didn’t when I was born though. I don’t think, well maybe but they didn’t have a fridge. I know that when I was a baby that they had. I don’t remember just how they handled the milk but I remember it being a problem when they didn’t have a fridge, maybe an ice box or something.
 
Tape 1 Side 2
 
Jon Duncan: Alright we were talking about electrical appliances and we were talking about a ringer washer when I changed the tape over. Why don’t we continue there?

Brenda Durtschi: Okay, it was kind of a square thing on legs and I know we would pull it out from in the floor. I know that we used this in the basement; the top of it had these two rollers. It must have been electrical, I really don’t remember. I have seen the hand crank ones that you turn yourself. This must not have been that way it must have been electrical. I know one of the things that I was extremely cautioned about was not getting caught in it, making sure that my hair didn’t get caught in it and that my hair didn’t get caught in it. We were taught how to put the clothes through the right way so that the buttons didn’t pop off. They needed to be laying down not going at an angle or they would pop right off. Anyway you would put the clothes through between these two rollers and that would squish the water out and the water would fall back into your wash tub. They would go through this ringer and fall on the other side into the roots tub. That was just a big metal tub. We had a stick, kind of like a broomstick with this cone shaped thing on the end, it was metal. I don’t remember what was in side but there was more to it than just the cone, there was something underneath there. You would use that and slosh it up and down in the rinse water to get the soap out of the clothes. Then there was a lever that you could turn on the ringer washer so that you could put those rollers at a ninety degree angle to where it had been. Then it would be between the rinse water and another basket. Then you would put it through the ringer again and this time it would be rinsed and the clothes would be ready to go hang out on the line. I certainly remember hanging lots of clothes on the line. That makes your towels and sheets and stuff a little bit stiff. One of the things that I liked doing when the sheets came in off the line I would fold them with mom. That was not a one man job; you had to have two people to fold sheets. You would fold it in half and you would fold it in half again. I guess that was about all. I remember when we got done it was lying on top of itself so that it was eighteen inches apart. So here mom and I would be the width or the length of the sheet away from each other. Each corner of this folded sheet always folds and then we would yank it back and forth. That loosened it up and would get the stiffness out of the sheets. So that is what we would always do first and then we would hold them towards each other.

Jon Duncan: Where did your mom get all of the soap?

Brenda Durtschi: By the time that I was around it was pretty much just bought, I don’t remember making soap. I do remember blueing in the rinse water. We never do that anymore. This blueing, whatever it was it wasn’t liquid blueing but we had some hard thing that she tied in a little white rag, pull it up around it and tie a string. This thing would be in this cloth and we would swish it around in the rinse water with our white clothes.

Jon Duncan: Alright, now you said that your parents didn’t have a fridge at first but when you were a teenager you had a fridge?

Brenda Durtschi: Yes, by the time that I can remember we had a fridge.

Jon Duncan: What other electrical appliances did your mom have?

Brenda Durtschi: One of the things that I remember hating on Saturday nights was this little tiny radio. It wasn’t anything big like the stereos are today; it was just a little tony box. Dad had made shelf and, this thing would be about ten or twelve inches by about five inches high. It sat on the shelf in the kitchen. We didn’t have TV so we listened to the radio. There were some shows that we would listen to, some story kind of stuff once and a while but mostly music. But Saturday night, Hockey Night in Canada, that was always on when it was bath night. We didn’t have a bathroom. We had a big round tub that was stored outside somewhere, or maybe just in the back entry. I can’t remember where we stored it. I certainly remember bringing it in. In the winter time you would go out and find drifts of clean snow and you would shovel clean snow into this tub. Then we would bring it into the house and put a little bit of water through it. You would use how water in it and use that to get to the bottom of the tub. Then you would put this tub up on the stove and melt the snow. That is how we had our bath water. We had a bath every Saturday night. Caroline and I in the bathwater, then mom would get in the water and then poor dad would get in the water after all of that.

Jon Duncan: The radio was playing the hockey game.

Brenda Durtschi: Oh yes, the entire time hockey at that time.

Jon Duncan: So you never had a TV in your home?

Brenda Durtschi: We did it would have been in the sixties when we got it, probably I guess maybe 1962 somewhere in there that is just kind of approximate. I kind of remember being a little kid and going out to Perrett’s next door. By then Delight and Joe Brandley had moved and Heber and Margaret Perrett lived next door. We had drinking water in the house, we dug a well. I was big enough to remember them digging this well and remembering the samples that the guy took of the water. He would put something in the water and it would make the water go various shades of pink to red. That would show how much iron was in the water. He had a case with fifteen different shades of pink to red to show how strong the iron was in the water. Our sample was darker than anything that he had. It wasn’t really fit to use for a whole lot of stuff, including washing clothes, absolutely not fit for that. We did bring a tap into the house with this water and it came up. It was just a metal pipe that came out of the floor in the kitchen and came up above the wash stand. The wash stand was big enough to hold a round wash basin and a round bucket about a three gallon bucket maybe. That bucket sat under the tap from this well. You would keep this bucket basically full of water; you would fill it up well before you wanted to use it. You let the metal iron settle out of it which is all this rust colored stuff in the bottom of the bucket. Then you would carefully scoop out of this bucket to use for washing dishes. We didn’t cook with it. We would wash with it, the basin was right there and that’s how we washed our face and hands. Of course we would use it for mopping floors and stuff like that. But to get water to drink or to cook with we carried another bucket. It was a white amyl bucket. That was one of my chores; I was often the one who went up to uncle Hebers. I would go up there and carry water. They had a cistern. Most people in Stirling had a cistern. We had spent the money to dig this well instead of building a cistern. We knew that eventually water and sewer would come to Stirling and so we held out until that happened, after we had spent all this money for the well. They didn’t mind giving us water. I carried this bucket of water, I guess every day probably. That is what we used to drink.

Jon Duncan: Okay, so we were talking about a TV as well.

Brenda Durtschi: Dad, Caroline, and I would end up going up there to get water and stay, or we would go up to Dave and Gloria Seaward’s. We would end up staying there and watching their TV and it bugged mom. She didn’t particularly want a TV but she was fed up with all of her family being gone all of the time so she decided it was time. She told Dad we can get a TV because I am tired of everybody being gone all of the time, so that is how we got our TV.

Jon Duncan: Alright, did you have a telephone?

Brenda Durtschi: Yes, I don’t really remember not having it. Our house was much smaller when mom and dad I first came around. They had a small kitchen, a very small bedroom and a small living room and we had a back entry. They had a front porch that was kind of a good size for a porch I guess. In order to adopt they needed another room. The guy said that if they enclose this than that would be sufficient; so that is what they did. I remember our first phone being in that front entry and we had a big wardrobe out there. The kids bed, we had a three quarter bed that both Caroline and I slept in was in the living room for a lot of years. That phone was a party line. So you had different rings, it would ring different homes. If you wanted to listen in on somebody else you would just quietly pick up the phone. After it quit ringing you knew somebody was on their phone. I remember being glad that Del Hardy wasn’t on my line. That’s a horrible thing to say but that was part of living in Stirling.

Jon Duncan: He listened to others phone calls.

Brenda Durtschi: Oh ya, I think that everybody did a little bit here and there. I don’t know if mom ever did. Some adults did and if she caught me doing it I would be scolded and told to hang up.

Jon Duncan: Alright, did you have anything like a record player?

Brenda Durtschi: Yes, we did. We had a phonograph. Once the 45s rolled around, people today probably don’t know what those are. They are the small ones, I guess forty five was the speed, and the bigger records were 78s. I remember some of the neat 78s that we had because they were locals. One of them Anne Perrett, Charlotte Perrett, they were cousins, and Karen Oler; all three of them were cousins. Those three girls were teenagers when I was young. I remember thinking that they were really neat. I loved to sit behind them when they were cheerleaders. But those three sang. They were a trio that was asked to sing in a lot of different places. They would sing for different things, we usually had some kind of program at wedding receptions and they would sing at that. But they made a record and we have got a copy of them singing.

Jon Duncan: Alright, did you buy records for yourself?

Brenda Durtschi: Ya I did, 45s is what I would have bought as a teenager.

Jon Duncan: What types of groups would you listen to?

Brenda Durtschi: Well I certainly remember the Beatles were popular when I was fourteen, sixteen somewhere in there. I think that the Beatles were the first group that people started screaming for. I remember going to a Show in Lethbridge. I went with Linda Metsker and probably Bev Hartley. I remember Linda squeezing a purse that I had a just about ruined it. The theatre people would not tolerate our screaming and whenever people screamed they turned down the volume so that you couldn’t hear the show. That is how they shut us up and it did work. I don’t remember anybody screaming for a group before that. Elvis was popular before that I guess. The monkeys, there was Bobby Pertola, Bobby Viten, there was another one but I can’t remember who it was. That was some of the music in the younger teens.

