Oral History Program Lon Hansen Interviewed by Alyssa Chaffee 6 June 2017 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Lon Hansen Interviewed by Alyssa Chaffee 6 June 2017 Copyright © 2018 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Utah Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum honors men and women whose lives exemplify the independence and resilience of the people who settled Utah, and includes artists, champions, entertainers, musicians, ranchers, writers, and those persons, past and present, who have promoted the Western way of life. Each year, the inductees are interviewed about their lives and experiences living the Western way of life. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Hansen, Lon, an oral history by Alyssa Chaffee, 6 June 2017, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Chase Hansen (far left), Maria Hansen (center left), Kaitlyn Hansen (center right), Rachel Bitton (far right) 6 June 2017 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Chase Hansen, Maria Hansen, Kaitlyn Hansen, and Rachel Bitton discussing their father, Lon Hansen. The interview was conducted by Alyssa Chaffee on June 6, 2017. Sarah Kamppi, the video technician, is also present during this interview. AC: Today is June 6th, 2017. It is 9:15 A.M., and we are in the Hansen home, speaking with Chase Hansen, Maria Hansen, Kaitlyn Hansen, and Rachel Bitton about their father and Maria’s husband, Lon Hansen, who has been inducted into the 2017 Cowboy Hall of Fame. My name is Alyssa Chaffee, and I’ll be conducting this interview along with Sarah Kamppi. Alright, so first I’d like to know, when and where was Lon born? MH: He was born October 30th, 1959, in Ogden, Utah. AC: What was his childhood like in Ogden? MH: His father was a firefighter, and mother was a stay at home Mom. He was the third son of four kids and had two older brothers and a younger sister. He was a little troublemaker, and he had the middle child syndrome and was always doing something to get in trouble. So after that, they moved to a place called Pawnee Acres in Roy. And then they moved to another house on Midland Drive, that’s still in Roy, so he was raised in the Roy area. And he was a funny little kid, but… he was a troublemaker. He tied his brother to a tree one time because the brother wouldn’t let him play with something or was going to tattle on him? 2 CH: He broke his arm. They were out playing one day and he broke his arm, and his brothers wouldn’t let him go tell his mom. They knew they would have to be done playing and go to the hospital. MH: They made him jump a bike or something. They were jumping over a table or a ramp or something and he fell and broke his arm, so… yeah, they wouldn’t let him go in and tell the Mom because they knew the fun was going to end. But that had nothing to do with him tying Randy to the tree. CH: I thought it was revenge that he tied Randy to a tree. MH: Oh that’s why he did, yeah. CH: And Randy got sunburned, his oldest brother. Like one whole half of his body was sunburned really bad because he was tied up. They left him outside for a couple of hours. RB: Tied him up and ran away, because he was the youngest brother. Because he knew he would be beat on by the other two, so he just tied him up and left. MH: And the little sister he tried to take out when she was an infant. His Mom found him climbing the crib with a rolling pin. AC: He wanted to be the youngest? MH: I don’t know, I don’t know. We joked, you could have just taken her out. Just kidding. AC: Do you feel like that mischievous side was in his later years as well? MH: Oh yeah, very much. RB: So probably the most famous, he would tell people all the time, “When I can afford to spend some time in jail, this is what I’m going to do.” And his most 3 famous was probably, he called it the Wal-Mart cattle drive. He didn’t like Wal- Mart, so he wanted to borrow or steal some cows, and unload them and he had this big quarter draft horse named Owen, he wanted to get on Owen and unload the cows then chase them through a Wal-Mart. MH: Watch the cows clear the people in the aisle. RB: We referred to it as the Wal-Mart cattle drive. AC: That sounds exciting. Why didn’t he like Wal-Mart? MH: He didn’t like crowded places, he didn’t like shopping. Too big, he wants to get in and out of the store. AC: Well that would be one way to clear it all out, right? MH: Yeah, and he had a plan. It was going to be somebody else’s cattle, somebody else’s brand, and he was going to put rubber horse shoes on all them, so they wouldn’t slip on the slick floor. AC: Sounds like he thought that one out pretty thoroughly. MH: Yeah, that’s what was frightening about it. AC: That’s impressive. So as a Dad did he ever play any mischievous tricks on his children? RB: No, he was just funny. We’d come home and complain about our bus drivers or things like that, and he’d say, you better be glad I’m not your bus driver, because I would have you kids handcuffed to the seats. You know, he was kind of scary looking, because he always wore this black cowboy hat and big black mustache, but, you know, we always knew he was joking, that he was never serious. And he would kind of smile under that mustache. But some people would take him 4 seriously, and think your Dad’s the meanest guy ever. He’d beat me and tie me to my seat! But he wasn’t ever that way, we always knew he was joking. Another one of my favorite stories: there was the Olympic rodeo in Farmington, and there were animal rights protestors up and down the road. And he kept saying, if I could afford to spend some time in jail, I would run those protestors down, or, you know, he’d just come up with silly things. Well, we pulled up to the protestors and got stopped in traffic. And my Mom was like no, no, no, no… and we were in a mini van… MH: Well and it was scary, because they were worried about terror attacks, so you could see those helicopters, those Blackhawks hovering around the arena, and it was scary… RB: And so we pull up, and she’s like don’t, don’t, don’t, and he starts rolling down the window of this mini-van, and he just looked at them and started laughing. MH: They were chanting, they had some chant. CH: A bunch of signs. RB: And he just started laughing at them, and then we all started laughing, the security officers started laughing, and he totally shamed the protestors in a mini-van. MH: By just laughing. RB: And then we just drove off, and the protestors were kind of like… they stopped the chanting, it was just kind of like “that was awkward.” And the rodeo went on, there was no trouble, we had a great time. 5 AC: That’s fantastic. I like this guy. Sounds like he had a really good sense of humor. So I’d like to know how you two met. MH: Most famous one I tell is that he dated a friend of mine in High School, and apparently he thought I put her up to mischief with him and caused him some heartache and grief. And, so in High School he was a Senior and I was a Sophomore, and at that time, you weren’t supposed to, but we’d leave Roy high school and go to Warren’s drive in, and they had where you could actually drive in and they would come out, I don’t think they were on roller skates, but they would come out and serve you, you know, so like back in the day old. So, I had gone with my friends, a bunch of girlfriends in the car, and his girlfriend happened to be with us in the car. We pull up this way, he pulls up in his truck with his other friend, and it was pretty obvious he was looking right at me and I could see him say ‘I hate her.’ So I would tell that story all the time, and he’d say I did not, and I’d say dude, I could read your lips, you hated me back then. But it’s okay, I know where you sleep now. So, they dated off and on for quite a while, and they had been ended for about a year, and we were friends. I’d gone and hung out at his house with another friend of mine. I was dating a guy and, so I initiated this, I wanted to know how to break up with this guy, and so I called Lon. We didn’t have cell phones, you couldn’t text, you know, you had to call on the old landline. So I got up the nerve, and I thought I’m going to call him and ask him, what does he think, what’s his opinion. And I did, and it was around Labor Day, 1981… and I said, look, he’s a great guy but it’s just, you know, not there for me. How should I 6 break up with this guy? So he gave me a little advice, just said, you know what, just be honest, don’t drag it on, that’s painful. And he just kept calling me after that. Like, let’s go get a coke or something, and we started hanging out. And I thought, well, he’s going to dump me, but I’m going to have fun for as long as I can until he dumps me and goes back to her, and he never did, so… AC: That’s awesome. MH: Yeah, I always tell him, it, it’s me, it’s a woman, you know, you would never pay attention to me if I hadn’t called you that day. AC: So you decided he didn’t hate you so much after all. MH: Well I think by the time that that happened, he realized that I was not the one who had caused the problems, and had enough ups and downs, bumps in the road, I think he realized, wow, it really wasn’t her. AC: That’s so funny. MH: One time he egged my house, too…with a friend of his. They actually served in a bishopric together years later… but, I found eggshells in my Mom’s rose garden one day, nothing ever hit the house, and I remember thinking, I wonder where these come from, somebody tried to egg the house. And you kind of think, somebody doesn’t like me. It was like… you know, I felt on some level of bad about it, and he confessed later, yeah, Sam Fowers drove me, but he was going so fast, and I was throwing hard and… So I said, well, see, that proves you did say ‘I hate her.’ And then Sam did admit it to me that he was driving, but they didn’t want to get caught so they were going fast and it was like, well you missed, but you fertilized Grandma’s roses. So… 7 AC: That’s so funny. And so how old were you when you guys started dating, then? MH: Well I was a young one, so I graduated when I was 17, so… I would have been 18. Cause I have a fall birthday, and cut off was later back then. So then we got married on July 8th, 1982. And… I was 19, almost 20. And he was 23 at the time. AC: Okay. So you dated after high school. So you both just had this rivalry going on during high school, then…? MH: Well I didn’t think that much about him. I thought he was a nice guy. RB: You thought he was a nice guy? MH: He was a nice guy, even though he was in trouble a lot in High School. AC: Oh really? MH: Oh yeah. They would light up, get quarters really hot in shop class, and throw them out in the hallway, wait for kids going by to pick them up. RB: A lot of his school stories they would tell us, would end with, “and then I ran.” Like he would do this and this and this and then he ran away. Like they were sending notes to every class, Lon Hansen, please come to the office, and he would just… MH: Tear it up. So funny, that, when that happened, when it got, you know, 6th or 7th period, whatever the end period of the day, they’d come and knock on the door, and they had windows, and he’d climb out the window and run home. AC: Did his mother know about this? MH: Sometimes, sometimes not. Because he was artistic, he could sign like a parent, so he signed all of his friend’s excuses, you know… RB: He would write, “wife having baby,” and excuse himself from school. 8 MH: Well, he would leave a reason for, and then he’d turn it around to the lady in the office… RB: He had like sixteen kids that year. MH: I know he kind of realized, maybe, since after he’s gone, that he probably had like ADHD, he was just busy, had too many things going on in his mind, too many things he wanted to create. It’s probably why he was in trouble in school, because he was really smart. Now, he could, when he would build things, he could pretty much figure out how many 2x4s, how many 1x6s or whatever he needed, almost down to the… RB: Inch. Without even writing it down. CH: He would do all the math in his head. RB: He would say he designed it in his mind. MH: Yeah… he would have to draw things out to show the rest of us the vision, but…Yeah. He did, whatever he was going to build, he could just figure it out in his head. AC: When did he get into art? Did it start in his childhood? MH: In school. He started drawing in school, in fact, I think… that’s a replica of another picture, but it’s actually done with an old ink pen. A quill pen, done with dots, that cowboy in the back. So he’d just see a picture, probably in a Western horseman magazine, that was the one at the time, and liked it, and then he did that in art. So I know that one came from high school. Probably a lot of, some of his drawings did. Do you have any of them? [To LG] RB: I have just one horse-head picture, it’s a painting. 9 AC: What did he make in his shop class? MH: Oh, shop was just, well… AC: Welding? RB: He could weld. He built us several horse trailers from the ground up. AC: That’s impressive. RB: If he could see it, he could built it. So, about anything. He built purses out of leather, and taxidermy, and furniture. He built that TV stand behind you. Doors, he could build doors… MH: She has like those cool barn doors that they’re now selling for 8, 9 hundred dollars at Lowes. AC: That is really impressive. So did he make you anything while you guys were dating, to kind of like woo you at all? MH: Uh… he made our first bed. And our second bed. He would do the big woodwork and, yeah… CH: Did he make that one belt for you? MH: Yeah, he made me the belt, which basically fits my thigh now. Like Chase is looking at it the other day, that’s a cool old belt. Cause it had my name on it, you know, he tooled my name, and then the initials, because my maiden name was Fowers, so it had the MF on, near the end of it. AC: When did he start with taxidermy? MH: I think he was doing birds when we got married. So the pheasants he did pretty early on in the marriage. But birds were, they were tedious, and time consuming. And, so then he started moving on to the bigger things. He wanted to do a deer, 10 and that is in the world record book. But he has redone it, because he didn’t like the first do on it. So he took a class through Weber State University, there was a taxidermy class, taught by a guy named Brent Morgan. And I don’t know if he’s still got a studio, he did have a studio down on 25th Street and he had a shop here in Hooper. And Lon stayed friendly with a couple of guys in that class that had just, you know, kind of done taxidermy as a side. And he would ask things in class, or other students would ask questions, like “how do you do this” or whatever. And he’d say, well, I’m not going to tell you that. And Lon was kind of like, well, you know, here we’re paying money to come to this class, you know. He didn’t say anything to him, but after class, Brent would pull Lon aside and he’d say here’s the answer to that question. You do this, this, and this. And Lon said, “Why are you telling me?” You know, he didn’t basically call him out and say “why were you a jerk to the whole class and now you’re telling me how to do it?” He just said “Why are you telling me this now?” And he said, because you’re the only one with enough talent to give me a run for my money. If you’re going to take business from me, you better be good. So he knew, he saw in Lon the talent. And they stayed friendly. I know they had some contact, because I still see his name on the sticky tabs in the organized chaos in the garage. There’s him and his cellphone number. So that’s kind of how he got started in that. And he picked up deer, and would do other things. My oldest son, when he was 14, he learned how to sew. Lon taught him, but he kind of came up with his own way. He called it the invistich. So when they started 11 doing the full body mounts, you gotta stitch all this so you can’t see, so all up and down the legs. And there’s a mountain goat at Sportsman’s Warehouse. It’s in Riverdale, climbing down a hill, and I think it has a plaque by it that says sewed by Tyler Hansen, age 14 or… CH: 15, yeah, he was 15. MH: When he was 15. And he’s now 32, 33? AC: That’s impressive. MH: Yeah. So the kids picked up on it, and helped him do this too, which I don’t know whether Tyler’s learned to sew on any of these or not. But now Tyler has picked that up, cause there were some mounts and hides left in the shop when Lon passed, so… AC: And he’s finishing those up? MH: He called some people to give them the opportunity to come and asked, you know, “do you want me to do it, or do you want to take it back?” A few people took theirs back, and a few people said no, wait, I want you to get going on the work. AC: [To the others] Did he teach you guys taxidermy? CH: He taught me a little bit. My older brother more, but he taught me more on the leather work, and the saddles. My brother does the taxidermy. MH: And Lon would say that Chase’s tooling in leather work far exceeds his. CH: [pointing to a leather halter] So he drew the pattern and then had me tool it. So actually, it’s for a benefit, for some family friends. He designed it and we kind of built it together, and it ended up selling for $300 dollars a-piece at the benefit, to 12 generate money. He was really about that, like helping people out. He loved to donate things. MH: That donating for him started when I was pregnant with Katy—well, for donating the bigger things. He was always willing to help out and do stuff, because when Rachel was 7, she was diagnosed with cancer. Leukemia. And that was really hard on the family, it was really hard on us. But we had some friends, that put together a team hunting, and I think team roping too, benefit. So it kind of gelled this group together. And because he worked for Roy City, a lot of the Roy city employees were involved, and they had this benefit up in East Hooper, and we were just overwhelmed by it. It seemed like they raised 10 or 12 thousand dollars, I can’t remember exactly. So much back in the day. That was 1993. After that, because Rachel survived and went on, he would always try to donate something. One of the big things I remember he did was when I was pregnant with Katy, so she wasn’t even born yet. And they were having a benefit for a guy named Daniel Kite out here. He’s still alive, he has Miner’s Disease, and Lon said “I’m going to build a saddle for that, and donate a saddle.” And I was like, you know, that’s a lot of money. Back in the