RAYMOND LARKIN SMITH

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RAYMOND LARKIN SMITH
A simple life story written by his oldest granddaughter
Terrilynn Morris Johannessen

    Raymond Larkin Smith was born in a tent at Fort McKinsey on the 23rd of July 1915, in Sheridon, Wyoming.  Born to Andrew Jackson Smith and Siddie Margret Bunn.  He was the second oldest of eight brothers and sisters.  His family lived in many places throughout California and Utah.  Granddad grew up during the Great Depression and during this time went to many trade schools, learned electronics and many other things.
     During the Depression the family lived at a bad time, like most people, trying to feed their families. Granddad left home during this time so his mom and dad didn’t have to worry about feeding him.  With his friend, Carlos Lang, they went hoboeing, traveling from coast to coast.  Taking any job they could find, they were gone for one year riding freight trains, hoboeing, and asking for meals.  Granddad did tell his dad where they were going, of course.
One certain summer, Granddad age 21, his older brother Kenneth at age 23, and Lynn Asay at age 17 (Larkin’s future brother-in-law) traveled by train like hobos.  Traveling from Washington State to California where they worked all summer, picking fruit to doing any odd job that they could find.  They first traveled to Washington and had a job picking apples then returned home after earning about $150, which they gave to their family.
They bought an old Model A Ford and drove it to Utah until it broke down.  Granddad being handy said he could fix it.  It turned out that the bearings were worn flat. Looking for something to fix the bearings, Granddad suggested they use Lynn’s leather boot loop.  They put the boot loop in place and it drove fine until they got home, then they sold it.
    Taking Granddad Smith’s old truck with only .35 cents between them, they set off to find work.  Kenneth showed them what they would need to bring to go ‘bummin’.  They made small bedrolls with heavy canvas, some food, some utensils and one extra set of clothing.  They wanted to hop the freight, so they sent some guy home with their truck, who didn’t know how to drive.  Lynn said that the poor guy drove all the way back to St. George in 2nd gear.  Having very little money between them, Granddad told his brother Kenneth that he couldn’t have his ‘Bull Durham’s’ (cigarettes) because they just couldn’t afford them.  Kenneth agreed to stop smoking.
    In Moapa there were 100 men to every 1 job; which was how it was all over the country at the time.  What they would do is just bum for a while hoping that by waiting, most of the men would leave and sometimes they could pick up a job.
    While in Idaho a man was looking for 3 men to bail and stack hay, they just happened to be there and were hired.  Lynn’s shoes were pretty worn out by then and the hay was cutting his feet through the holes in his shoes.  The boss noticed blood all over the hay, so he told Lynn that he would go into town and buy him some shoes.  In the meantime he put his wallet in his shoe to keep it from getting worse.
    Next they went fruit picking in Oregon, then to Yakima.   Lark’s Aunt Bertha (last name of Prisbrey? or Brisbee?, and cousin Scott Prisbrey) lived there and she helped them get a job in an apple orchard “pickin’” apples.  They could get .03 cents to each bushel they picked.  They would compete with each other to see who could get the most bushels by the end of the day.  Lynn had won by surprise, being a scrawny 130 lbs. at the time.  Kenneth and Larkin were pretty big men, Granddad being the largest, and Kenneth being the strongest from using a jackhammer on previous jobs.  Both weighed a little over 200 lbs.  That was pretty big being that they were half starved that summer.  They then moved on to a plum orchard and worked.
    Wherever they went they would camp out in the woods.  For food they would have to steal fruits and vegetables from people’s yards or sneak fruit while picking on the job and hurry to eat it so the boss wouldn’t catch them.  At one time they were camping out and it was dark and Kenneth had found a chicken coop.   Kenneth grabbed a chicken, when the farmer came out after him with a shotgun.  He ran off with one chicken.  The trick was to grab the chickens by the neck to keep them from squawking.  They found a 5-gallon can, while one of them plucked and cleaned it. Granddad had found some carrots and peas. They cooked up 5 gallons of stew, and were able to live off of that for days.  At one time they noticed bees around them and decided they wanted some honey.  Kenneth and Lynn had worked with bees before, so they followed the bees to find their hives.  Waiting until night they went to take slats out to get the honey and didn’t realize that all the bees were sleeping inside.  Granddad was first and with his hand he took a big slab of honey with bees all over it.  The bees swarmed all over him as he ran as fast as he could through an alfalfa field swiping and hitting the bees off into the field as he went.  Kenneth put his hand in next, after Granddad, and took off running, straight into the bees that Granddad had just swatted off.  Lynn said he looked like he was running like a bat out of hell.  Lynn could see him running and screaming and thrashing around trying to fight off the bees, until he ran and jumped into a nearby river. Lynn and Granddad were laughing so hard.