Jon Duncan: How often would you get together and play your records?

Brenda Durtschi: I don’t know but I do remember that we had birthday parties. It must have been before we were old enough to go to dances. I would have been turning thirteen; I know that we had a dance at my house for my birthday party because I remember the song “It’s My Party and I’ll Cry If I Want To.” I don’t remember who sang it but anyway that was a popular song at the time. I had a mad crush on a good friend’s older brother and he didn’t show up at my birthday party. He went to a show in Raymond with Linda King. We were all too young to be dating but he went to this show. We had birthday parties, I remember Chloe Hogensen’s. I don’t remember if we did the same thing at Beverly’s, most of these kids when they had a birthday party that is what it would be, that was the first time that we started inviting boys to our parties and we would have a dance at the birthday party. We had one on the nice hardwood floor and it was right at the time that spiked heels came in. The end of the high heel was no bigger than a nail head. It just massacred this beautiful floor that they had worked so hard to sand down and get nice and smooth. The wood out of the old square school on the corner, I didn’t even go to school to it. When that went down people salvaged a lot of what was in it and what my dad got was this old wood that was almost black. It was covered in dark. He had got a bunch of this wood and when we built onto our house and made our living room bigger this beautiful hardwood floor went down in our house. It was very rough because the boards were worn. It took a lot of sanding. When the got it sanded down past all of that dark oil and made it level it was beautiful. They didn’t have it done very long and I had one of those dances. Kids didn’t come in jeans. You didn’t wear jeans when I was a kid. I do remember jeans sort of starting to come in and I remember fly fronts. When I was a little kid girl’s jeans didn’t have fly fronts. Only boys had fly fronts in their jeans Girls jeans had zippers on the side. On one of these trips to Kalispell when we went shopping I asked for jeans and this clerk and I got mad because they looked like boy jeans. That is when I found out that jeans with flies in the front were coming in for girls. That was the first of fly fronts and I was probably a young teenager by that time. Even by the time that I went to BYU, although girls wore jeans I still wasn’t comfortable going out in them. Jeans to me were work on the farm, I didn’t wear jeans to school I wore pants. Jeans were just like I was going to go work on the farm or go and milk a cow.

Jon Duncan: So the girls all came in the high heel spikes and ruined the floor. Okay, so I am curious, if jeans weren’t really in at this time, what were the fashions for women?

Brenda Durtschi: Dresses were worn a lot. In Raymond you had to wear dresses to school, you couldn’t wear pants. In Stirling you could wear pants. For the strength of the youth Pamphlet that the first presidency of the church hands out, when I was a kid they taught dress standards. They were encouraging the girls to be feminine. It wasn’t like we couldn’t wear pants but to wear pants when they were appropriate and not to when they weren’t needed. I don’t remember how strong it was but I wore pants, I wasn’t really a tomboy but I certainly wasn’t overly feminine when I worked out on the farm. I wore pants to school all of the time and I remember putting up a little sign on my wardrobe and it said the prophet said no. It was my goal at that time to follow that and I think I went a whole year without wearing pants to school. I didn’t wear jeans, maybe to school but I would have never thought of going to a dance or a date in jeans. Dress pants were getting more popular for girls then.

Jon Duncan: How many pairs of shoes did you have?

Brenda Durtschi: Probably a Sunday pair, a school pair, and if I was lucky maybe a pair of tennis shoes. They didn’t have the fancy athletic shoes that they have now but I am sure that I had tennis shoes because we couldn’t wear regular shoes for gym.

Jon Duncan: Where did you buy your clothes?

Brenda Durtschi: Lethbridge and Kalispell.

Jon Duncan: I want to go back a little bit here; we have already talked about where you got your drinking water and stuff like that. Were there no irrigation ditches in front of the house?

Brenda Durtschi: The irrigation ditch was right up by Perrett’s but we didn’t have a cistern to put water in.

Jon Duncan: Did you use the irrigation water?

Brenda Durtschi: Ya, in fact we had about a one and a half foot pipe that we put in the ground, they had to dig up Perrett’s driveway because we had that pipe into the irrigation ditch. It was right next to Hebers and that pipe had some kind of strainer on the end of it so that it wouldn’t get plugged. That pipe went from that irrigation ditch down the hill. Now that road is smooth but the actual land is kind of slanted, the road is built up in front of out house. It was kinds of a downhill slope from this irrigation ditch down to our place. I can’t remember where that hose came out at or how we coupled it to irrigation stuff but I do remember starting it because we didn’t have a pump on it. It was a siphon setup. I had to put my mouth on the end of that hole and suck on it so that it got started. It was downhill so once you got it started it would go. I guess we flood irrigated or something, I don’t know.

Jon Duncan: Did you ever play in the ditches?

Brenda Durtschi: Oh yes, as the ditch goes under that road and goes into Stirling there was two ways it could go. It could keep going west or it could go south. Where it went south, I don’t know what you would call the thing but it was probably three feet wide and there was a gate at the top of it. There were boards in a tramp that you could lift up. Lifting those boards up would let more water go down to the south. There was this wooden trough I guess and it was just short, probably five feet long at the most. I remember there being a board over the top of it and we liked to slide down this flume and catch that board. You couldn’t go beyond that because it dropped down and there were a lot of rocks there. I don’t think it was ever going fast enough that it was a problem but you wouldn’t want to fall down those rocks, that wouldn’t have been too much fun. We would slide down that flume. We would adjust that water, we were doing that for quite a few years before it dawned on me that we weren’t suppose to be doing that. But we would adjust the water so that there would be enough in this flume for us to play in. Beyond that up at the top, above the flume, the ditch was probably two feet deep. We would play in that water as well. We played in that quite a bit and mom let us do it.

Jon Duncan: What do you remember about the water system coming in?

Brenda Durtschi: You know before that I remember the natural gas coming in. We got to change our stove. Our stove had been coal and we heated up the whole house with that stove. It gets going with a pretty good flame in the summer and that is how we heated it. But when the gas came in we converted this coal stove to gas. It had two burners with the gas and then down at the bottom where the coal would have been before was this row of gas that would burn and heat the oven. I remember that coming in. I think dad worked on a lot of that thought the town. By the time that the water came in he didn’t really help with that. I must have been fifteen. I was probably sixteen before we really had it in our house. My dad tells this story and I really don’t remember it. I remember not minding going to get into the tub. I had grown out of the Saturday night bath, I was big enough that I could move the tub and whenever I wanted to have a bath I could take one. It was in the kitchen so maybe had to negotiate to have some privacy. Anyway I remember coming home when I was a cheerleader and rushing in the door and throwing my books inside the door and rushing back to get this tub and putting it on the floor. The gas stove at the other end always had a water tank and dad had hooked up the facet on that. So I would run in with this tub and drop the facet so it would fill. There was no pressure from the sink so it takes a while. I would kneel down on the floor while this facet is running water and wash my hair. Then I would put the tub up on the stove and get it heated nice. I would go and curl my hair and I had this nifty little hair drier that was no bigger than a gigantic flashlight and it had a rope that tied around your waist to holes and that is how your hair drier worked. I would get my hair done and then get in the tub and hang this electric hair drier outside the tub. By the time that we got a real bathroom I wasn’t allowed to do that anymore. That was how I got ready for basketball games, I would rush in and do this and get ready to go and run back up town to the bus to go to basketball games. So we managed without a bathroom, we never had it. My friends did and I enjoyed them but I wasn’t that desperate for a bathroom. When that opportunity came around dad says that us kids didn’t want to build the bathroom. That cost too much money; we would rather use the money to go on a fun trip. I don’t remember that but apparently that is how we felt about it that time. Then when we got that bathroom he says we couldn’t get you out of it. By then we were teenagers, it was nice to have water.
 
Tape 2 Side 1
 
Jon Duncan: Alright we were talking about the water system and your dad putting in a bathroom when the tape ran out. Why don’t we continue there?

Brenda Durtschi: Well what you need to know about that is although there were a lot of people with cisterns that had bathrooms in town. There were a few like us that still used outhouses. I can remember as a little kid going out back and running back in the house real fast; there was a skunk under the pine tree. You could see his eyes and you could smell him. For those occasions we used what was dad called a thunder mug, like knock, knock, whose there? It was under the bed if you need it, I could never get the joke when you need it, in our case it was behind the door, and then I got it. We had these little metal pots that were big enough for adults so when it was real cold outside or especially for the kids that were toilet trained but it was still cold enough that you didn’t want to go out and had to go out in the morning you would use those. So if there was a skunk out close to the outhouse then that is what you would have to do. One of our great plans at Halloween as a kid was tipping outhouses. There were still several around town, even if they weren’t used. Bev Hartley still used theirs. Merna and Harold Christensen had one but they didn’t use it. We loved to tip theirs. If you don’t have this story of Perry Barton in the outhouse I won’t tell it because it was way past my generation but it is too good to miss if you don’t have it somewhere.