day, it was probably 500 in supplies. Right now, you’re anywhere from a thousand to fifteen in just the leather and the tree, and the, you know, buckles and pieces. But back then, that was a lot of money for us, because we didn’t really have a lot of money. We got by, but I says, okay, that’s great, you know. You do that. So he built this saddle and they auctioned it off, and I think it was one of the highest things they auctioned off to 13 make money. And Katy was due in about a month, she was due early May, and the benefit, I think, was on the 12th of April. I knew after the saddle was done and the benefit, he’d have time to paint the nursery and get a baby crib put up and everything. Well she came the 15th. We didn’t have time to get things ready. She wanted to come early, so… yeah. That was kind of funny. But I always associate her birth kind of with him doing that saddle. He’d also carve fish and donate them to benefits for either a baseball team at Fremont or baseball fundraisers. He also did them for benefits for Luke Brigg’s, who was a local kid who had cancer, he would donate those kinds of things. If he didn’t have time, he’d do stuff like this. He did the canteens, too. Do you want to pull that canteen off the wall? I think he started doing the canteens around the time of the Daniel Kite benefit? Maybe a little before? And just leather cover them. LG: He would always say that it was his goal to never say no. And people came to him a lot, because he was so talented, and built a lot of things. People would call and ask and it was always his goal to never, you know, to never say no, and always have enough time to do something. Whether it was a halter or, you know, something bigger. MH: And he’d feel bad sometimes if it was just a halter or a canteen, because those were easier. He’d feel bad if he didn’t have time to do something bigger. One of the last big ones he did was a saddle for a girl, and they auctioned it off at the state high school rodeo finals. Or raffle. They just finished that up this week, but that was, was that your senior year? Or before? KH: I don’t remember. 14 CH: Yeah, three years ago? RB: Three years ago, yeah. MH: So the funny thing is, they announce, they pull out the ticket, and they announce Bailey Hansen. And I was thinking there was a Bailey Hansen about her age, when Lon and I were together. And I was thinking, I’ve heard her name, I think I know who she is. Well it wasn’t Bailey Hansen, it was his wife, who had bought these tickets. RB: And the girl who did this saddle for, she picked… MH: She picked the ticket. They hated to say it was nepotism, it wasn’t. It was totally legal. KH: We took it there and brought it home. MH: But now we’re kind of tickled, because he’s gone. One of his last saddles, it had a pretty Turquoise seed in it. RB: That, I guess, for me, kind of showed his true character. When he got a smart phone—he used to call his old flip phone a dumb phone, so he would say “I don’t have a dumb phone, I don’t ‘tex’ anyone.” He would leave the “t” off the end. But he got a smart phone. And so he texted me one morning, like “hey call me.” Okay. So I called him, and he’s like, “hey, I think we need to make a saddle. And either sell it or donate it for this girl.” And it’s not someone we knew very well at all. I don’t know that we’d ever even really met her. But he would just kind of get those thoughts and inspiration, and he would run with it. He said, “Okay, would you see if you can get help with donations, to actually build the saddle?” And we had that saddle paid for as far as donations in a few hours. And then we took 15 raffle tickets, and I think we got about twenty four hundred dollars in raffle tickets, for her, in just a few weeks, between the State Finals and some other events we did. MH: He was always about helping other people out, and he never wanted to feel like he short changed them. He wanted to be the one who took care of the shorts, so to speak. So when he’d do, like, saddle repairs, there was one guy who he’d rodeod with, and he had worked on this saddle, and done a lot of work to it, and he says, “I’m only going to charge him this, I don’t think they can afford much more. They got a lot of kids.” And he said, “One day, he’ll come back and he’ll help your kids.” And that same man is the assistant coach to Weber State’s team, and he has been their rodeo dad since their Dad’s been gone. And he’s paid it back to my kids big time. So, he knew. He knew when people would come back and help, and it didn’t matter if they were gonna come back and help. He would have done it anyway. Just because he was that way. AC: So in his bio, it says that his favorite saying is “you’ve got to get the vision.” What did that mean, exactly? CH: It meant a lot of different things. Like I remember mostly, right before Rachel got married, they would go look at different houses. And he had found her a house that was really run down. RB: It was like a shack! CH: It hadn’t been lived in for probably a long time. Had a bunch of ground with it. And he said, “This could be your guys’ house! So awesome, so much land.” And Rachel was like “This is a shanty, this is a shack, it’s horrible.” And he was like, 16 “Rachel, you just have to get the vision. You have to picture in your mind what this could be.” And he would just go through and name off all the things he would do. Oh, I could fix this, and turn this into this. Kind of like how he talked like he could design things in his head, that’s what he’d say. There was like, a new roping dummy that came out that I wanted to buy real bad, because they’re really good training tools for young horses. It’s like a 3,000 dollar dummy. And he’s like, I can build it. And I said, whatever. It’s brand new, why don’t you just get it? And he said, no, we can do it. So we started searching pictures off the internet, and just from the pictures he was able to see it. We built the dummy, it sits out there, and it probably cost us 200 bucks, if that. It was just made out of scraps that he had from other things. RB: He was really good at taking scraps. So back here is the old dairy farm that my grandparents owned. And when the last renters left and Grandma Fay let us go in and start cleaning out, he would like, pull boards out of the garbage. Like, he’s got piles, he was kind of a hoarder. There’s piles of stuff everywhere. Like his wood pile and like his driftwood pile, and his metal pile. And one day he was in an old hay barn over there and called me, cause at the time I had Holly, and was staying home, and I took care of Grandma Fay, and he says “hey come over here!” And he had designed and started building by himself in one day a kitchen in this barn. And he was like we’re gonna build this kitchen, and then we’re gonna be able to have parties out here, and we’re gonna be able to ride, and this will be the area for the kids, and we’ll eat, and do this. And he pulled out most of the boards he found around the barn, and he built this really cool raised bar with 17 this really big beam in it that he pulled out of somewhere. He just, in just a few minutes, was like, “this is what I’m gonna do today.” And he built that thing pretty much by himself. And he would just figure things out. Like the big doors on the back of that thing are like what, twelve feet high? And he would sometimes get a little dramatic, and he was like “I was pushing the door up and it was almost squishing me to death, but then I finally got it and stuck a screw in it so I didn’t die.” We’d say, you know, we will help you, and he said “No, it’s fine. But I almost died.” KH: One day I came home from school, and he had built this front, like a little roof over the door in the front. And I remember, he had a board under the one side, and he was trying to hold it up, and he was still trying to put it up. He was all by himself, and I said he’s gonna kill himself. But that’s what I came home from school to most days was him building something. RB: A project. AC: Sounds like he had a lot of energy. RB: He did. So in… 2008? He was officially diagnosed… MH: Same year he retired? Might have been 2008? CH: 2007 he retired. MH: No, 2008. Cause Rachel got married in 2007, July of 2007, and that’s when he said I’ll have my 30 years next year. I can retire, but we still need the medical. And I said, well, I can pick up a few more hours at my work. If I work 32 hours a week I can get medical. And he said would you do that? And I said, sure why not? I’ve been part time for 20 years, you’ve worked for 30 years. You know, it’s 18 your turn. He said put a pen to it, see how much money you can make, if we can afford it we’ll do it. And I’m glad we did. He retired in May of 2008, but I think he was diagnosed with the muscular dystrophy in 2009. RB: Cause he’d been sick for… MH: He’d been sick for years. RB: Probably about five, because he got sick when I was in 9th grade. So people, a lot of people, especially after he passed away, they had no idea that he had. They called it Limb Girdle Muscular Dystrophy, but he was hard, really hard to diagnose. Because his doctors would say you’ve lost no muscle strength. But to him, he was losing muscle strength. So for him to do the things he did, like, one guy told me after his