Oral History Program Saralyn Lucas Interviewed by Nicholas Lucas 03 December 2008 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Saralyn Lucas Interviewed by Nicholas Lucas 03 December 2008 Copyright © 2014 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii 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. Archival copies are placed in University Archives. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description The Weber State College/University Student Projects have been created by students working with several different professors on the Weber State campus. The topics are varied and based on the student's interest or task for a specific assignment. These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. ____________________________________ 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 All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Lucas, Saralyn, an oral history by Nicholas Lucas, 03 December 2008, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Saralyn Lucas. It is being conducted on December 3, 2008 at Saralyn's house and concerns her life story. The interviewer is Nicholas Lucas. NL: I am Nicholas D. Lucas and this is December 3, 2008. I am recording and introducing Saralyn Kathleen Lucas. Mrs. Lucas, where were you born? SL: I was born in Bountiful, Utah, at Lakeview Hospital. NL: Do you remember what your first house looked like? SL: My first house that I lived in, that I remember, was in Farr West, Utah. It was a little one floor rambler; you walked in, there was a living room, it was very small. There was a tiny hall; there was two bedrooms, one bathroom. Me and all three of my younger siblings shared one room, my parents shared the other. There was a tiny kitchen, and we had a really big back yard. NL: Do you remember getting along well with your brothers and sisters growing up? SL: I got along pretty well with my brothers and sisters. I, Rachel and I, Rachel is a year younger than me. Her and I have always gotten along really well; she has been like my best friend. She has always been there for me. When Holly came along two years later, we didn't like her much. We didn't want a new baby. Umm... We wanted mom to play with us, and help us, you know, ride our bikes; she was too busy having a baby, so we didn't really like Holly. Adam came along, and we didn't like him either. He was a boy; I 1 remember we tried to go door-to-door to sell him. We put him in a wagon, and went around and asked the neighbors if they would buy him, so we could get rid of him. But as I grew up and became the big sister, and the helper and the role model, I loved my brothers and sisters. When my mom had Kent, who is now 16, I remember loving to help and watching all the kids, and we played, and we, you know, we played in the closet and had fun. NL: Did you take care of them, did your mom work, while you, when you were younger? Do you remember taking care of the other kids if she was working? Did your dad work as well? SL: My, my dad worked for Morton Thiokol, and my mom did not work. She was with us because she had so many kids so close together so she stayed home. Well my dad got in an accident; he fell off a fifty foot ladder and he almost died. He had to have openheart surgery, and he had lots of complications and Morton Thiokol ended up firing my father from his job. Umm....They offered to pay for him to go to college so he could become anything he wanted. So he went to Weber State, decided to become an elementary teacher. That meant my mom had to work, so my mom went and got a job at the I.R.S. She worked nights, and my dad would go to school during the day, and then he would come home and take care of us. Um...He...After a couple of years, he finally graduated from Weber State and became an elementary teacher, and my mom worked at I.R.S. for probably fifteen years. I remember being the one that had to do everything. I had to help, I cooked, I cleaned, I did the laundry. I had to make sure the kids were all quiet. Um... My dad was a very domineering kind of person. He's six-foot 2 eight, so he's a pretty big guy and he would just look at you, and you would know that you had to shut up. And he would do his homework after he got home from school, and watch tennis, or golf, or basketball, or baseball, or football, and we would have to sit, after we cleaned the house, on the couch, in descending order of age, silent, until 5:30. Then we would go to bed. And he would shut us in our room, and we'd have to go to sleep. We would play in the closet, umm because at 5:30 you’re not really tired and I remember peeking out the blinds, watching all my friends riding their bikes and playing and wondering why at 5:30 I had to go to bed. So I would get all the three kids, and I would take them in our little closet and we would play Care-Bears or GI-Joe or trucks or whatever we could, until we could hear Dad coming down the hall. And then we would hurry and jump in our little bunk bed which the four of us shared. Rachel and I shared the top, and Adam and Holly shared the bottom. NL: How was your relationship with your father? SL: Um...My father was, like I said, very, very domineering. Very strict, very... he was mean. He was a tyrant, he really didn't know how to be a dad. He was the youngest of his siblings. My parents got married very young, had kids very young and I don't think my dad knew what he was doing. And the only thing he knew how to do was use his size to, to boss us around and... So that's what I grew up with. I grew up with a dad who never said "I love you" never hugged, never cared, never was really there. But yet he was nice to everybody else. Everybody in our ward, everyone in our neighborhood, all of his friends from school. He was this fun-loving guy, but at home he was totally different. 