Jon Duncan: I haven’t heard it.

Brenda Durtschi: When my dad was a kid Perry Barton was a cop then, he was a town cop, when I was a kid Perry Barton was the town cop. Apparently they didn’t like him a generation ago any more than we liked him. He was probably supposed to be out patrolling the town but he was determined that nobody tipped his outhouse. So I guess my dad was involved in it, I know that uncle Louis was and some of my uncles were involved in this but I don’t know just who. They knew that Perry Barton was in his outhouse and he figured that they wouldn’t dare tip it. They decided to outsmart him. They got a rope and wrapped this rope around the outhouse door and tied it shut. So then he couldn’t get out. Then they tipped the outhouse over. As they were running away there he was with his head through the hold that you normally sit in. He was there calling for his wife to help, I don’t know how he got out of that but that was the most fun outhouse story that I know about.

Jon Duncan: So you were still doing that as a teenager?

Brenda Durtschi: Oh ya, that was part of Halloween, when you got to be an older teenager after you got a few treats you went out pulling pranks. One of the other things I remember, I think it was Bobby Zaugg, I’m not sure if it was him but that is a pretty good likelihood. Anyway they got a bale of hay and they put it in the middle of the road. Our roads weren’t hard top then they were just gravel so it didn’t hurt the road at all. But they put a bale of hay out in the middle of the road and then they set it on fire. There had never been any damage from it but I guess if there had been a wind it could have been a problem. But that was one of the pranks that they pulled. That was a part of Halloween was going out and doing stuff like that. One year long before me. This is one of my uncle’s stories or maybe my dads, they took somebody’s wagon apart piece by piece and put it on top of some shed and put it back together. But pranks on Halloween were defiantly a part of life here.

Jon Duncan: Did you trick or treat?

Brenda Durtschi: Oh ya, we would do that too but as you got older you had to do a little more. Your parents told you that you were too old to go out trick or treating, around twelve they would say that but you still had to go out and party. Some of the meaner kids might steal a few bags or something. You would have to go out and party Halloween night. One of the things that I remember, sometimes there was snow October 31^st, usually there wasn’t but more than once I can remember tripping because I stepped in the same hole in the bar pit and I wouldn’t be up on the road between two places just across the road from our place. I knew that there was a bar pit, we chased cow’s right there. I would get stuck in that hole more than once if there was snow. One of the other things about Halloween, any body in my age group and on either side of me would remember was Mildred Eaves. She always had the best Halloween treats. Sometimes it would be fudge, sometimes it would be popcorn balls, and you always wanted to make the extra effort even though her house was a little out of the way. You always had to go to Mildred Eaves. That is down where Dianne Barton lives right now. You always had to go to her place because there was great treats. Back then you trusted everybody. You didn’t worry about what might be in the food. We would get apples. Homemade stuff was a fun thing because it was usually a bigger treat, popcorn balls was one of the things that people would make. She was a good woman, I can’t remember who else but there was one or two different people that you never wanted to miss their house when you were out trick or treating.

Jon Duncan: Okay, another question that I have. Did you have any pets growing up?

Brenda Durtschi :Oh ya, when I was a little kid about two we had a pure white cat that was deaf. They were always careful when they backed out of the yard to make sure that the cat wasn’t there. One night when dad came home from a boxing bout, he ran in the house and ran right back out and he didn’t bother to check. The cat was deaf and he didn’t bother to check so he ran over it. A white cat was something that had been kind of special to them. One year at the sugar factory there was a cat that had been around there for quite a while. They had other cats but this was the main one. Dad brought this cat home from the sugar factory and he said I think if we give this cat a bath we might find out that it is white. Sure enough we gave it a bath and it was pure white. She had one green eye and one blue eye. We learned from others that there is really no such thing as a perfect white cat. Some may say that they saw one but that cat wasn’t perfect white when it was tiny. When they are kittens and we had a lot of kittens, we were told about this and our cats followed it. They will have some color on them somewhere; ours was on top of their head. Sometimes it was small and when they grew up and it faded away and they were all white, they were never pure white and perfect when they were born. They either had two colourd’ eyes or a bit of color or they would be deaf. We had some deaf ones. We would usually have two batches of kittens every year. There were just about always some white ones there.

Jon Duncan: What would you do with all of the kittens?

Brenda Durtschi: Usually give them away. I guess there would have been some that dad had to kill. I think that he tried to keep that from us if it happened. I know that he had to kills some that were hurt. You didn’t take it to the vet to put it to sleep. Now you would get charged with animal abuse if you do that. I remember dad having to do that with some that had been hurt. Even take the cats that were multiplying like crazy and were sick to have them fixed. We never took a cat to the vet when I was a kid. Mom and dad both say that it costs too much to get them fixed; they have got a house full of cats that they don’t want. They can’t bother to get the mother cat fixed so that that doesn’t keep happening. We would give them away mostly or they would hang around for who knows what. One of these things that we did with these cats especially at Easter time or something, some people had colourd’ chicks, I don’t know how they got colourd’ chicks at Easter time that were alive and real. I decided to try that with our cats because we bathed our white cats quite often. They stayed outside; they didn’t stay inside the house like most cats do now. They would come in but they didn’t live in the house. Our white cat was called Muffy; she always had to go out at night. She would be inside all day and she would ask to go out. We didn’t have a kitty litter yet. She would just ask and we would let her out. We kids would like to take her to bed with us. It was really fun to think that we outsmart mom and dad and they thought that the other had let the cat out. Of course you would have to get up in the middle of the night to put her out but anyway we would always try to outsmart them and keep the cat in bed. By this time they had started to add onto the house. Mom and dad had a nice big bedroom. Caroline and I were still in the three quarter bed together but we had the bedroom that used to be their bedroom. We had outsmarted mom and dad and the cat was in bed with us. I got woke up in the night and Muffy was just making these horrible sounds. I thought what is wrong, I must be lying on or Caroline was lying on her. I was trying to figure out what was wrong, so finally I called mom and said something is wrong with Muffy. Mom came in and probably knew what was happening, she turned on the light and came in, and pulled the covers back and I am sure that she could have killed me. At that point Muffy jumped off my bed and has one kitten still attached and hanging from her, all out but not released yet. Muffy walked all the way from our bedroom, through the living room and into what was the new kitchen. It wasn’t finished yet but the sliding door was on it. We had a basket for her that she was suppose to have her kittens in. That kitten stayed attached until she jumped up to get in her bed. Needless to say mother had to change the sheets and the bedding.

Jon Duncan: Alright, did you have a horse?

Brenda Durtschi: No, always wanted a horse. I would go horseback riding with Linda Metzger a lot. She was my best friend from first grade up until high school. We always would ride horses at her place and one of the traditions with us is sports day in the spring we would have sports day down at the park. I think that we brought our lunch to school that day, I don’t think that it was provided or anything. We would bring our own lunch because we would stay in school and do all of these fun activities. Well the night before that day at school I always stayed at Linda’s that night and sometimes other people would too. We would ride horses into town, she usually had more than one or we would borrow a couple from her uncle. We always rode horses into town and when I was young some of the older kids, I didn’t ever do it but one of the games that we had was a horse race across the park. It wasn’t very far but sometimes that was one of the things that happened. Each horse just went down to the park, by the time that I was maybe in tenth grade or something Jack Hicken was here. I blame him for this, maybe I am wrong but I think it was him that did this. There were many kids bringing horses in and there were fewer kids that understood how to be around horses, just general safety precaution. I can understand it probably wasn’t a very smart thing to do but it was tradition. We would run horses to sports day every year and we weren’t about to stop just because Jack Hicken said we couldn’t do it.  We decided that despite the fact that we couldn’t take them to the park, they could stop us from doing that, it was tradition and we are riding horses in anyway. We put them in the little cow pasture beside our house. We would ride horses in and leave them there and go to school. Well unfortunately we were late so I think that we were in trouble at school. That wasn’t near as important as the trouble that we got into after school. We had a chicken coop that was part of a part of a bine and a chicken wire that is attached. The last thing that Linda’s dad told her before she left because she was riding birdie which wasn’t the grandest horse in the world, there was no way they would put me on that horse. Linda was good with horses and she could handle it. But because of me being there she had a different saddle on Birdie which had a back synch which was basically a loose belt. Anyway the last thing her dad had told her was to make sure that you undo the back synch first. She was not used to using a saddle with a back synch period. She forgot, she undid the front synch like normal and then went to pick up the saddle to take it off. The back synch hit the horses belly at the back. She went crazy. She went through the chicken wire on the one side and the other side. Linda couldn’t get a hold of her and I had been scared and couldn’t do anything. I said what do you want me to do and she said go and get Richard Kip quick. He lived just next door and he was four years older than us, he was good with horses. I ran to get Richard and by the time we got back the back synch had broke and the saddle had fell off the horse and she was calming down. That was our last year to ride horses in. I don’t think that anybody rode horses in after that. Years ago people rode horses to school; my mother rode horses to school. That was kind of just an extension of that I guess.

