Welcome to the first installment of the Ivan Barry Thompson personal history! We'll be posting it one juicy chapter at a time, hoping for oohs, aahs and other comments from his adoring family and fans. If you have a photo that fits with a particular chapter that you would like to share, please do. With a drumroll. please...back to the beginning....

The Pre-School Years

Mom and Dad were married in Logan on January 7, 1828, and then sealed in the Logan Temple  the following January 7. I was born December 31, 1929 at the Budge Hospital in Logan. Evidently it was a difficult delivery, because Mom had some corrective surgery several months later in Salt Lake City.  She had read my name in a magazine, so that I was given the name of Ivan for my father, and Barry for Mom’s preference. However, as was quite common then, Bishop Thomas Rose was voice in my blessing at church.

While Mom and Dad had lived with Mom’s folks after they were married, they then moved in April 1929 to Preston into the red brick home owned by Grandpa Thompson on 6^th South.  The next two years, beginning in November 1930, we lived on the Taylor place in Fairview near Bear River.  My earliest memory was in the Taylor house, where I would race around the covered porch in my cart.  We had a big black walnut tree in back. Mom tells of being out of patience with my learning to potty-train. So she took me outside and put my bare bottom in a pan of snow.

 

Since we were way out in the countryside, I had no playmates. My pal was Fido, a half-breed Boston terrier who had many pups.  One time she had a litter of eleven, so Mom was forced to put the pups in a gunny sack and throw them in Bear River to drown.  A neighbor reported that a dog had killed his pig, and apparently he was sure that it was Fido, and wanted her destroyed.  So she was shot. It was a sad time for me, because she would follow me around as I wandered around the farm. 

Since we lived in Preston until I was about two, we must have been down on our Fairview farm when this event happened because it was reported that I was only a baby.  Anyway, we had gone down to the banks of Bear River to get a load of sand. As we were going up the steep dugway from the river to the road at the top of the hill, the pin cam out of the doubletree so that the horses with Dad holding the reins went on up the dugway, while the heavily loaded wagon first stopped and then started back downhill. Mom was sitting in the high seat on the wagon with me in her arms.  Evidently Dad yelled to her to jump because the wagon was headed straight for the river.  She probably did not feel able to jump with me in her arms, so she threw me over in to the side of the dugway next to the hill. I have never learned how it exactly happened, but the wagon veered into the side of the dugway, averting going over the embankment, to be retrieved in a few minutes by Dad coming back down with the horses.

On December 1, 1933, we left Idaho in a new 1929 Chevy car to go to California to look for work.  We rented a little house in Hollywood, with a couple (Ken Nielsen) from Weston next door.  I recall our going to an orange grove, where we picked huge oranges.  It was the depths of the depression, so Dad was unable to find work. At Christmas time we went to the May Department store to visit Santa Claus. I recall that he looked and acted very convincingly, causing me to say that I knew that the other Santas were phonies, but he was the real one. I received a red police car that shot sparks from  Santa that Christmas, and I was pleased that he would remember me.

 

The following spring we moved back to Idaho, and then lived in Preston in an apartment owned by Dad’s Aunt Sadie Jenkins. My brother Dennis, was born 20 February 1935 in Preston Hospital. In the spring of 1935 we went to live in a log cabin up the hill from the Taylor place in Fairview. It was the log house where my Dad was born. That fall Mom took me to Fairview to see if I could enroll in school there.  I assume that I was not old enough to attend first grade. It was the summer  of 1935 that Uncle Grover Duff gave us a Buick cloth top roadster—a pretty fancy car.

In April 1936 Dad bought a farm at a price of $7500 across the river in Weston, where Uncle Art Moser had lived a few years previous. It was an exciting place with a nice home and a big barn. There were 40 acres of irrigated land, 60 acres of dry farm, and 20 acres of lower pasture.  We raised sugar beets, peas, beans, corn, potatoes, and alfalfa on the irrigated land, and wheat and barley on the dry area.  All of our farming was done with horses. We had a small herd of cows that I would take to and bring back from pasture. We always had a good dog which could be a big help in bringing in the cows. There was Jeff, Napolean and Wolfe.  When I was older, I rode a pony to bring in the cows and horses. I preferred bareback and was a good horseman.

One of my fonder memories is of Grandpa Lundquist. He had such an engaging personality. One time when I was perhaps 3 or 4, he invited me to join him and Sy Gassman to go to the mountains to prospect for gold and other minerals. I faintly remember looking down into a big hole in which they were digging. It was very exciting for me. But when I got back to their home, my Mom gave me a real licking for not asking before I went.

It seems that about the Christmas before entering grade school that I was determined to see Santa Claus when he came to our home.  Mom and Dad thought that was a good idea, so they let me stay up on Christmas Eve.  No doubt I fell asleep pretty soon, since our bedtime was always early to that we could arise early in the morning to milk the cows.  When I awoke on Christmas morning, Santa had come without waking me.  The gifts under the tree helped moderate my disappointment.