funeral, I thought your dad was the picture of health. Because people would see him, but he never stopped. MH: That’s what kept him going. RB: He would walk over to the farm and feed, but at night he would curl up in this chair and his muscles would just basically be tearing themselves apart. Like, for a while he had a twitch in the back of this arm, and it didn’t stop for two or three weeks. Just shaking. And so, I guess, when you take that into consideration and things he did by himself, you know, lifting and building and doing. And he’d still shoe horses. He got a little slower, or he would like only do the fronts or only do the backs. I’ve said that when I was little, because I went everywhere with him, that I probably could have put shoes on a horse at 6 years old because I knew the whole process. I would watch everything that he did. I knew what he was 19 gonna do next. Which foot. How much he was gonna take off. The nails in it, and how he’d hold them in his mouth. MH: He’d roll his cuff up, because you clamp off the ends, and you don’t want sharp ends for people to drive over with bikes or tires, or whatever, so he’d drop the ends in the cuffs of his pants. He was fast. The fastest he shoed a horse I think was 20 minutes. And that’s pretty impressive, if you’ve ever had to watch… Chase is doing that now. CH: He could do all four feet in 20 minutes, it takes me an hour for the front feet. MH: But he said, when he started, the first one took him a couple of hours, didn’t he say? But he started when he was a young kid. He was like 13 or 14? AC: Wow. So did he live on a farm as a kid then? MH: No, but his dad had horses. And he loved it. He had to do rough stock when he was in high school, but he would have loved to have roped if his Dad had been able to haul him to rodeos. He did 4H, he was the state champion judging livestock or something like that. He won a trip to Chicago and got in a lot of trouble there, too. Which was his usual mischief. AC: And how old was he when he did the 4H? MH: They usually start when they’re around 12. When he won, I think he was a senior in high school or a junior. So he was probably 17 or 18 when he won. AC: What was some of the trouble he got into in Chicago? Do you remember him telling? MH: I don’t remember a lot of those stories… RB: Something about running the halls maybe… 20 MH: Of the hotel after curfew, when they were supposed to still be in bed. CH: Growling like a bear, too, I remember him saying. Like I wanna say it was when they asked what his name was, and he like growled like a bear. MH: And I think he had a mustache from 9th grade on. Never ever shaved it. CH: I’ve never seen him without a mustache. Like in person, alive. Even when I was little. MH: Even when he was in the Bishopric. Usually in the LDS Church they make them be clean shaven. They didn’t make him. And he was willing to be obedient, you know, when they asked him to be in the Bishopric and he went and met with the Stake President, he said “Are you gonna make me shave my mustache?” And they said no, just keep it trimmed. They let him be who he was. You know, we see them in Idaho, they have full beards and stuff. Depends where you live. Church is still true to us if you have hair on your face or not. RB: When he was in the Bishopric, about the time we got married and I was moving out, Casey, my husband, and I just live on the corner, so I moved like 3 houses away, that’s it. So we would still come down and ride horses and things. But every night we’d help do chores, and the one night he was leaving to Bishopric meeting, and I got looking at him, and he just cut the front half of his hair. Like this much. And so he kind of had this flowing mullet. He was kind of balding on top, but right here was shaved. And my husband looked at him and said, “Did you cut your own hair?” And he was like “Shut up, I’ll burn your house down! Go home!” Like he would just threaten things and we laughed and laughed and laughed. And he said “I only got the top, I only cut what I could see.” 21 MH: I usually cut his chair. Maybe I was too busy. CH: You were still at work at that point. MH: Probably wanted it done, so… RB: He just got what he could see. MH: It didn’t look too bad, I fixed it. AC: What was his full time job? You said he retired in 2007 or 2008? MH: 2008. He started with Roy City when he was 18 years old, and he worked in the street department. He ran the street sweeping machine and just learned to run all the equipment. He welded. He painted things, and then… he did a lot of those, like ‘I can build that.’ Different things for Roy City, but he worked himself up into being the Street Superintendent, and had that department running really, really well. And I don’t know how many years he ran the water department, and they come in, and they say, the water superintendent is gonna retire, and we want the water department running as well as street, so we want you to learn all that water test and certification. So, he did. RB: It was really hard for him to study. I remember him studying, because the math calculations were really hard. But he did it, and he… MH: He did it, and he was also Assistant Public Works Director. RB: Which he, he was horrible at spelling. And I worked for Roy City also at the pool, so I would see this paperwork come through, and he would sign his name and he would write “ass public works director” because he would never finish writing “assistant.” So he would just put ‘ass’. MH: Part of that was just to be… 22 CH: His humor. RB: Finally I called him one day, and was like, Dad? And he said, “I don’t know how to spell it. So I just write ‘ass’ and then scribble.” So that’s what his paperwork always said when it came through. AC: So did he go to Weber State University for college then? MH: He just took some classes. CH: Continuing education type, classes like that. MH: That was it. No formal degree. CH: But the guy who replaced him when he left had a college degree. RB: Yeah, it was like an equivalent of what he learned and did at Roy City, was equivalent to an engineer. AC: Okay, interesting. And he was able to do that because he was so talented? RB: Yeah, moved him up. Yeah, he could just figure things out and do things, like they, it was one of the first, they called it urban fisheries. They have a ball diamond in Roy City, and it was always just kind of swampy and wet and gross. Bathrooms were already there, and Roy City got a bid to build this urban fishery. And it was millions of dollars, and they said, there is no way we can do this. So he went to the City Council, and said, you buy me a trackhoe, and I will build it. And he did. He would spend hours, he loved it. He was always a guy that always had his cellphone. He was the best emergency contact ever. He would always answer. He would flip his phone open and be like can I call you back, but he would always answer. But on that trackhoe, he couldn’t feel his phone vibrate, and years of shoeing horses kind of ruined his hearing, so he could never hear 23 cell phone ring. But he spent hours down there at that pond. And he dug this great big pond, he did all the landscaping. They built an island. He would take us and show us, we would take the kids over there, like how he placed the rocks, and why he put these trees where he did, so that when you were sitting at the little bowery table, he built this mound with rocks and trees, he wanted you to feel like you were in the mountains, not in the middle of the subdivision in Roy. And he carved a big metal fish and put it on the side. MH: Is that Meadow Creek? CH: Meadow Creek. RB: Meadow Creek pond in Roy. And we had gone up there the fall before he passed away, and some of the Roy City employees were still there, and they said the islands kind of washing away, and he was like, okay, I’m going to tell you how to fix it. You need to do this and put this here, and the next spring they were able to fix it. And one of the employees, one of my dad’s good friends, somebody went to move a log, and Kevin said no, that’s Lon’s log, you leave it there. And you know, what a good thing for the residents of Roy to have. It’s the coolest fish pond. I mean you can barely see it if you drive down the road, but there’s always people fishing and kids playing, and that was kind of his mantra, I guess, is to bring people together. And create good experiences. Same with the barn over at the farm. We had parties there, and the kids would play, and… MH: Oh, so where he made that summer kitchen in the barn, it was a hay barn, and then he left that one end where the kitchen was, and built a big wall, and then the rest he hauled dirt in so the kids could ride in the winter and warm up horses and 24 stuff. But on the wall, he came up with, let’s have Branding, let’s put everybody’s brand. Let’s put our family’s brand on the wall, and invite people, local farmers and stuff, to put their brands. So it was gonna happen on Halloween, and we did a couple of fliers, I made phone calls, we went to all the local farmers around here in the Plain City area. We emailed people, friends who moved away to Montana, different places. So we said, so we’re gonna have an open house, and I’m gonna cook all the food, and we’re gonna have people come between certain hours. The flier’s still on the fridge. But it was great. We kept track of all the brands. He had running irons. Back in the day, 19th century, running irons were illegal because people always branded their cattle, but if you stole them, and you were a rustler, you could turn that brand into something else, because there were curves and whatever. But it was really, really neat. I think we tracked over 80 brands. The people either actually had their own brand and they brought it, or they had him create it with the running irons. And the really cool thing is, is that there are farmers down there that feud. They don’t speak, some of them are in the same family and have the same last name as me, but Lon was Switzerland. They loved Lon. He was neutral. So you would have these two feuding farmers that hadn’t been in the same building for decades were on our farm at the same time. And they stayed, it was pretty awesome. 