Jon Duncan: Did your parents ever own a car?

Brenda Durtschi: A truck as far as I can remember. The pickup we had maybe they got new I don’t know, it was a 1950. They didn’t have that then because in order to go and get me they had to borrow grandpa’s car. But sometimes after that, I was small I know and had that 1950 pickup from that time that I was little and there was my sister and I. It was long before seatbelts came to be. I do remember for trips Grandpa had a Nash. It would have been a 1947. We used that Nash a lot, even to go to Lethbridge. Grandpa would even go with us. I remember our trips to Kalispell we always went in the Nash when I was little. I can almost remember in the pickup doing that. When we got bigger I know that we went in the Nash and grandpa did to. That was fun because the seats laid back. That was even our play place on Sunday. Grandpa would come in for dinner every Sunday and we would go out in his car and these seats lay all the way down so that you had the backs to the front seats laid down flat and met the bottom of the back seat. It was basically pretty level. We would play house and all kinds of things with the seats lay down. That is how we traveled to Kalispell and we used that car to go to Lethbridge and stuff too. That truck stayed around through my teenage years. That truck has teenage history for me. We called it the sardine can. We packed that truck so full that I can remember some parties after mutual giving kid’s rides home. When Max Zaugg would be on my left side between me and the door, I was the driver. Max would signal, I don’t think that our signal lights worked. You had to arm signal out the window. Max would signal and probably work the clutch. I would work the gas pedal, the brake and the steering wheel. Probably the one sitting on the lap of the one beside me would work the gear shift. We had been known to have probably six to eight people in the front of that truck. It was that truck that I took, I may have been sixteen but I didn’t have my license yet. I basically obeyed, I wasn’t wanting to stretch the limits, but like I said Linda Metzger was my best friend and she didn’t exactly  have the same standards that I did. By this time I was a little bit uncomfortable and wanted to fit in and we had Sadie Hawkins Race. That was another tradition in high school. We had a Sadie Hawkins race, don’t remember what time of the year it would have been but it was early or late in the school year because it was decent weather. This Sadie Hawkins date was achieved by the Sadie Hawkins race that happened at the end of the school day. So you had to catch your date. The kids on the school council or something would set up the rules each year because it varied. One year I remember being down at the park and trying to climb trees to catch Bobby Zaugg I think it was. One year the boys got this brilliant plan. Maggie’s lake is what it was called, that lake that was, I don’t know what it was.

Jon Duncan: A slew

Brenda Durtschi: Ya, it was a slew and it was over there kind of across from the lions hall, that road by the lions hall did not go all the way through because the lake took part of that area. Anyway there was an alley between the school and it went right through the road where the town owns that lot now. This race for the first hour or two hours included that school yard, through the alley and back into they are that included this lake. The boys decided that none of the girls would go in there. Nobody ever waded in it, nobody ever swam in it, and it was yucky. They had decided that none of the girls would chase them into that lake. That was their plan, they would go in there and handle that yuck and we wouldn’t follow them. Well they also didn’t want to handle the yuck for very long either. So Bobby Zaugg and David Hardy built this raft. They had two 55 gallon drums and put some planks together overtop of it. These drums made it float. It wasn’t level for some reason, I don’t remember why but I know that it wasn’t level. Bev Hartley and I decided that we would sabotage their raft. This was really creepy to go out into the thing and I don’t like lake water anyway, it just gives me the willies. We had to do this. So we got one of my air mattresses, kind of destroyed it because it stunk so badly after. But we got this air mattress and we had no idea how deep this thing was or what we were getting into. So that was our mission. We got the lid out of this drum and lowered it enough to get water in it, the thing was now stuck in the mud, This lake wasn’t very deep. Because it was already at an angle they didn’t realize it had been sabotaged because now the angle was just a little different and it was a little lower and stuck in the mud but they didn’t realize that it had been sabotaged until they got out there. The fun part of that is this lid that we took out, I don’t remember why, if I had it in my pocket and we had seminary at noon. In the old church when the bishop office was built between the culture hall and the church we had this nice big kitchen. The kitchen window from the kitchen to the cultural hall had a big folding door that you could pull out far enough that you could crawl into the kitchen even if it was locked. I don’t know why I did this but that is what I did. I crawled in the kitchen and put this lid for this drum up in the cupboard quite high in the back corner. The funny thing about that is that for years after that I would come home and check and it would still be there. After many years somebody got rid of it but nobody knew why it was there or what it was. Ninety percent of the boys went out in that slew for Sadie Hawkins race and ninety percent of the girls followed in after them. Oh did we stink, it was awful. I remember after wards I was trying to be some of the mud that was off of his head that was in his hair and was picking up the water that wasn’t so yucky. He thought that I was trying to be mean. We were all a mess. There was about three or four of us girls that went over to Lucy Zaugg’s and we had a shower down in their basement and after we had hosed each other off outside her mother permitted us to use the shower down in the basement. We all cleaned off as best we could and cleaned our hair about three times. We had our hair in curlers. Back then we didn’t use electric curlers like we do today. So our hair was in curlers and needed to be put in a hair drier or needed time to dry. We needed to find Calvin because Linda needed to go home and get ready. We couldn’t find him, my parents weren’t around. The truck was home and the keys were there. Well Linda would have taken the truck and gone home if the situation had been reversed. She knew that I normally wouldn’t. Anyway I wanted to be tough like her or something like that; it was peer pressure in my mind because I wanted to fit in. Linda was telling me and meant it, don’t go, it wasn’t like she was enticing me to do this. She knew that I shouldn’t and she knew that I would be in trouble if I got caught. I was trying to play tough and she knew a back road that we could go so we didn’t have to travel a highway. I decided to take the truck. Mom and dad were in Lethbridge. So we got in the truck and we head out for the cemetery, I had never been past the cemetery, that gravel road goes over a little hill at the railroad tracks there. When we got that high, we were in a hurry, I was driving faster than I ever had on a gravel road with my dad. I only had my learners permit, I was going every bit as fast as I could handle and there we are at a ninety degree corner, that corner is curved and I probably could have handled it if I had kept going, I was sure I could have handled it. My mind was saying just ahead is just grass and dirt; it had never been made into a road. If I just keep going straight I won’t tip over and I can stop and back up. So that is what my mind is telling me to do and I started to make the curve. I had to yank it back. I didn’t see that in the grass was a ditch, my front wheel hit the ditch and by that time I had slowed down enough that nothing serious happened we just tipped over. My head was out the window as a I drive Beverly was one the other side and her head was hanging out the window Linda is in the middle. She is on her knees with her head out the window to dry her hair. We are lucky that they got sat down and nobody got hurt. The boys all came and tipped the truck up and I wouldn’t drive after that. Brian Eaves was Linda’s boyfriend at the time and I made him drive the truck home because I wasn’t getting in a driving it again. I was sort of in shock. We went home and mom and dad weren’t there. They wouldn’t let me stay home. Linda said you are not staying here alone. You are either going to the same Sadie Hawkins party with us which was right out by the highway 52. I went to the party not thinking that I could get away from mom and dad but thinking that I could get home before they got done shopping in Lethbridge. I didn’t make it and everybody wanted to know what my dad was going to say. Many people gave me a ride home that night and Linda wasn’t going to let me face my parents alone. So she and Bev came in the house and Suzanne Peterson of course had to tag along. The boys could hear through the window. I was totally embarrassed. I knew that mom and dad wouldn’t get made but I had broken their trust, I had taken the truck when they knew that I wouldn’t. I really felt rotten about it. Then I wasn’t even there to face him afterwards.  Anyway I went in and my head was hung down low. I didn’t have to see my dads face, I knew exactly what it was like, and I knew his expression. All he said to me was what happened. At this time they didn’t suspect it, they called Perry Barton the town cop and told him because his truck was parked at an angle and it was a busy road and by what the side of the truck looked like he had figured that one of these big trucks had hit it because there were dents at the very bottom up the door and above the door. The whole side from top to bottom on this door was a dent. His first though was that one of these big trucks must have hit it because it was parked right the way that he left it. It was parked different then normal and I parked it that way on purpose hoping that they wouldn’t notice. But Caroline did and pitched such a fit that dad finally had to go out and look. So he called Perry and though it had been a big truck, after he looked a little more he said ill handle it if you don’t mind. He could tell it had been tipped so he knew that I had done it. Anyhow that was kind of the talk of the school the next day. I never did get chewed out for it. The only thing that was ever said was about two weeks later mom said I thought that we could trust you Brenda. Graduation Jack Hicken commented about different people and mentioned Brenda’s truck driving but that is what he was talking about.
 