    Later that night, they set up a campfire; it was a dark night.  They melted the honey down and poured it into three old whiskey bottles they had found.  Lynn said it looked so golden and pretty in those bottles.  Then a rather large man came up to them and told them he wanted one of those bottles, thinking it was actual whiskey.  They tried to tell him it was honey, but he was too drunk to listen or to understand.  He just wanted the bottle of whiskey, so he went after Kenneth.  Kenneth ‘clocked’ him hard and the guy fell over into some barbed wire fencing that was on the ground.  He was so drunk that he started to thrash around trying to pull it off of him, all the while getting caught and cut up more and more.  He thought that it was some wild grass that he was trying to pull off.  Kenneth was not someone to pick a fight with.  He was a big and strong man, used to doing hard jobs.  There were other hoboes out there that they shared their honey and chicken with.  They took off, running pretty fast, putting the bottles into their hip pockets.  There were many thugs and bums, so they always had to be careful with whom they talked to.  Lynn said most were in the same desperate situation, looking for work, the kind of men not to be trusted or keep company with.
    Lynn started to get a bad toothache.  He would pour honey and anything on it to try to get it to stop aching.  But nothing was happening.  Kenneth said that he would have to kill the nerve and that would stop the aching, but the tooth could still rot.  Lynn had agreed.   Kenneth had him lie down, while he put the tip of his knife blade into the middle of the tooth and hit the butt of the knife with a rock. He hit hard enough that Lynn felt the tooth crack.  Lynn said it hurt so badly when it cracked.  But it stopped hurting.  He didn’t have any more problems with it, it was taken out three years later.
     The peach orchards were the hardest jobs they had, because they would be out in the heat all day and get peach fuzz all over their bodies and inside their clothing.  They would itch so badly that they couldn’t wait to dive into the Snake River at the end of the day.  They only had one extra pair of pants to wear and would have to wash everything out and hang them to dry for the next workday.
    One time Kenneth had stolen a whole crate of cantaloupes, which weighed close to 100 lbs.  All three of them were hopping a freight train.  (Sometimes there would be crates of fruit or vegetables along side the tracks unloaded from the trains).  Kenneth spotted a crate full of cantaloupes by the tracks.  While he was hanging from a ladder on the train, he reached down and grabbed the crate with his right hand and heaved it up to the top of the train.  Just then Kenneth sees a ‘Bull’ (police hired railroad men to scare and pull bums and hobos off the trains) with a gun coming after him, running on the ground.   Kenneth takes off running on top of the train in the opposite direction, while Granddad grabs the cantaloupes and starts running opposite of Kenneth, by then the train was going too fast for the ‘Bull’ to catch them.  Lynn said that only Kenneth could heave a crate that heavy.
    After this they worked on a temple (I wasn’t able to find out which temple).
    Uncle Lynn said that they learned everything in their hobo days.  That was about 65 years ago.  Granddad and Lynn loved to talk of the old days and reminisce.  They sat and laughed while telling stories anytime they got together.  He said that it was one of the hardest things they did, because of being out there never knowing if you would have anything to eat each day.  Lynn said he never felt so hungry and starved in his whole life, during those days.
Granddad and Kenneth traveled by train down to San Diego looking for more work.  Shortly after arriving in San Diego, they were both arrested for vagrancy; for being caught sleeping in an old broken down car.  They laughed about that because there were lots of old trashed and abandoned cars there.  What did it matter if they slept in a car that no one owned?  After that experience they went home to give their mom all that they had earned for the family.  They were gone for about six months.
    Great-Granddad Smith and his Uncle Isaac taught Granddad how to play the banjo, it is said that they played the banjo beautifully.  I have heard Granddad play on his banjo, and the accordion; I remember the days that us grandkids would sit and listen to him play.  He learned to play the accordion from his father-in-law, Jerome Asay Jr.  His dad and he used to play for the Church dances; during this time, they danced the Virginia reel and the polka and many ‘old time’ dances.
    Ella Geneveive Asay was born in Clawson, Utah on 25th of March 1922 to Jerome Asay and Mary Louise Jensen.  She was the second oldest of four brothers and sisters.  At the age of twelve her family moved to St. George.  Grandma went to Dixie College for one year and took many courses in art; which became her biggest talent out of many.  She also took courses in Artesia, California.