25 RB: And, so speaking of the barn, we had parties over there all the time and there was no bathroom. So one day, he’s like, I got to build a bathroom. So we went to the RV store and bought a tank, and he built a mobile port-a-potty on wheels. MH: It’s like an outhouse. RB: Like an old outhouse. It has a light, it has a little area for hand sanitizer, he had me make a sign. CH: There’s an old sink, like an old time wash basin, and he put a pitcher of water in there and a sign that said wash your hands. MH: And it would drain into the tank. RB: It’s like the cutest potty on wheels ever. CH: It has the old half-moon on the door, it looks like one of the old style outhouses. MH: Just one of those things rolling in his head. Okay, we need something. CH: And it was built like on a trailer that some neighbors gave him. A little work trailer, not like a big enclosed work trailer, just like this tall, so he cut the top off the work trailer and framed the port-a-potty outhouse on that trailer. RB: Yeah, like he would just dig through his piles. Like one day, there was a barn he had built Katy as a little girl, she had little horse toys. And it was on the wood pile, and I said can I have that for my kids, I want to dig that out of the wood pile. And he said yeah, I’ll fix it up for you. And he just showed up one day, down at my house, and he said he got that one out, but it was a piece of junk so he had burnt it, and he had built for my kids this little red barn with the angled roof, and he painted it so it looked like it had an old tin roof on it. And I had no idea, he just 26 showed up, he had spent half the day building my kids this little barn. And they love it. They still play with it. MH: [pointing] And he made that rope dummy. We’ve had people offer us a couple of hundred dollars for that. CH: Those are actually real steer horns, like the sheets, but they have bone, but the outer what you see is the sheet. So he cut out a piece of wood and shaped it and slid those on there. Yeah, he built that for Quin, that roping dummy, he roped up here. AC: So you actually used that for rope practice? CH: Yeah, we played around with it. MH: Had the little kids out there throwing rope. AC: So it sounds like he did a lot of things at his work. Did he have any help with the Roy Pond and everything? MH: He had employees that worked under him. And they, most all of those guys loved him, and would have done anything for him. RB: He was a strict boss, but they respected him and they, I guess like she said, they would do anything for him. But they learned a lot of respect when they worked for him, because he, he worked hard. Even after he didn’t feel good, he still worked for Roy City for a few years, and he never felt good. But he was still, do what needed to get done. And the last few months of his life, he told me, he heard a talk by one of the Church General Authorities, and he said, when you can’t do what you’ve always done, then you do what’s most important. And that’s what he did, is spend time with his kids and his family, and we would, you know, some of 27 my favorite memories I guess as a teenager is Mom was working, and so my older brother, Tyler, and I , and then our cousin pretty much lived here. We would go to all these high school rodeos. And we would sing old cowboy songs, like at the top of our lungs to all these crazy rodeos. And my Dad would just tease Tyler and Doug to no end. They always said they were tough, they were teenage boys. And he would say, alright, let’s have a wrestling match. Like, we’ll set up team posts, we’ll set up stuff like WWE Wrestling Ring, and they wouldn’t ever agree to it. He would like, you know, they’d wrestle out on the farm, and he would always beat those two boys, even when he started not feeling good. CH: They’d get mouthy, like ‘we don’t want to do this, we don’t want to do that’, I would do the same thing, he would say, alright, you want to be the boss, get up on the bale of hay. And we had like half ton bales of hay, like probably about that tall. So we would get up on that bale of hay, and he would say if you can throw me off this bale of hay you can be the boss today and tell me what to do. None of us could ever throw him off. I remember jumping off one time, because I was just scared. AC: That’s awesome. So as kids, did he pull you guys into his projects at all? CH: Oh yeah. RB: All the time. He had this sort of, this sign, we called it dad sign language. Tyler, the oldest, he was the best at Dad sign language. Like one time, I was like what is he saying? CH: He’d be up on the tractor, so the motor’s running. If he yells you couldn’t hear him, so he would sign. 28 RB: But it was not like normal sign language. Tyler would say he wants you to lift that up and put that there and I’m like, what? AC: Dad sign language. I like that. RB: Yeah, Dad sign language. AC: So did he compete in rodeos at all? It sounds like he rode a little bit, is that correct? MH: He did rough stock when he was a teenager, which means he did bareback and he rode some bulls. RB: He did the paint horse show. MH: After we were married. RB: I guess when I was really little. But there’s a painting of him, our first stallion. So the paint horse show and he’d team rope and show that horse, and then he just did some for fun. A few jackpots, but as us kids got older and into rodeo, it was us. And, you know, we each kind of had our turn. My senior year, my good horse broke her leg, and was turned out to be a brood mare and had a bunch of young horses. And they were trying to help me do everything that I could, and practicing, and we had cattle, and I joked all the time that I had my own NASCAR pit crew. Like these two were younger, they would help load chutes and saddle horses and cool horses, and, you know, we were, we each kind of had our turn I guess as being the focus of…okay, like, Chase is rodeoing, so now we’re all gonna help Chase. Tyler and I kind of rodeoed together, which probably wasn’t the best idea sometimes. They made me be his team roping partner, and I was just learning. I 29 didn’t know how to team work, and Tyler is better than me. It was like an all-out war in the back yard all the time, and I was sweating to just say… because in team roping you have your header and your heeler. Your header comes out, ropes the head, turns it, and the heeler heels it. Well I was a heeler, so I would threaten to not come out, two days before the rodeo. Like, I’ll just sit in the box, don’t be mean to me. But, you know we each kind of had our turn, and our parents, giving their all, and having good horses. We have a horse that I started on, bless her heart. He raised her. She actually kicked my dad in the knee and broke his knee which he didn’t find out till years later. She was kind of Sassy. I actually wanted to sell her for quite a while, then one day he was like I like this rodeo girl, so I rode her, and Chase rode her, and Kate rode her, and she was kind of our pride and joy. And she just had her first baby this year, and I’m sure my Dad’s pretty happy about it. Because I begged the last few years, can we just breed her please? And he overrode me like no, this is Katy’s, it’s Katy’s turn. We cannot take this horse away from Katy. And then last year, where she’s getting old, she kind of has some arthritis in her back, and Katy was like okay, it’s time. AC: What was the mare’s name? RB: May. Her registered name, my Dad named her, is actually Katy’s Outlaw. KH: So she’s always been mine, really. AC: Katy’s Outlaw. That’s cool. So when did he register her as that? MH: Named her after the kids. KH: I was two when she was born, so I was really little. 