Tape 2 Side 2
 
Jon Duncan: Alright Brenda, I want to take a different direction now; I want to talk about your school years. Who are some of the teachers that you remember?

Brenda Durtschi: Viki Zaugg was everybody’s first grade teacher for many years. Ellen Nelson was the next one in second grades. Annette Londonwest or Westlondon, she came and got married while she was here. It was third grade for me, third grade was split. Grade one was alone, grade two and half of grade three were together. Half of grade three and grade four were together. Ms. Wylde was our teacher in fourth grade teacher and the other grade three kids. Myrtle Christensen wasn’t especially loved. She was getting awfully old to be teaching. She taught my mother school. You pretty much knew all of your teachers. We had a new principal when I was in sixth grade because I remember kids would have thought that I was in trouble because his wife called and said gets a babysitter for tonight or something. I babysat for that principal but he was only here one year. I guess Jack Hicken must have come when I was in seventh grade. I think he was the one that moved into that house after that teacher. I babysat for him too. In seventh grade I think Golespy must have been our main teacher then because he was not from Stirling, he lived in Lethbridge. Socially he didn’t do anything with the community. All of the other teachers living in the community and were members of the church but Mr. Golespy didn’t know us all. Therefore he didn’t know what had happened one morning when I would have been in eighth grade Calvin Metzger and a bunch of his friends had gone hunting. One of them, may have been Dick Berhagy, he didn’t have his own gun so he had one of Metzger’s when they went hunting. When they came home, now I cant remember because I know nothing about guns, but I remember Calvin did take care of whatever he was suppose to do with his gun. I think bobby hollered upstairs and asked where his sheets were or something because his mom had just done the wash and his bed wasn’t made. His mom told him that they were upstairs and to come up and get them. Calvin said I think I will go to bed too. I think that is the way that it happened. So Calvin picks up this gun and maybe his was put away or maybe he had both of them in his hand I don’t know. Calvin picked up this gun to go downstairs and go to bed. As he went around the corner to go downstairs Bobby was just coming up to get the sheets and bumped the gun. The gun went off and buck blew Bobby’s head off. Most of the town knew about it but Mr. Golespy didn’t know and then I guess teachers figured that he did and were maybe too involved with helping students. That was not a good day at school, it affected the entire community. I remember being in class and I think he either asked where Bobby was or red the roll. I don’t know exactly what happened but some comment was made about it anyway and someone finally said he is dead. Mr. Golespy didn’t believe him. It took quite a bit from the class before Mr. Golespy realized something was going on here and he left the room and talked to one of the other teachers. I remember that is how he found out because he didn’t know. I personally remember knowing before going to school but it was like it wasn’t real until I got to school and saw other people crying. That was when it hit me what had really happened. School was let out for the funeral. Chuck offered to drive bus for anybody that didn’t have a ride that wanted to go to the funeral. As I remember he didn’t even have to because there were so many parents that went to the funeral. I don’t think that he drove the bus, I do remember him offering but as I remember he didn’t have to do it because it wasn’t needed. That was a pretty rough day in Stirling. One of the things that were special about it which to me represents about what Stirling is, this wasn’t just the Mormon community, and the Metzger’s weren’t members. But just the beautiful spirits that are there when you live in a little place. I know that it was harvest season; all of the farm neighbours out there came in with their trucks and their combines and did the harvest for Metzger’s. I guess that there were just hordes of combines out there on their land. Of course it is difficult because without the gospel you just don’t have the same perception. I really feel bad about it because Linda was my best friend. My parents did take me out to see her, I should have stayed with her but they didn’t understand that. But because Petersons had a kid die and understood better Suzanne would stay out there with them so at least she had somebody out there with her. I was her best friend, it should have been me. But as far as the teachers, you wanted to know some stuff about school, one of the good and bad things about Stirling, it is probably the thing now even though it is not as close, you know everybody. Unfortunately the teachers can’t help but know what type of student you are, your reputation follows you. By second grade I was poor in English. That followed me all through high school. My very last semester I went to Raymond because I wanted some cooking classes because that is where I was going to major in university. Because of the way that they cycle I didn’t get it anyway but then I didn’t dare come back to school and have them thinking that I left them to finish in Raymond. Nobody in Raymond knew that I was bad in English. I did an English 33 over there and did really good. I was shocked. A large part of that is the reputation that follows you. If you do what is expected of you that is one of the problems about being in Stirling. The good part is that people do care and you know the teachers better and it is easier to talk to them. One of the other things about teachers with my parents is that even though we didn’t like Myrtle Christensen and would complain about her, my parents would never let me get away with it, they always stood up for her.

Jon Duncan: What are some of the pranks that kids would play on the teachers?

Brenda Durtschi: Well what could you get away with, one of the things that I know that you couldn’t get away with, they knew everything, and they knew what was going on. One of the things that bugged me was high school graduation I was going with a kid from Mountain View, his graduation was on Thursday and mine was on Friday. That was a long way to drive so we stayed at each others homes. Mostly we would stay at his because he had to work on Saturday and our dates would be a weekend long. We were very well chaperoned because parents would have very good standards. Anyway graduation day in Stirling, that morning of school that twelve graders have to go to, they don’t accomplish anything anyway and so my parents were going to let me skip the morning because there was no school in the afternoon for us. So I was going to go to high school graduation there and there would probably be a party after grad. I would have stayed overnight and then come down here for my grad the next day. Well one of my friends, more likely Bobby Zaugg let the cat out of the bag to the teachers, so they decided that if I skipped school then others may do the same. They decided not to put up with that and so they made it loud and clear that anybody skipping school on Friday couldn’t come to grad. I suffered for it, my parents had given me permission they shouldn’t have done this to me anyway. So mom and dad went to the temple Thursday night and hung around at Uncle Louis’s and Aunt Hables while I went to graduation in Cardston and then he came down so that I could go to school Friday morning. So that is one of those things, you just don’t get away with that down here because the teachers know that.

Jon Duncan: How did the teachers discipline students?

Brenda Durtschi: I don’t think they had to, I don’t remember much, and you just obeyed. I guess there was detention after school. I do remember sometimes for some stuff you had to right down pages of a dictionary. I think I have done that before. I don’t really remember anybody being strapped but it was allowed. You would get sent to the principal’s office and you might be worried about that happening. Your parents would have supported it.

Jon Duncan: Another thing that I wanted to ask, you said you went to seminary. Who was your teacher?

Brenda Durtschi: Joe Stevenson, he was our vice principal and he was our seminary teacher as well. He was interesting because apparently you had to fill out evaluations because I remember his comments about it. We must have been honest enough because I don’t even remember what he said but there must have been enough honesty in it that he kind of got the picture of what was going on. Mr. Stevenson understood the subject well, like math. I remember he was our math teacher and we would see him in seminary. He knew what he was talking about and he had a testimony but he wasn’t a fun teacher. He didn’t put it over well. Somehow whatever was said in these evaluations I remember that idea coming out. We felt like we didn’t care about it but it was just his ability to relate well with the students. He did care and he was willing to help, you could go into him afterschool, ask for help and get it. None of us felt comfortable about doing that. Jack Hicken I enjoyed, he was a good teacher, and he was fun. He was strict and you had better mind but he was fun. Doug Christensen was our principal and he was probably the principal by seventh grade. When that teacher left that was principal for one year Doug Christensen was principal after that and I don’t remember how many years he was principal. He was strict but good, you learned from Doug. One of the things that was really weird, you couldn’t fall asleep in his classes, you just didn’t do that. I finally found out by tenth grade, I had a class with him before lunch and I could fall asleep in it. Other students didn’t understand how I could do that, I would get hollered at. He would wake me up and give me a hard time about it. It was after that I got to BYU and got so tired that I didn’t have the energy to go out and have fun. When a kid can’t do that something is wrong. Maybe it’s okay to fall asleep in class but to not go out on the weekend and have fun, something is fishy.  After I came home from that month the doctor figured that I had a thyroid problem. I learned later that I am a little hypoglycaemic so before lunch I probably needed food real bad. That is part of the reason why it was going on.

Jon Duncan: Alright, now how long were you a cheerleader?