    St. George was where she met Raymond Larkin.  Both their fathers and brothers worked in the coalmines near that area.  Grandma says at that time her family was living in one of Brigham Young’s old houses.  The walls were so thick that the kids were hardly ever heard.  Grandma would cough, but no one could hear her.  She was diagnosed with tuberculosis.  Because of the tuberculosis, she developed bad asthma.  Someone was needed to care for Grandma to recover; so Granny Smith (Larkin’s mother) would come and take care of her at the house.  Granny Smith would talk to her all day about her family and her son Larkin.  Grandma told me that she fell in love with Granddad Larkin before she even met him.   But Geneveive thought nothing could come of it because Larkin was 7 years older than her.
    They did finally get together and dated through part of the depression, they would go on dates taking a cup of sugar and some cocoa to a friends house to make hot chocolate or go roast marshmallows at a neighbor’s house.
    At one time Grandma decided to break things off with Granddad.  She thought he was wasting his time because she was too young for him.  One year later, Grandma had a dream that Granddad had gotten married to some other girl.  She panicked and thought that she had missed out on a wonderful man.  So Grandma told Granddad’s sister that she was still in love with him.  Granddad’s sister would later tell him what Grandma had said.  Granddad proposed through a letter from California, and Grandma accepted.  They finally decided to get married, Grandma was only 19 years old and Grandpa was 26.  They were married June 28th , 1941 in the St. George Temple.
    They bought their first house for $75 in Bellflower, California.  World War II had started and Granddad was called to go but received a deferment because he was needed to work in the defense plant at that time.  And also that he had three brothers and one sister serving in the war.  Grandma always worried that they were going to take her husband away to the war and leave her behind and alone with all their babies, but it never happened because of the deferment.
    During the war Granddad slept on the beach near Los Angeles, the Santa Monica area, living off bananas.  Bananas that would fall off the delivery trucks.  For two weeks he did this until he was able to get a job.  Then he sent for his cousin and brother and helped them get jobs.  By the time he got his first paycheck he had helped 18 other men find jobs and places to live.  Granddad worked as an electrician and would tell employers that these men had worked for him as electricians and needed jobs also (which they really had little or no experience as electricians).  After the war he helped 36 people build their own houses, by wiring their homes and laying the cement work with his old cement mixer.  He also helped do cement sidewalks for the Church.  He did all this for free; this is the kind of man that Granddad was, always giving and serving others.  The family moved to Henderson, near Las Vegas, Nevada.  Granddad and Grandma felt that the youth had higher standards than in Utah.  Granddad was inactive up until then because he always held jobs that required 16 hours a day work, everyday, because of the Depression and WWII.
    They both have had many church positions; Granddad received an award for ‘Man of the Year’ in the youth program, the Honorary Master MN award.  They both served a mission in San Diego in 1982 at the Mormon Battalion Visitor’s Center.  Grandma was embarrassed many times because Granddad loved to tell everyone that the last time he was in San Diego he was arrested for vagrancy.
    Marlan Walker, a friend of theirs (who was at one time their bishop and their stake president), traveled to Mexico with Grandma and Granddad.  They stayed in a brand new fancy hotel.  Apparently the owners had no idea how to turn on or work the air conditioner, so Granddad offered to take a look and turned it on for them.  During that same trip a bus full of people had broken down, so Granddad went out and fixed it.  Marlan Walker thought highly of Granddad for being so giving.
    Granddad and Grandma served their calling each Sunday, and had Sunday services at the convalescents home for the elderly.  And both held a calling in the Church Library for 13 years.  And for several years they worked in the Las Vegas Temple.
    Grandpa served in the Bishopric.  He served in his ward as a High Priest and attended to about 15 widows.  He would go and help them with anything and everything they needed.  They had an old refrigerator in back of the house full of old motors.  Grandpa would take some of those motors and get them working again.  He would use them to fix the widow’s washers, dryers, and appliances.  He would repair their fences, rewire their houses, and fix burners even though at the time Grandma had two burners that didn’t work.  Grandma later found out that Granddad even helped clip one widow’s toenails.
Many families of those widows came by to help carry off all the junk in their back yard that Granddad had acquired for nearly 20 years.  It took 5 large truckloads and a dumpster to haul it all off.  They did this to thank Brother Smith for all he had done for the widows in the ward.
    Granddad and Grandma can boast of their great posterity from eight children and a foster daughter who were all sealed in the temple.  They now have 60 grandchildren and about 120+ great-grandchildren.