30 RB: Yes, and he named her Katy’s Outlaw. Dad always called Katy, even though it’s not her real middle name, Katy May, so that’s why we called her May. AC: Did he name all your horses? RB: He named a lot. So mine and my husband’s horses, he named like all of them. He named them horrible things. Like the one horses name, his name is Lester. And my Dad just kept calling him that. And Casey said we want to call him something cool, and my Dad kept calling him that until it stuck, and everyone called him Lester. CH: He named my horse. I bought a horse when I was going to school, and I was trying to think of some cool name. And he was like, “well, you know, sometimes he doesn’t think real fast, like you do sometimes. I think we should call him Roy,” ‘cause my nickname was Roy. And he said we should call him Roy. So it stuck, and we still have Roy here. It’s been, I don’t know, ten years? Yeah. AC: Did he teach you guys how to ride? RB: Yeah. AC: Very cool. How did he start you guys out? RB: Babies. KH: We’ve always known how to ride. CH: When we were little. We used to in the mountains a lot, that’s kind of where I mostly learned. We’d be going, do a ride in the mountains, camp with the horses, pack all our food and supplies in. AC: That’s cool. Where would you guys go camping at? CH: The Uintah’s a lot. That’s where we mostly went. 31 AC: You would all ride in and set up camp and everything? CH: The whole family would go. KH: I would be really little. CH: One year, Katy went… KH: I was maybe four, and I rode with my Mom all the way in. MH: We shared a horse. RB: We went with friends, ‘cause I went, there was a good friend of ours, they had a son just younger than Katy and he rode with me. And sang Kenny Chesney’s She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy, and he would only sing three lines of it, all the way in. And all the way out. SC: So you guys say, a lot of people think we’re raising cattle and horses, we’re really raising kids, what does that mean? MH: It wasn’t about selling the horses or the cattle or making them more valuable. It was about teaching the kids responsibilities. The kids had to feed horses before they got fed in the morning, animals have to be taken care of. It teaches them discipline, you gotta learn patience. Horses all have different personalities. You get the ones that may be sweethearts on the ground, but you get on their back and they’re not gonna go the way you want to go. So, that’s what he meant, that it was teaching the kids to be better human beings. Look outside themselves, be responsible for something else. And not spend so much time in front of the TV or texting. We’re not much of a video game family. We have had one, and played a few. But he was good too, with other kids. There were a couple of summers he 32 took in some boys that needed some help. Parents approached him. Katy hates those years because she had to share her dad with other boys. KH: All summer. MH: It was all summer long. These boys were a little bit challenged, and their parents asked “Could he work for you during the summer?” So we did that with two young teenage boys. And those boys loved him. AC: That is really cool. RB: I don’t know if I put it in the application or not, this Nick, my Dad would just tell him like, the craziest stuff, and Nick would take it as, like, this is big. Like Nick would say he wanted to be a doctor because he didn’t care about people, he just wanted to be rich, so then my Dad would come back at him with like, really just kind of off the wall things. And coming from my Dad, straight faced, you know, with that big black mustache, like Nick would take that as I better do that or I’m gonna die. So Nick was saying he didn’t want to go on a LDS mission, so, in turn, my Dad told him, well, if you don’t, your wife is gonna be so ugly, you’re gonna wake up in the morning and roll over and look at her and throw up. And he like, Nick was just like, okay. Like, I’m gonna go on a mission, I’ll go. I’ll go tomorrow. And we knew my Dad was joking, but my Dad was just straight faced and looking in his face… it’s like you don’t do this, your life is gonna be over. And so Nick worked really hard one day, and he had gone fishing, he kept calling my Dad, we were rodeo-ing or something, and Nicks’s like, “I got a fish! I got a fish! I want you to mount my fish.” And so my Dad’s like just put it in the freezer, Nick. 33 So he put it in a cookie sheet in his Grandma’s fridge, not the freezer. So this stinking fish is stinking up their whole fridge, so she picks him up and takes him over here and says Nick said you wanted this fish, so here’s your stinking fish. Well it was a carp, and carp are just trash fish, and it wasn’t even that big either. And my Dad was like Nick, I’m not gonna carve a carp. MH: That’s what he wanted when he caught the fish, he wanted Lon to do one of these replicas for it. Like if he could see the fish he could replicate it. RB: And Nick said, “No, I’ve worked all day fishing, and it was hot and I was tired, and I want a carp.” So my Dad carved him a carp. And painted it and took all this time building it, and he took Nick his carp. AC: He’s a really good sport. So, did he take in troubled teens often? MH: Just those two boys. Two different summers. And they would have to fence and work on the farm, and you know, help weed and do different things. Katy was always irritated at them and Lon would always say that Katy could do the work of two teenage boys. He was always proud of her work ethic. Yet he took them in, and she would roll her eyes, and they would come home, and he would be like how was your day with so and so. And there was Nick and there was Cade, and she just… AC: I like this. So he passed his work ethic onto his kids. That’s wonderful. MH: Yeah they know how to work. They all know how to work. AC: That’s cool. In the bio it says that he took up every opportunity to expand his knowledge about how to fit the needs of each animal he was working on. Was that particularly related to horse shoeing? Or does that have to do with… 34 RB: Horses. MH: Training them. RB: Well when he learned how to use the computer, and he would hunt and peck, he learned how to use YouTube. We were given this old brood mare, and she had been foundered, and that’s where a bone in their foot kind of rotates and comes through the bottom. And so he got on YouTube, and he would research foundered horses and how to deal with them, and he ended up putting a horseshoe on her backwards. And we got her so that she was healthy enough to have a colt, and that was his goal. And she was pregnant when she was given to us, and she was a big mare, like these two went with my Dad to kind of trim her feet on her cobb, and they said we don’t know if she’s gonna make it. Why don’t you look? And my Dad took his tools, and I told these two, don’t let her fall on him and crush him. But we got her home, and that’s what he learned on YouTube. He put a backwards horseshoe on her, and got her to where she would move and trot and lope out through the pasture. So, you know, he was never one that was like, I’m gonna shoe a horse like this for thirty years because this is always how I’ve done it. He would learn and adapt and change, you know, kind of how, how maybe he was taught. He liked to go more in the, I don’t know, natural, like the way a horses foot should naturally be, and how they would move, to watch, especially when we went to Texas for the world Paint horse show. Like different disciplines of horses, they put different shoes on them and they wanted them to move a 35 certain way, and he would always look at that and try to figure out what they were doing. MH: Yeah, forever, don’t you think? Seeing him ride a horse and him always looking. He was either looking down at what he was riding or the other kids while they were on a horse were always looking at the movement of their legs and feet. RB: Actually he worked at the vet in high school, and a horse would come in, and they would say, it had some foot problem. And he was like, no, it’s not that foot problem, it’s this foot problem. And the horse died of something else, so he cut his foot off, and he boiled it down, and was like, see, I was right. This horse had this and this problem. AC: Wow. MH: They would, sometimes when he was at the vet, or just getting horses vaccinated or whatever, the vets would ask him, what do you think? This horse is like taking a leg. The vets would call him over, they wouldn’t call him up on the phone, but if he was there, they would say, well, what do you think about this, Lon? And there was a guy who lived in our neighborhood here, and he was a vet, and he used to get irritated because when people would finally go to him, they would say “Lon says the horse is bad and I should take him to you.” CH: “Lon diagnosed him with this, but he said I should take him to the vet.” Not all the time, but a lot of the time he’d be right. MH: And he’d say, this is what you need to do for that horse, and he would save them the vet call. Like, “Your horse is gonna be fine, either trim it here,” or if it had an infection, “this is what you need to get. It’ll take care of it. Here’s how you patch 36 that wound.” So all those kind of different things. He would kind of get irritated when they would say “well I talked to Lon.” AC: Did he have any other animals besides horses? MH: Cattle. We’ve had different kinds of cattle. We’ve been down to Corriannies, which are roping cattle, last twenty, fifteen years at least. AC: And you use them for sport? MH: Just raise them. And use them for team roping. RB: One of the best stories from when we were young—when I was young, Chase was probably a baby—we were paint horse showing, and I had gone, my Mom had stayed home. And his friend contracted the cattle, so he would take the roping cattle to this paint horse show, and the one cow, like, came out of the chute, down the arena, and jumped out