Brenda Durtschi: I was a cheerleader in eleventh grade; I think that I cheered two years. I didn’t cheer in twelfth grade because I had a boyfriend in Mountain View and he played Church basketball. Back then cheerleading was not something on its own, cheerleaders cheered for basketball. You didn’t have your own competitions or sometimes there would be cheer competitions at the basketball tournaments. It was purely connected to basketball. So high school basketball was on Friday unless we had a tournament and then it would be on Friday and Saturday.  Church basketball was Saturday so he played church ball and if I cheered I would have basketball on Friday, when would we date. So I chose not to cheer in twelfth grade. I was scorekeeper, I worked the clock. That way I was needed in Stirling and he could come to Stirling and we could be together at the game or afterwards. If I wanted to go to a game with the team I could but I didn’t have to. One of the things that was different about cheerleading then is that we didn’t have a coach. The cheerleaders from previous years, we did more yells, I don’t know about routines but we had words with our cheers. The previous cheerleaders taught the new ones coming in. We invented our own cheers and we invented our own teams whatever we did. But we didn’t have a coach. One of the other things that I thought was a special part of Stirling was that both the cheerleaders and the basketball teams in our dressings room before games we always had a prayer.

Jon Duncan: Alright, that brings me to another question. You have had many friends that our in the church and out of the church. Who are your best friends?

Brenda Durtschi: In my grade there was Bev Hartley, Suzanne Peterson, and I. We were the only members of the church. There were two Mennonites that lived out of town and didn’t socialize with us. The only time that we did anything with them was at school. That was Barbra Walter and Betty Hoffarth. Then Linda Metsker was Catholic. Basically for Linda to have a friend it had to be members of the church. She and I got along great as little kids. She was a true friend all through our years. She lived out of town so as a little kid I didn’t do much with her unless I could stay overnight or she would come in and stay the night at my place or at school. I ran around with Bev Hartley and Barbra Nelson she was a year younger. When I was a little kid I would stay out at her place when she lived in Maybutt and dad hauled grain, he would drop me off at her house when he would go drop off the first load and pick me up on a later load. Then later towards the end of high school Barbra Nelson and I were good friend again. Bev Hartley wasn’t the true friend that Linda was but we were friends through all the years but we had our ups and downs through the years. Suzy Peterson basically the same way. You would get along and you didn’t. Linda Metsker was a true friend and when were kids our differences didn’t matter, we didn’t see them. As we started to get older our parents were defiantly concerned because her friend and the life that her family led was defiantly different than ours. As teenagers and getting older and getting more things parents were concerned that I would get into doing the stuff that she did. They would be mad and I figured I could do what I wanted but at the same time I was a follower. She was a leader, by somewhere in eleventh grade I was starting to make my own choices, at thirteen years old I remember one time being mad; I didn’t have the temper long. In eleventh grade I started making some choices and I wanted to live the standards that the church taught, I had the testimony, I wanted a temple marriage, I wanted all those things and I realized that running around with Linda I was going to have a hard time. Her friends were the kids that were either Non-members or Inactive and didn’t live the standards as high. They would smoke and drink; as far as Stirling was concerned they just didn’t have high enough standards. So when I chose what I wanted to do, I regret how I handled it but at that time I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t run around with Linda and do what I felt I should. Finally many years later I did talk to her about this and apologised and tried to explain myself and she was wonderful about it. I came to school one day and she had no understanding of what I was doing, I just said that I couldn’t run around with her anymore and I needed to keep the standards that I needed to keep, it’s not like she told me not to keep them because she never did. She was very supportive of my standards. So I came to school one day and quit being her friend. I wish to this day that I had the guts to try and explain myself. She had no idea what was wrong. The sad part was that at the same time someone was spreading gossip about her. I don’t know if the gossip was true or not but I didn’t believe it. I did know that the person spreading that gossip was living that kind of false life. No body in town believed it. To this day I have a real hard time appreciating that person like I should and not having a resentful attitude because she spread malicious gossip that I don’t think it was true but it was true about her. She was playing miss goodie two shoes. The difference in LDS and the non-member is very strong here. It is true that some standards are different but some aren’t. I grew up in it and accepted it and since I have been out in the world and around lots of non-members. You can have wonderful non-member friends that have neat standards and set a good example for them and learn from them. In this town because there are so many members of the church and our life centers around the church, it isn’t a Sunday religion. Everything about our life centers around it. We give service related to it because of other people that are committed to doing things. Our life is full because of the church. Because of that I am sure that non-members look at us as stuck up, like we don’t have time for them. With some people there is probably some truth to that. The other side of it is that it is not intentional. I did learn some things about this before I had been away from home for very long, one of the things that was similar that was Stirling hated Raymond and so did Magrath. Really it was because Raymond didn’t need us. The four wards in Raymond, there was enough socialization there that they could date and socialize with just them. We needed more than that. We felt like they were stuck up. In Stirling who wants to date, you go to school and the kids are like brothers. In Waterton when I went to work there kind of the same thing happened. We called the kids that worked at the hotel stuck up because they didn’t socialize with the town kids. The fact is that there were never enough town kids. They needed each other and more. They didn’t have a group to get to know.  At the Prince of Wales so many kids were working up there and they were living in dorms and got to know each other, they had a social group. They didn’t need the kid’s downtown to have a social life. I don’t mean to be rude but the members of the church don’t need the rest of the town to have a good social life. But we need to stretch out to the others so that their life isn’t, so that they don’t feel isolated from us. It is not all rudeness; part of it is the logistics of what happens. One of the things that I have seen since I came home and listened to one parents that they are concerned that their kids marry within the religion, marry in the temple and make the covenant because that is where happiness is. That is very important to all of us. So with that concern we sometimes get concerned about our teenagers socializing with non-members. I was the same before I lived here; I was concerned that before I lived here that my kids socialized with kids that had high standards. That they had to go beyond the church to find that because there weren’t that many members, here there are so many members. Those that don’t live church standards can all too easily be ostracized, that is a sad fact that I am sure non-members have here. 

Jon Duncan: Alright, I want to go back to school for a few more minutes. Especially in the teenage tears what was the 24^th of July like?

Brenda Durtschi: That was one of the sad things for me. The change in the town that happened in the seventies was hard for me to take. The 24^th of July and the ward dinner, it is the pioneer day in Utah. It is a state holiday because of the Mormon pioneers. Mormon pioneers settled this town; my grandparents on both sides lived in Stirling. Grandpa Romeril came up two weeks after Theodore Brandley got here. He was one of the first settlers in fact that was a project in high school to find out if grandpa was on the list of first settlers. So my roots are here, I belong to Stirling; anybody that has ever lived in Stirling has connection here. Especially if they live here for any period of time or had any connection here. This is home. As a kid growing up, people came home to Stirling. The 24^th of July, we recognised the fact that we were still celebrating Mormon pioneers. As more people moved in we wanted to break up this Mormon and non Mormon distinction in town so we changed that from the 24^th of July to settler’s days. I was probably gone when that happened or at least out of high school. It was probably by the time that I was coming back. It wasn’t just family anymore, you would have a few people here and there like Jean Macintosh was a year older than me. I don’t think that their family was connected to Stirling but she was part of all of my growing up. I don’t know if they were here when I graduated or4 not but she was a year older than I was. There were a few others that moved in. Most people had roots here. Even Jack Hicken that was a school teacher said that he had lived here for seven years and started to feel that he belonged. There is truth to that but there is also truth to the fact that Jack was an outsider, he was a Raymond kid. Anyway, Stirling people have always been here as I grew up and they came home. The church had a ward had a ward thing once a year and anybody who had lived here came home. The other time that they would come home was Christmas. Maybe aunts and uncles are here. One of the other traditions for longer than I can remember and I think lasted until I was gone was a kid’s dance in the afternoon. I believe that this was from three to six in the afternoon. All the members of the church came, I don’t know if non-members did but they would have been welcome. Anybody that was in town except for teenagers came. So you not only knew everybody in town but you knew their cousins, you knew their pets, you knew the car that they drove. When I was about fifteen I saw a green station wagon in town. I was immediately asking if anybody knew of anyone that got a new car. Nobody did so I wondered who it was.
 
Tape 3 Side 1
 
Jon Duncan: Alight we were just talking about social life in Stirling when we ran out of tape there. Brenda let me ask you, what took place on the 24^th of July?