3 And...him and my mom fought all the time, and it got progressively worse as we got older. Um... NL: What did they fight about? SL: They would fight about money. We were very poor. We did not have a lot of clothing and food. We were on church assistance, and we would get our food from the church warehouse. And my parents did not want people to know, they didn't want people in our neighborhood to know that we were poor. So my mom would have to go and, and work sometimes at the church warehouse so we could get food. And we would have to tell people and lie and say where she was going somewhere else and we could never have people come over to our house. We never had people come over and eat dinner because they couldn't see that our food was generic; that it was not namebrand or storebrand, it came from the church warehouse. Um... so that’s, I think, the majority what they fought about. NL: How was your relationship with your mother growing up? SL: Um... When I was growing up, my mom was gone at night so I don't really remember much of a relationship with my mom. She was working; she made sure we got on the bus in the morning and she was there when we came home from school and then she was gone. She was gone to work; I saw her on weekends, and she was really the only comfort or support we kind of had in the house when it came to my dad and his....his whatever you want to call it. When he would get mad, and he would get pissed and he would storm and rage and he couldn't handle things. She was the one that, you know, 4 kind of calmed everything down but that's when she was there. When she wasn't there, she had no idea what went on. NL: As you grew older, what was your mental state like? How did you react? Did you rebel as you went, as you got older? Were you a good student? Were you a good friend? Did you have lots of friends? Were you popular? What was your teenage years like? SL: Um.. As I, as I grew up, my dad finally graduated and we moved to Roy. And he got a job teaching elementary school in Layton. Um.... Growing up in Roy was pretty good. My mom could work days now and so I saw her a lot more. But then they started to fight more, cause they were both home together. As that happened, um my dad got more and more abusive and I, I was always a good student because in in general I think I'm pretty smart. I have a lot of street smarts, I just was very good at school. I always had good grades, I always, you know, did well in Math and English and Science. I never had any issues with that. Um... when I was probably 15, 16, I decided I had had enough of being the parent. Because I had to watch, you know, my four brothers and sisters. Um... my parents were going through a divorce; um… There was lots of restraining orders and, abuse problems. NL: How long were they married? SL: They were married 15 years. And my mom didn't know quite how to handle life without my dad because they got married so young and so she kinda was depressed, very depressed. She stopped doing anything. I had to cook and clean, pick the kids up, watch them and take them places, and I was the one that was responsible. When I was at school, I didn't want to be responsible anymore. I wanted to be a teenager, I wanted 5 to have fun so I rebelled. So I would sluff school and go hang out at Denny’s, and go to the mall, and go to friends houses, and go sit at the park. I, I just wanted to have a normal teenage life and because I couldn't do it after school, I did it during school. NL: You mother filed a restraining order against your father or vice versa? SL: My mom filed a restraining order against my father. NL: Like he couldn't come within 100 yards of the house-type thing? SL: Yes, he could not come within so many feet of the house, um... and against my mom. Like he couldn't be anywhere but she couldn't keep him from the kids cause there was no physical abuse shown against the little kids. So he could come and he would stop at the curb and he would honk, and the other kids would go see him. Well Rachel and I were older, and we knew what went on so we chose not to see him, not to go places with him. But he would take Holly and Adam places. He never took Kent cause Kent was a baby when my dad left. So Kent my younger brother has never known his dad. NL: How is your relationship with your parents now, and has he ever repented or apologized for his actions? SL: Um... my relationship now with my dad I'll start with. My dad has apologized um... I had a rough relationship with my dad for a really long time. He didn't talk to me, he wasn't in my life when I graduated from high school. When, when I was 18 he cut me off of the insurance, and my mom was not working anywhere and so I