the vents. She went through a park, she went through like a subdivision, and then she got onto the highway. And some guy in a brand new Mercedes tried to cut her off. MH: He wanted to herd with his Mercedes. RB: With his brand new red Mercedes. And the cow was freaking wild, she jumped the hood of that car. My Dad was on, not his own horse, but a different horse. So this cow finally gets across the road and I’m like 6, riding in the truck, riding with a different friend of his, following my Dad, like through the ball diamond, like right through the middle of a soccer game, and finally this crow, after she crossed the highway, she went through a field, jumped a fence, and my Dad roped her under a little kids swing set. Behind somebody’s house. And so for a while, in more 37 recent years, my Dad and my husband, they would get these calls, like we got a cow out. And they would go chase the cow… MH: He was the go to guy in the neighborhood for an animal getting out. RB: They would go rope them and drag them, and they went all over for a while. Our one neighbor had like some really naughty cows that would just go through fences, and they would call my Dad and my husband, and they would just go off. [Sound cuts off] RB: This was kind of a safe haven house, my parents always had really good advice. I even had one friend that brought this girl that, she didn’t know my parents from anyone and she was like, “Well, we’ll go out to Rachel’s house because her parents will know what to do.” And a lot of my friends said what a great example of marriage and family. And both my mom and dad would always tell us as teenagers “If you tell me where you’re going and you get thrown in jail, we’ll come get you. If you lie to us and you get thrown in jail. You’re sitting in jail.” I took that for serious so I told my mom, like, “We might be going to some sketchy places, you know” but she always knew I was always very honest with her. I thought it was neat how many comments I got after my dad passed away saying, you know, we loved your parents. What teenagers love somebody’s parents? But my friends would love… mom would feed them and my dad would tease them and sometimes scare the crap out of them with his wild stories. And you’d have to know my dad pretty well to know when he was teasing because he would say things with a straight face and you’d think yikes! That guy! And there was a guy I was dating once and that was hanging there [pointing to fox skin 38 hanging on the mantle] and he was scared out of his wits of my dad and he was like I swear your dad is going to shoot me, skin me, and shove arrows down my throat and hang me on the mantle . MH: (laughing) I forgot that. RB: Yeah, he was just like scared to death. And I guess as a grandpa for my kids, that’s one thing I miss the most. He loved these little kids and would lay on the floor with them and he would take Holly and I different places. And he’d go on horse buying adventures all over because we were always like “there’s a cheap or free horse that fits our program, we’re going to go get it, you know. We’re going to drive a few hours.” Josie even went on one. She was only three months when he passed away but she got to go on one horse buying adventure and we actually didn’t buy the horse, we changed our minds at the last minute, but JoJo got to go on one. MH: Yeah, he was always good for advice. People came and wanted to run things past him, because he was always just common sense, really level headed and so a lot of people would come and unload on him. I think that was the hardest thing for some of his very best friends and the kids after he passed. He was trying to work in the garage with his cell phone and the kids called him and checked with him every morning. Tyler can’t have his phone with him being in intelligence, but when he goes out on break or on lunch Tyler would call, Rachel would call or be here in the morning and check him out. Chase was not living here at the time but he would call and check in while he was working and so you know. And then I know there were those friends that 39 missed being able to come because they always knew he was either in the garage or they could find him at the farm and he’d always give them a listening ear if they just wanted to vent, or if they wanted the advice he’d give it. If not, he’d just listen. So he was a good guy. Rachel had a friend that had a father that was an alcoholic and sometimes the mom would say “Our house is not safe. Could she move in with you guys for a couple of weeks?” And we’d take them in and they knew they had a safe place and those were some of the kids that would come back after he passed and said just how much they appreciated him. AC: Very selfless. MH: Yeah. Like I said he would rather shortchange himself and…you know, not charge for the taxidermy. I’d say “you’re not making too much off of that” and early in the marriage I was like… we were poor and I’d be like “you’re not charging enough for the work you’re doing. Are you calculating the hours?” And he’d say “yeah but they’re friends.” And finally I just learned to not care as long as he was covering his hunting addiction with his taxidermy and the kids and I weren’t going hungry, I’d just let it be his deal. That’s your deal, your deal with your friends, you know. I got so I didn’t care. RB: He was one that if you did something nice for him he repaid you about ten times over. That’s just how was. He carved a lot of fish as thankyous for people and built things and wood chip things so if you did something nice for him he always… MH: He always wanted to pay you back. AC: How long did it usually take him to do these taxidermies or a fish carving? 40 KH: Usually about a week. MH: We calculated depending on the complication of it, was it about 20 hours for a fish? He got a little faster. RB: So he would just go out in his wood pile and glue blocks of wood so they started as a rectangle and then he would say… CH: He had them on a band saw and he would cut out the basic shape of the fish, like really rough. And then he would just sand them and hand carve them and shape them. MH: I wonder if I have one on my phone of him and he’s just covered in shavings RB: Just covered in sawdust. KH: He called me and he’s like, “Katie come take a picture of me!” And I was like “why?” And he’s like, “Just come outside!” And he was just sitting on the little box down here outside and he had his fish in his lap and he was just all white from sawdust. RB: And the dog was right next to him. CH: Yeah, covered in sawdust. RB: The dog, Gus, was kind of like his side kick and Gus would just squint, just like “I’m here for you bud” and Gus would stay there the whole time. MH: I’m thinking maybe I don’t have it on my phone anymore, but his mustache was just covered with sawdust too. Looks pretty cool. KH: He would make me blow him off—we have an air compressor and you can put the thing on to blow him off—he just stood there and he had to get all blown off. 41 MH: Yeah so the fish were about twenty hours. The one here—he wanted to do one that looked like it was going after, can you see the fly? He had to figure out how to do the line. Just one of those ideas he got in his head. He thought “I want to make it look like it’s going after a fly.” RB: He would figure it out. So like this deer mount. So, they come in forms, they’re Styrofoam forms, and the deer right here was a standing deer. MH: Standing on all fours. CH: Just got it on a discount. RB: Got it on a discount and then he’d always wanted to do a mount like that. MH: Like the mountain lion had gotten the deer. RB: And so he would cut sections and turn it and turn it until he finally made it into that. CH: And then the tree is a tree that he cut down in our front yard. It had died. MH: And was this a door from the barn? CH: This wood came from, this was wood that he salvaged from the barn and then on the mountain lion he’d seen mounts done like this before, but their ears were forward and they didn’t look mad and in his mind he said “I want this to look like I have walked up on this and the mountain lion’s mad and trying to protect his kill.” So he wanted to figure out how to make the mountain lion look mad, so he took my mom’s house cat and he’d hit her in the face so her ears would go flat and she’d get mad and then he would run back to the garage, because the ears are actually packed with clay so you can mold and move the ears, and so he’d just lay the ears out and then go back and hit her again… 42 MH: (laughing) Just flick the cat. RB: I was holding her. MH: Oh you were? RB: I was holding her and…[inaudible] MH: Hey we all made sacrifices. It’s ok, she’s still alive. RB: They kind of had a love-hate relationship anyway, that freaking cat. But yeah, he would like flick her in the nose and she’d get mad and try to slap him and so he would just, you know… He wanted things to be really natural and he didn’t want like these animals to look like they have lipstick on. Like you go to certain taxidermy places and you’re like wow! MH: He wants them to look like they’re gonna move and blow air at ya. AC: Right, they look very realistic. He did an amazing job. MH: Yeah he did a good job at it. AC: What is the story behind getting the mountain lion? MH: That was the roughest hunt he said he’d ever physically went on. With mountain lions you generally have to find somebody with dogs and bloodhounds that can get a scent and tree them and he said that it was physically grueling. They were in the mountains above Willard Bay, so if you know where Willard Bay is and you look up on the mountain. When we’d drive up to Logan or past that way he would point to the spot “see those rocks right there? I was above that.” So it was in the snow, and I think it was February, so they were hiking through thigh deep snow, chasing these dogs, him and his friend Scott, and then they had a couple of different guys with the dogs and they treed the cat and it was mean and hissing 43 and it had swiped some of the dogs, I think it was trying to pee on them. But it was a good shot. It brought him down and got the big kitty. I said, “That’s a big kitty!” AC: So they ran it into a tree? RB: That’s how you bring them down. CH: Yeah they tree them and they shoot them out of the tree. He said it hit every branch on the way down and he thought it was just going to fall dead and it hit the ground on its feet, swiped a couple of dogs then took off. The dogs ran after it then it died. AC: Wow, a lot of excitement then. CH: Yeah. I remember he said he was amazed at how tough the animal was. And they picked up the trail right where the boy scouts from our neighborhood would go hiking and camping MH: And that scares me. CH: So he always felt proud, like he’d protected the local boy scouts. AC: Did he do those mountain lion hunts often? CH: That was the only one. MH: It was kind of like a one and done. It was all about natural preservation and believing that you have to hunt some of these and use the meat, use the hide, you know… We didn’t eat the cat of course, but he was a part of that because if you don’t hunt and thin the herds, starvation is a much harder way for these animals to die. You know, in these harsh winters and deer aren’t getting anything, there’s too many of them to feed, they’re running out of feed, so he was 44 all about using what was legal and then using the meat and what you could. Some of them were too gamey, so the dogs ate a lot of wild game. Our dogs ate well. But some of them have been really good. It depends on what they eat. One of the best deer we had [inaudible] because it was eating like a cow so the meat was really good meat but not gamy and yet more healthy for you than beef. That buffalo was really bad though. He could smell if I was cooking it, he could smell it outside the house, because it hadn’t been fed right for a buffalo, but we didn’t know that. That other one was really good because they had raised it right. But yeah, the dogs ate a lot of that bigger buffalo. RB: Well, and we gave a bag to Kevin Hagley and he served it at the ward party as mystery meat! CH: Yeah the church party. MH: I don’t know how they hid that flavor! I don’t know if they had enough peppers, onions, sauce, or whatever to cover that well, but it was bad. AC: Because the smell is strong when it’s gamey. RB: It is, yeah. MH: Yeah. AC: So where did he get the buffalo from? MH: That buffalo came from Hooper. CH: He shot it in some one’s backyard. MH: The guy had it was a rodeo clown and a stock contractor and the buffalo was getting mean with some of his prized bulls so I don’t know how he figured Lon would want the buffalo… 45 CH: He traded a bunch of stuff for it. RB: Like a puppy, a horse, and… CH: He always wanted to shoot a buffalo but didn’t have the money to go to Montana to a big ranch and hunt it so yeah, he traded a horse, a puppy, he mended Bill’s saddle or repaired his saddle, built some tack… RB: Yeah he did some leather work... CH: It was like years of trading to get this buffalo. AC: Wow. And which one was it, that one? CH: The one on the wall. AC: Ok and the one on the left…? CH: The one on the padded stool was one—we went for my senior trip on a buffalo hunt to a ranch in Oakley or like Peoa, and so he shot that cow and I shot a bull. MH: Yeah they had looked at going to Montana but the guy that ran this ranch in Peoa was a broker for a big ranch. Ted Turner had a big ranch with thousands and thousands and that guy had managed for him and brokered and so we thought why? You can get the same thing here in Utah it’s just its close. Let’s keep local business local. AC: I love that he wanted that buffalo so much that he was willing to trade for years. RB: Yeah it took him forever. MH: Because he thought it was cool looking. And then the wife has some Indian in her. CH: Like a quarter Cherokee I think. MH: Yeah and she was mad because there was some big… 46 [audio cuts off] AC: Are there any other last stories you wanted to share before we close? MH: Um one thing that was interesting that, going back to the branding where he was Switzerland and brought everybody together, the kids had a thought and I don’t remember, whose idea was it to brand his casket? RB: Tyler. MH: It was Tyler? I didn’t ever know, I thought it was Rachel. So she threw the idea out there and we got a wood casket and I guess Tyler said to one of the kids what do you think? Should we, lets brand his casket he’d think it was cool. It was cold when he passed away. CH: January. MH: It was just a cold, cold…down below the 20s was the high for the day. But they set it up and Rachel put it out on social media. We sent emails and kids made some phone calls. I wasn’t too involved in that, but I double checked with the mortuary and they were like, “Well we’ve never done this before.” And we were like “well can we just do it out in your parking lot?” So when I got there, I got there a little late because I’m always 10 minutes late everywhere. They’re going to start my funeral 10 minutes late or bring my casket in 10 minutes late. So anyway, I pull into the mortuary and I think oh man, look at all these cars here and we’re out here in this parking lot doing our redneck thing, branding. And then I realize there was no funeral that day. All the cars were just there and the people were there to brand his casket. So it was pretty cool. There was quite a crowd there and the boys did a good job, because some of them didn’t have 47 brands but they had the running irons so they’d say ok mine was a circle with a cross through it or whatever and the boys would create it and we branded his casket. And at the end, two of the mortuary guys that were out there, they thought it was so cool they wanted their initials put on so we said, “Yeah, why not? Go ahead.” And for the first few months I had a couple of funerals so that I had to go back to that mortuary. Kinda hard, but I’d walk in and they’d recognize me and they’re like “you’re the one that we branded the casket!” Yeah, that was me. We’re redneck. But it was cool too. I think he would have loved it that they did that. AC: It sounds like part of his legacy was that he just brought everyone together. MH: Yeah he did. CH: Everyone kind of had their claim, like felt a connection with him. So there was a really, really big turnout at his funeral but it was just because he was that kind of guy. He was charismatic and people were drawn to him, whether it was for a listening ear, for advice, that’s just how he was. [video cuts out] MH: Because the day of my mother’s funeral, Lon’s brother passed away from ALS. And that was really hard on him because we thought we had more time, you know. We thought we’d recoop from my mom passing away and that he could go spend some more time with Rick and he just started going downhill so fast. AC: I’m sorry, when we were talking earlier about what the friends had said about him…Could I have you repeat that about how he had meant so much to that friend? 48 RB: Oh, so it was a former employee and he stopped me at back to school night or something, or an event at the elementary school, and he just said, “You will never know what your dad meant to me.” And I thought that was interesting because that wasn’t my dad’s favorite employee but I thought you know, that just goes to show that connection he had with people and that they had a special connection with him. And even though my dad would be like “This exasperating employee…” that employee still really respected and cared for my dad. I thought it was really neat. AC: So what do you think he’d want people to remember his legacy as? MH: I think he would deflect from himself. He would turn it out and make it about the kids or somebody else. It wouldn’t be about him. AC: And what do you guys feel like his legacy was to you as his family? RB: He taught us how to work and work hard and I think he would want us to continue to work hard and take care of the animals and… MH: Serve other people. RB: Serve other people. CH: I think service. He was so selfless. It was always about somebody else. With the benefits, he never did it because he wanted to look good he just did it because it was the right thing to do. And like with us kids rodeo-ing, he didn’t get the chance to go do rodeos and rope like he wanted to. His parents weren’t able to support him and so he made sure that we had the opportunity. And like my sister said, we all worked to help whatever sibling was rodeo-ing at the time. Just, you know, all about helping others out.