Brenda Durtschi: Well I think there was a breakfast first, I don’t remember that I went to that but I know one of the early the early things that happened was the primary parade. Primary is the church organization for the kids from three to eleven. So this primary parade all of the kids dressed up somehow like pioneers or Indians. I remember my little wagon that dad fixed up with wire or willows and made the wagon look like a covered wagon. My little sister would ride it and I pulled it. I think that we only walked the entire block in front of the church or something like that, it wasn’t a long parade. It wasn’t floats or anything else; it was just the kids dressed up. We would do that primary parade every year and there were games. Kids would come. Like I said you knew everybody’s cousins in town. She went to a camp with us one year too. That was one of the other things that we did in church and pretty much only the beehive years, twelve and thirteen years old. We would go up there for four or five days each summer for those two years. You didn’t just socialize with Stirling. I’m my teenage years you were getting to know kids from Raymond and Magrath. There was a lot of community things, high school we had dances maybe once a month or something.

Jon Duncan: Did they still have a rodeo on the 24^th of July?

Brenda Durtschi: No, we would always go swimming and of course the pool was always there. I remember it being important and I remember it being fun. I don’t think that we had fireworks at that time.

Jon Duncan: Okay, I want to focus on Christmas for a while. What was Christmas like in the Adamson home?

Brenda Durtschi: Well grandpa Romeril lived four miles out on a farm. Grandpa was part of our family to dad as much as to mom. You couldn’t have Christmas without him. Us kids always begged him to stay overnight because we were afraid that he wouldn’t be there in the morning and we couldn’t open presents until he got there. Sure as shooting he would always be there before we would get up and he would always be standing on one leg and the other leg would be over the corner of the kitchen table. I don’t know why he didn’t sit down in the living room or on a chair in the kitchen. He was always there and we would open presents. When I was little Aunt Mary and Uncle Art Fife, dad’s sister lived in Stirling and she had an older daughter that was pregnant the same time that she was. Those two boys were just younger than me and we often shared gifts at Christmas time. We would get together, we didn’t have dinner together but we would get together part of Christmas day. I felt cheated actually because everybody in Stirling had cousins coming home and I had nobody. Grandpa would be there, some Christmases we got together with Farrell and Merle Oler. I guess they didn’t have any other family until their older kids started getting married and they were coming home, then we didn’t get together with them anymore. He was dad’s cousin. For years I have said that I was going to marry into a big family and my kids are going to have lots of cousins and did I ever get it. One of the other things of Stirling with Farrell and Merle, we had cows that we milked and we sold a bit of that milk. Back then life wasn’t so busy, I cant imagine doing this now but when they would come to get milk the would stay and visit or we would take the milk down to them and most of our family would go and we would stay and visit. We didn’t do this every night but probably a few times a week.

Jon Duncan: What would happen at Easter time?

Brenda Durtschi: We would go out to the coulee at the farm, we always made eggs and colour’d them. We would go out there and roll the eggs. As I got older and babysat I still did it but I would take the kids with me and we would go out and roll them.

Jon Duncan: How often would people go out and play cards?

Brenda Durtschi: Our family never did that; Zaugg’s did that quite a bit.

Jon Duncan: Something that I want to ask you, where was the hangout for the teenagers in Stirling?

Brenda Durtschi: Well some of the older boys, those that didn’t have quite as high standards would hang out in the pool hall. Girls never went in the pool hall; I remember once or twice sticking my head in the pool hall to ask for Chuck or something. My dad never went in the pool hall but Chuck was there quite a bit. We joked about Albert Hartley being the bishop of second ward because he hung out at the pool hall a lot. The pool hall was second ward, they were the ones that didn’t really come to church a whole lot. I don’t think that we really had a place to hang out, just each others place or up town. One of the terrible things that we did, we had a payphone in front of the post office, you could dial a number and then when somebody answered you had to put your money in. Us kids at the post office memorized the number for the payphone. I guess we cheated the telephone company. We knew that if your phone rang at home and nobody answered and you could call back the payphone and then you could use it without paying for it. We didn’t have the red apple, we had Canadian grocery. Chuck had the Bergenson place on the corner that no longer exists. The pool hall was between and it burned down. I guess we hung out in the café a little but that was mostly the older guys. It wasn’t the teenagers really that hung out in the café.

Jon Duncan: How often did you go to the swimming pool?

Brenda Durtschi: I think mom put a limit on it; we couldn’t go every day or twice a day like my kids do. We had swimming lessons and I think those days she wouldn’t let me go swimming and I could go swimming the other days. We hit the pool almost every day of the week. I think back then you didn’t get a season pass it was pay for ten and get twelve.

Jon Duncan: Did you ever get into trouble at the swimming pool?

Brenda Durtschi: This is while I was still running around with Linda but it was really close to the end. We had to go and check on something where I babysit and we ended up leaving our swimsuits on the lawn somewhere. Linda comes by; it had to be after nine because the pool was closed. She came by and she wanted her swimming suit. They were going to climb the fence and go swimming at the pool. We drove down to check on the jeans and I found her swimming suit and got mine as well because both of them had been on the lawn. They were driving back to drop me off only I wasn’t going with them. Then somebody asked if I wanted to go, I decided to go with them. That wasn’t smart because I had left the house without even telling mom and dad what I was doing. We went over to Bev Michelson’s because she had a tent up and she was supposed to be with Helen’s kids. We went to Bev’s house and we put on our swimming suits and we put our clothes on over top. There were a few boys with us; I remember there were some boys on the bleachers that were near the pool. We climbed the fence, why the girls did it and not the boys, I don’t know. We climbed the fence and the three of us went swimming. I think it was Calvin Metsker hollered, he wasn’t really with us but he was on the bleachers watching, he said that a car was coming. By this time my dad was town cop. We were afraid that it was him. You could kind of tell by the headlights what the vehicle was. I thought it was him so we ran out of that pool really fast and if we were caught we didn’t want to be caught with our swimming suits on. We put our clothes back on over the suits so the clothes got wet. We went to Bev’s, changed out of our swimming suits. When we went home they dropped me off and stopped the car by uncle Heber’s so that the car wouldn’t stop in front of the house. I had two pairs of cut offs that were the very same as what I was wearing. I had to come in through the window; change into dry cut offs and then come in through the door. I was just about to step onto the lawn. Then I hear my dad’s voice and it wasn’t from the house. Mom and Dad were both in the truck and had their heads ducked in the corner so that I couldn’t see them. They watched me get dropped off and called me over and asked what I had been doing. I stood there at the truck and I remember kind of leaning on the window and spread my legs apart hoping that my pants would dry a bit. I ended up standing there talking so long that they did. For years I didn’t know if mom and dad knew what I had done or not. I think that they probably did. Lots of people jumped the wall at the swimming pool but that was quite extreme in pushing what was proper for me to do. But it was fun.

Jon Duncan: You mentioned many times Chuck, how come you were so close to him?

Brenda Durtschi: Well when Chuck’s wife first moved to Stirling to marry him and was taken around to meet everybody. She thought that I was kind of special as a little Carol Anne was there already, the baby, she was the cutest little thing. She told me that I came to her house; I didn’t have as many babysitting jobs as Bev Hartley. I loved kids and wanted to babysit. Apparently I went and knocked on here door and asked if I could babysit She thought that I was a little too young and she probably had about four kids at that time. When I was about fourteen I started babysitting for her. Whenever I would have trouble when I was babysitting for them I started being there more and just became part of the family. I even stayed overnight a lot. In the summer I was there more than I was at mom and dads when you include the whole twenty four hours a day. Bev Hartley got mad at me one day; she asked if I could do something I said well I have to ask first. In an irritated tone she said who have you got to ask. I said well mom will let me I just need to see if LuJean needs me or not. I was just their babysitter. If someone would ask me to babysit for a church function or something I wouldn’t say no I would just say well let me check first, maybe I was even dumb enough to say well I have to check with LuJean first. I went to LuJean a lot; she could be a friend, when I would go over there after high school dances I would get tired of being a wall flower so I would go over there. Chuck wasn’t home because he worked, if her door was locked I would go around to her bedroom window, this would be around eleven, she would be asleep by now. We would talk and she would go back to teenage years when she was dating and she was more like a friend. If I was having trouble she could be more like a mother or an older sister. I would go over there if I was having trouble with my parents or something. She never once criticized my parents, they parented differently so there had to be times that she didn’t approve of what they were doing but I never knew. One time when I went over there really upset I was crying and she listened to me and finally she starts to laugh. I said this isn’t funny, why are you laughing. She said I finally figured out what is bothering you; she said you made your dad so mad that he swore at you. My dad didn’t swear all he said was damn but he didn’t do that and I had made him so upset that he said that. Some times I would go over there and say that I was with LuJean or they would call her and ask if Brenda was there. They really didn’t mind. There were times over the years when I got so close to them that I think it hurt mom a little that I wasn’t closer to her but they were also grateful that through rough times. I was so close to the kids, I was babysitting by the time that Lauren was born so he didn’t know that I wasn’t really part of the family. When Chuck was in the bishop ranks and went down for a bishop meeting I would tend to the kids twenty four hours a day for several days. Fortunately we were all in School. I don’t know who tended Laurent, he wasn’t in school yet, but I would tend them for days at a time.