had no more insurance and when I went to college I had kidney stones and I had to have surgery to have them fixed and he called me one day on the phone and told me "sorry I took you off the 6 insurance, you are no longer my child; you'll have to pay for this all by yourself." And so it took me a long time to finally… NL: Is that normal? Does that, is that required by law to take you off at 18? SL: No. He did that because once we were 18 he felt... to get back at my mom. And because she couldn't afford anything, she couldn't help me, she wasn't paying for my college anyway. So I had to pay for that and once I, I started dating my husband, now, things kind of got easier, and my dad got remarried, and his new wife said you need to probably get back in touch with your kids. And he called, we talked, and he apologized and it’s taken me a long time to forgive him and now I have a great relationship with my dad. I forgive him, people can change, umm... I have seen that he is really sorry for the things he has done. NL: Your mom? SL: Um... my mom. After they got divorced, I rebelled and my mom did not really know how to handle me as a teenager. She could barely handle her own life and the divorce she was going through with my dad. So I kind of was left to do whatever I wanted to do whenever I wanted to do it. Well, we were very poor, my dad was not paying any child support. My mom had quit her job because she couldn't handle being without my dad, and so we had no money. We were once again back on church welfare. And so I got a job, I had to pay for things. I had to get a scholarship to go to college. I worked three jobs, put myself through college. Um... I maintained really good grades so I could have some of it paid for by scholarship. l kind of just kept my mom at a distance, never really, you know, she was there for support and comfort, but nothing more. When I started 7 dating my husband, she did not like him, she did not think that was acceptable because he was not her religion, and so she told me that she was not going to talk to me anymore, and she didn't talk to me for a really, really long time. And she....she....it took her a long time to finally come around. I guess she talked to my husband on the day we got married, and she apologized to him, and she has tried, I think she has tried to, to put an effort and mend that relationship that was broken with me. And you know, make my husband and I feel comfortable. NL: I know your husband, and he thinks your mom is pretty good. I know he loves her too. Mrs. Lucas, let’s talk about your career. What is it that you do? SL: I am a high school teacher. I have taught ninth through twelfth grade. Um... but mainly now I teach juniors and seniors. NL: When did you teach ninth grade? SL: I taught ninth grade when I taught in Salt Lake City at West and East High School. That's the only time I've ever taught ninth grade. The rest of my career (I have been teaching for six years) was spent tenth through twelfth grade. NL: What did you think of ninth graders? SL: They are pretty hormonal... NL: More than tenth through twelfth? SL: Oh... they are definitely going through the change, they don't know how to adjust to their new bodies, things are changing, and they don't know how to really deal with friends and girls and guys and so they definitely are not as stable, I think, as sixteen, 8 seventeen, eighteen-year olds. I really like teaching my seniors....they are... I just love them. I teach a class that is concurrent enrollment. It is a college class through Salt Lake Community College. It is Adult Roles and Financial Literacy. So the kids get elective credit, they get financial literacy credit, and then they get three college credits. NL: You do love your job though? SL: I love my job. You know, I'm not a morning person, I hate getting up in the morning, but I love going to work. I love when I get there, I love seeing my kids, I love seeing my students. I love that I can help them. I love that I know that I am making a difference in their life, and that's really important to me, that I feel like I am of value, that I am of worth, that I am out there contributing to society in a positive way. I love the people I work with. I love my colleagues. I love my principal... I just love what I do. I love that I get to go to work every day and, yeah I don't make a lot of money, but that's ok... Cause I would rather love what I do then make a lot of money. NL: Describe your relationship with your husband, and give us a little background on that? SL: Um... my husband is the most wonderful thing in my life. We've been married almost five years, and I've known him for over eight, and....we dated for a while. NL: Why is that? SL: Why is what? NL: Why did you date for a while and not get married? 