Florence Decker Corry passed away in 1954, leaving behind six children, aged 2 to 18. For the younger children who have only vague memories of their mother, and for the grandchildren who know her only by legend, this is Florence's story.

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Beginning a Family


E.M. Corry Farm 1936

When Elwood was a young boy, his father and his Uncle Willard purchased about 700 acres of land in the area later known as the intersection of Midvalley Road and Lund Highway, northwest of Cedar City. Roughly half of the land lay on the west side of Lund Highway, with the other half on the east. In time, Elwood’s father, E.M., and Uncle Willard broke up their partnership, and E.M. took all but 90 acres on the east side of the highway. Over the years, he purchased additional acreage in the vicinity, and “the farm” became a constant in the lives of the Corry family for decades to come.

Soon after Elwood returned home from England at the end of 1932, he took over operation of the farm. This was in the midst of the Depression and just before the advent of mechanized equipment replaced the work horse. Though meager, the farm income provided enough to put Elwood through two years at the BAC (Branch Agricultural College).

In the spring of 1935, Elwood worked the farm, anticipating his quickly approaching college graduation and marriage. That year’s hay crop and corn silage was to pay for his studies at Utah State Agricultural College, and the newlyweds planned to move to Logan in the fall. However, the hay failed to sell. As a backup plan, Elwood took the advice of some neighbors and borrowed money to buy 40 head of cattle. Through the fall and winter of 1935-36, he fed the cattle, finally taking them to Los Angeles in March, where he ended up selling them for less than their purchase price. In the end, he had to sell a milk cow just to repay the loan.

The spring of 1936 found Florence and Elwood with no money to live on, no money to run the farm, and a baby due in September. Elwood was able to make a little money feeding lambs that summer, and they rented the farm adjoining the Corry farm, primarily because the rental farm included a house they could live in. The house had no running water, no indoor bathroom and no telephone, but it provided shelter and electricity, and they had food. They also had the use of an old car of Elwood’s father’s, although they only used it when they had to, as they had little money for gas. Elwood hired a boy to help him with the farm work, paying the boy in hay. Florence had resigned her job at Cedar Mercantile due to her pregnancy.

In these conditions, Florence entered the third trimester of her pregnancy. She must have worried some about starting a family in such hard times, but then Florence had weathered her share of poverty over the years, and she had inherited a bit of her Grandmother Decker’s pioneer spirit. Besides, the Corrys were not the only young couple at the time to know the pinch of an empty pocketbook. Elwood later said that, although they realized virtually no income in those years, he remembers their early marriage as a happy time. They worked hard, and they recognized the Lord’s hand in their lives.

1935 model Heatrola
One day, for instance, Roe Palmer came over and asked Elwood if he would mind taking Roe’s men into town at the end of the day. Elwood agreed, although he privately wondered how he would buy gas for the car. He and Florence determined they would have to use $2.50 in tithing money they had saved, and so he pulled the money out of the drawer, and they headed into town, planning to repay the tithing as soon as they brought in some more money. Just a short distance down the road, a neighbor flagged them down, handing Elwood $5.00 toward a pasture bill that would not come due for some time. No one paid their bills early in those Depression years! When they arrived in town, Florence stopped by to see Fae and found, to her surprise, that her brother Alpine had left her $15.00 to apply toward some money she had loaned him years before. Elwood said, “Not only did the Lord enable us to preserve his tithing money, but he provided us eight times over its value.”

The Lord continued to bless them. On September 15, 1936, Florence and Elwood welcomed their first child, Kristine, at County Hospital in Cedar City. Her birth ushered in the coldest and snowiest winter Elwood had ever experienced. He reported that the temperature dropped to 40 degrees below zero, and the snow was higher than the fence. They spent much of the winter snowed in, gathering around the Heatrola to stay warm. They kept a fire roaring constantly in those frigid weeks, bringing coal a sack at a time from the highway. And yet, only hindsight revealed the precarious nature of their circumstances, stranded with no telephone six miles from town.

Moving into town

E.M. Corry Farm 1937
Early in the spring of 1937, LeRoy Davis returned to Cedar City. He had farmed the meadow land for E.M. from 1918 to 1920, and he called on his old friend to renew their acquaintance and inquire about the farm. Roy was enthusiastic about the possibilities of the new mechanized machinery, and his enthusiasm was contagious. An initial friendly meeting turned into a partnership agreement wherein Roy would take over operation of the farm, and he and E.M. would split the final returns for crops and livestock 50/50.

Elwood described the hum of activity that took over the farm over the next few years. New tractors replaced the horses. The men bought additional acreage and built a farm home and outbuildings. Roy introduced crested wheat grass into Southern Utah, and they raised pinto beans, potatoes, and other crops. The new partnership brought E.M. out of the depression that had plagued him for several years, and he was more optimistic about the future than ever.