Jon Duncan: My last set of questions has to do with this, when did you leave Stirling?

Brenda Durtschi: Basically I left right after high school. But I was back quite a bit. I only went to school for a year and I worked in Lethbridge so I lived in Lethbridge and I would come home. From there I got my call to go on my mission and I came home from my mission and went to Rexburg immediately for a semester. Then I came home and worked again and then ended up going back to BYU. In that time I was kind of back and forth a bit. Until you’re married your not really gone it seems like. In that time frame I had a real hard time coming back to church in Stirling because all my years growing up I knew everybody. At this time people that had no connection to Stirling moved in. For many people they had no connection, it felt like they were changing the town and they didn’t belong, they weren’t connected to Stirling. Stirling was a connected town we all were related. I think it was eleventh grade we had a spare and we sat down instead of Studying and we tried to figure out who there was in Stirling that didn’t have relatives here, Pengilly, Metskers, McGlands, the DP’s I wasn’t sure who they were for a while. It stands for Displaced Persons it was the Germans that came here after the war. They didn’t really socialize with us at all. There was one family of DP’s, they had some married kids that lived here and there was Gregory the shoemaker. He didn’t have any relatives. And to have these people come in that had no connection it just felt like they were changing my town. I would go to church in Lethbridge and mom and dad figured that it was just because I liked to see my friends and that is true but I didn’t want to come to Stirling to church. I didn’t want to see this change; they were taking away my town. That is how it felt and I knew that I was nasty about it but that is how I felt. I was excited to be home one weekend because the ward dinner was on. Everybody would be home from all over southern Alberta. Lots of people would be here that I hadn’t seen for years. I went to the ward dinner and they weren’t there. I think my parents didn’t dare tell me and probably knew. The fact was that it was a ward dinner, it was the church that was putting this one and for the new people that were part of the ward the needed not to do that anymore. It needed to be done, those people needed to feel a part of the church. They probably felt some of the rejection that I was feeling towards them. Even though they lived here and others got to know them I didn’t like it at that time. Now as I come back I love it, I am glad they are here, I am glad its not jus the same old people that knew me when I was a kid. That is when it was really hard to handle, that is when the ward did change in the seventies.

Jon Duncan: Alright, why was it that you decided to go off to BYU?

Brenda Durtschi: Well for starters when you left high school you either got married or you went to university or collage or you were a bum. Anne Perrett got married right after high school. Everybody else had either gone to school or was a bit of a bum. I wasn’t getting married and I wasn’t going to be a bum so you had to go to university. I stayed away a year and then worked so that is why it took me so long. I couldn’t go to school in Canada because by then I wanted to go to BYU. After all, I wanted to marry someone who had my standards and was part of the church, which was about as much good sense as I used in making a decision. Then when I got back I wanted a cooking degree. If I had to work while I was married I could be a cooking teacher and my kids would be in school. I liked sewing and I needed to learn to cook and like it better, I never learned to accomplish that. Anyway that is what I did and I got married five months after I got out of University so I never really used the degree for the work. I married somebody from BYU, he was from Idaho. After he finished his school we ended up going back in the army. He had been in for three years. We lived in Washington, went to Germany for four years, went to Bermuda for five years, back to Germany for three, and then back to Fort Louis for the last three years. We have really tried to use prayer and guidance of the spirit as we make decisions. Definatly used it in joining the army, I had no intention, I felt sorry for army brats in high school and you would ask them where there from, well I was born here, my parents live here. I belonged to Stirling, Stirling belonged to be. As Mark finished school we looked for jobs all over and used a lot of prayer. As we were on the highway to Montana and he said what you would think if I said I wanted to join the army. This was kind of at the end of our job search and he was serious with prayer because nothing was hitting us right. When he said that I didn’t even have to pray about it, the reassurance of the spirit let me know that that was right and it was so strong and it was so much against everything that I ever thought I wanted for my family. There has never since been question that that was the right choice for us. We were supposed to do that. It has given me great comfort as we had to move. We had to know people but moving is not my favourite thing. I expected to marry someone and probably live in a little Mormon town like I grew up in somewhere. It is not the life that I expected but that conformation from the sprit that that is what we were suppose to do gave me great comfort. I knew that is what the lord wanted and you know we would move; we weren’t there forever. We had such guidance and everything just fell into place it was like there was never a choice, it just fell into place. Like with the army there was no choice there. With moving here mark came home from first sergeant school, we had about a year left in the army. He did the remodelling that had to be done. He said well we have got everything done on the house that we needed so now we can sell it, we are ready. About as easy as that he said I think we need to move to Stirling and take care of your parents. We talked about that but a few weeks after I was up here on vacation with the kids and he couldn’t come because of his job and we were looking around for a house. No way did I believe that we could afford a new one. Someone said to go and look at what Gorden Shaufert was building because he wanted to live in it for a year and then move. I wanted to move up here and buy in a year so we went and looked just for fun. When I was done looking threw I looked at Gorden and said how can you do this to me. I said this is my floor plan but I can’t afford a new house. In the next couple of days the kids had picked their bedrooms and I wondered how I would convince Mark that this was our new house. The short part of that story is that I did. We are here and the kids dreaded it, they didn’t want to come to yellow southern Alberta, they wanted to come where there were trees all the time. They didn’t want to move to this little town. Alicia said well if one person doesn’t like you, you won’t have any friends. Alicia knew that the lord had blessed us and that good things were happening. The way that we sold our house and everything about it let us know that we were to move here. That was her attitude before we left. Even though she wasn’t happy she quit murmuring. When we got here it didn’t take long and they were overrun with friends and their social life was more than it had ever been.

Jon Duncan: When was it that you married mark?

Brenda Durtschi: December 9^th 1977, three weeks after he got home from his mission.

Jon Duncan: How many children have you had?

Brenda Durtschi: Three

Jon Duncan: That is your family that you’re brought back here to Stirling?

Brenda Durtschi: Yes.

Jon Duncan: Alright my last question is this. You have answered in part, when you look at Stirling today and you look at the Stirling that you grew up in. What is the major change?

Brenda Durtschi: You don’t know everybody, you knew everybody then, it is still friendly it is still community you still take care of each other. You just don’t know everybody; you don’t know every car that drives by.
 
Tape 3 Side 2
 
Jon Duncan: Alright, we were just talking about your perceptions of change when the tape ran out. Why don’t we finish there?

Brenda Durtschi: One of the things about Stirling when I was a youth the members of the church with high standards were probably the most popular. That was the accepted norm. About five years later was when that changed and the kids that didn’t live the standards were the more popular ones. Then I think it was a hard time for the youth and it was a hard rime for the parents in Stirling because they never faced that. I think that it has turned back again and one of the things that I love about it is all these kids that my kids are friends with. My son got a phone call several weeks ago from a girl that he liked and he couldn’t date her while we were in Washington because he wasn’t sixteen yet. What I found out after we moved is that they spent an awful lot of time on the phone. I guess he had a phone in his room and they would talk after we went to bed. She got a call from him and she informed him that she was pregnant and getting married. He was devastated, not because there was that much relationship there but because he was so far away from that. My kids have had friends that you would probably expect that from and we did expect that from her. They have had lots of friends and I think many of their friends that they left in Washington were not virgins. Even down to Heidi and she was still in Junior high. So they were use to associating with kids like that but here it is so different and there are so many with high standards that I don’t worry when the kids are out. I don’t worry about who they are with. The worst part about Stirling is that there are so many good kids and the parents are so comfortable with it that they let their kids keep too late of hours. I think it is a bad president for when they get older and they have single dating. Other than that I never have to worry about what my kids are doing so far. Jared finally has a girlfriend. I want to know a little more about what is going on but it is awesome. They don’t have to face what they would have faced if they were still out in the world. It is such a sheltered life. Mr. Maynes the principal here says that Stirling is in a bubble. They don’t know what the rest of the world is like. In some ways you feel like that doesn’t prepare them for it but they get to grow up most of the kids here. By the time that the leave are strong enough and secure enough that they continue to live the standards. Maybe some get out and done know how to face the rest of the world because they are sheltered here and there are a lot of things out there. I don’t know if these kids who have always lived here would really know what they were facing if they were around kids who were on drugs. They may not recognise what is going on. I love the shelter that they have here. My kids have benefited from both.

Jon Duncan: So that is something that has continued over they years?

Brenda Durtschi: Yes, it has even though there was a time when it got crazy.

Jon Duncan: Okay, well Brenda I would like to thank you for your time. We have had a good visit. I have learned a lot, I think it is time to shut this off.

Brenda Durtschi: Okay
 
Transcribed by Clinton Dovell