9 SL: Because he wasn't ready. He didn't want to. He was scared. Um... that's what I think anyway. He just wasn't sure if this is what he wanted. So we dated, he proposed to me on Christmas 2002. NL: How did you meet him? SL: Um... I met him through my sister and her now-husband. Um...her husband and my husband were, and still are friends, and I came down from college on a weekend and was over at my sister's boyfriend’s apartment, and he came over. And he and I started talking, I thought he was extremely cute and sexy... and it took a long time before he, you know, would take me out. I was actually the one that told him he was gonna take me on a date. NL: Why is that? SL: Because he was scared, he was shy... he's very… NL: I don't know, I know your husband. I don't think he was scared or shy. But what could have been the other reason? SL: The other reason was that he had a friend that really liked me. And he didn't want to tread on his footsteps... NL: There was another reason too. What was that? SL: I was dating this other guy before. But it wasn't anything serious. It was just dating. But I'm very glad I told my husband to ask me on a date. And, from that time on, I just knew. NL: Have you had any pets in your life, and what kind of pets? 10 SL: Um… We were not allowed to have any dogs or cats or anything big like that. Um... my dad had a dog when he was growing up and the dog had been killed. I think it had got hit by a car, and so my dad refused to absolutely let us have anything. Um... he finally conceded and said we could get a bird. Um... so we had a bird. It was a parakeet, or a parrot? It was a parrot. My dad named him Larry the Bird, cause he loved the Boston Celtics. We got him a little basketball hoop even, and a little basketball, and he taught the bird to put the little basket in the basketball hoop. He loved Larry the Bird. He freakin’ loved him. Well Holly came around, my second younger sister, and she was allergic to the bird, and we had to get rid of Larry. Um... my dad was very upset, and ever since then we've, we never had any pets growing up. The first pet I ever had was when I moved in with my boyfriend and now my husband, and he had a dog. Avie, and she loved me and I loved her, and she was like my baby, and.... She passed away. And my husband and I just got a new puppy two days ago, and I just, I just don't know. I just don't know about her, I just don't know if she can help fill that void...But I don't think she will ever live up to the other dog, but it might be close. She might be able to at least get halfway there, so those are the only pets I've ever had. NL: What are the things that you like to do? How do you like spending your free time when you’re not working? SL: When I am not working...I... love, I absolutely love to take naps. I loved coming home, when we had our other dog, and I would come home, and she would just know. She would just run into the bedroom with me, and we'd crawl into bed, and we would take a little nap after school. It was awesome. I love naps. I love spending time with my 11 husband, I love when he wants to go and do things. I love when we’re sitting on the couch, and we watch a movie, and he holds my hand. I love that. I love shopping. I love bargain shopping, not shopping; bargain shopping. I love getting a deal, it gives me an adrenaline rush. It's like drugs for me. I don't know, it’s an addiction. I love my nieces and nephews, I love spending time with them. I love spoiling them, I love seeing them, playing with them. I love that they love me, and that I am their favorite aunt and that I get to do all those fun things that, you know, maybe their parents can't do. Um... I love reading. I read a lot! I love reading mystery books, and suspense, and funny; I don't really like romance, that’s not my kind of thing. And I love to watch movies, I love to watch movies with my husband, and just be with him, do fun things. NL: How many nieces and nephews do you have, and what are their names? SL: Um... the first nephew is Jaxton. He is five. Then there is Skyler and Skyler is five, and Skyler and Jaxton are brothers. Um... my sister had Jaxton, and then two weeks after she had him she got pregnant with Skyler and Skyler came nine months later, so they are ten months apart. Then there is Madelyn. And Madelyn is four. And she is exactly like me. She has an attitude like me, her personality is like me; she just reminds me of me. Then there is Triston. He is three, he will be four on Sunday. And he is my brothers little boy. Then there is Mckayla, and Mckayla is three. And then there is Chloe.... NL: Who had Mckayla? SL: Holly had Mckayla. That is Skyler and Jaxton’s little sister. Then there is Chloe, and that is Madelyn's little sister; um...however Chloe passed away. She, the umbilical cord had wrapped around her ankles when my sister was eight and a half months pregnant and 12 she was stillborn. And then my sister Rachel got pregnant and had Olivia, and Olivia will be a year on Saturday. And then Rachel is pregnant again, and due in June of next year. NL: Would you say that Olivia has a big head? SL: I would say her head is huge. She is also really, really cute. But her head is not as big as Skyler’s was. Skyler's head was so big he couldn't even crawl, cause he couldn't lift it up off the floor. He would scoot and drag his head on the floor. It was so big we thought he had a brain tumor, and we took him to Primary Children’s hospital, and they told us it was just big. NL: Did you think, do you think we have forgot anything, is there anything we are missing here? Can you think of anything else? SL: Nope. There is nothing else I can think of. NL: Thank you Mrs. Lucas... and that ends our session. 13