The changes on the farm also brought about significant changes for Elwood and Florence. Elwood had about decided to make farming his occupation when Roy came to town. He and his father discussed the proposition of Roy taking over the farm, and Elwood decided to try his hand at life insurance. Early in 1937, he and Florence moved off the farm, renting a three-room apartment in the basement of Abner and Jenny Perry’s home.
Elwood

Insurance did not provide immediate success for Elwood. He began selling for Mutual Life Insurance of New York, with whom E.M. had worked successfully some years before. The company sent one of their top salesmen down from Salt Lake City, and together the two men made several sales. Elwood began to think he had found the right occupation and that finances might begin to look up. However, left on his own, he discovered that sales came with a great deal more difficulty to an unseasoned salesman. For a time, the family lived from commission to commission, barely making ends meet.

Christmas Day 1937 found Florence and Elwood with 47 cents and a pile of unpaid bills. They purchased a small gift for Kristine and then left the house for the day, not wanting visitors to see their circumstances. Elwood began to feel a bit depressed and bitter.

One evening, about that time, O.C. Bowman called on Elwood. Brother Bowman had been called as the new Cedar Second Ward bishop, and he wanted Elwood to serve as his first counselor. Elwood had already served as counselor to the two previous bishops, beginning in 1934, and he felt the time had come for him to get his financial affairs in better shape in order to serve the Lord more effectively. However, he agreed to ponder the matter. Eventually, he took the advice of his father, who said, “If they want you to take that position, you accept it and don’t turn it down.” When Elder Joseph F. Merrill set Elwood apart for the calling some weeks later, he said in the blessing, “Brother Corry, you have a number of financial obligations troubling you at the present time, but within a very short time there will be ways and means opened up to you whereby you will be able to take care of all of them.” Miraculously, within six months of that blessing, Elwood and Florence were out of debt.

Before long, Elwood began to find his footing in the insurance business. He and his father opened an office on the second floor of what was then the Bank of Southern Utah building (later the First Security Bank). Elwood sold insurance, while E.M. carried on his wool marketing and farm business. In 1939, they organized the Cedar Real Estate Company, of which Elwood took over active management. Florence worked as his secretary to save overhead expenses. Her experience learning the business would prove critical during the war years just ahead.

Extended family happenings

While Florence and Elwood celebrated a new marriage and prepared to welcome their first child, the Decker family also marked more sobering milestones. Just two weeks before Florence married Elwood, Aunt Annie died in California. Annie (referred to as “Anna Willette” in the 1920 and 1930 census) had been living in Los Angeles for some years, running a business on Santa Fe Avenue called the Shamrock Restaurant. She was Harriet’s only sister and next older sibling, and the two remained close through the years. When Mahonri and Harriet returned from Delta in disgrace, they lived in Aunt Annie’s home. When Blanche and Harriet needed space to convalesce, they stayed with Annie in California. No stranger to sorrow or the messiness of life, she seemed to provide a safe haven. She had married three times and lost a daughter along the way. Harriet’s children loved their aunt, even if her life hinted at the scandalous, and her death at the age of 57 must have cast a shadow.

Then, in January 1936, about the time Florence became pregnant, her half-sister Rachel died of pneumonia and heart trouble, leaving behind a husband and four children.  Rachel’s own mother had died almost exactly 34 years previously, just days after she gave birth to Rachel. Mahonri traveled to the funeral from St. George, where he was serving a temple mission. He had buried two wives, his infant son, a daughter-in-law and now a daughter. This once towering, vibrant man was beginning to feel the weight of life. He still sang, and he loved his temple mission, but years of exposure and heartache had crippled him.

By the time of Rachel’s death, the Decker children had all grown up. The older children –Virgil, Alvin, Gertrude, and Earl—had well-established families by this point. Fae had finally regained much of her health after spending several years under the thumb of tuberculosis. She and Cleo and their son, David, lived in Cedar City, where Cleo began working as a correspondent for the Salt Lake Tribune. Blanche lived in Salt Lake City, and Woodrow remained in Parowan.

Alpine herding sheep in 1938
The youngest living brother, Alpine, struggled to find his place in the world. By the end of 1937, he was herding sheep out of a camp on the west side of Delamar Valley in Nevada. He appeared to like the herding life, at least for the time being, although he missed his sisters. Florence and Fae seemed to be constants in his life, even more than his father. Around Christmastime he wrote to Florence, “Please write me soon and make it a long one…I always carry yours and Fae’s letters in my pocket and read them every day till the paper wears out and now my pockets are empty.”

A few months later, Al wrote to Florence that he had taken her advice and decided to quit herding. “If I don’t quit herding,” he wrote, “I’ll be all the same as married to them and never quit.” He worked for the Union Pacific Railroad for a while before joining the military in 1941.

The family grows

Florence with baby Judy and Kristine (about 1939)
With the move into town and with the insurance business beginning to pick up, life eased a bit for Florence and Elwood. They both remained actively involved with the BAC Alumni Association and other civic groups. Elwood served in the bishopric for several more years and continued to compete in tennis. In September 1939, Florence gave birth to their second child, Judy. Around the same time, Fae also gave birth to a baby girl, Nancy, and the sisters raised their daughters as close friends. The bullets of World War II began to fly overseas, but back on the homefront war took a back seat to more peaceful concerns.

Corry family at Elma's wedding (September 1940)--Kristine in front of Florence and Elwood
In September 1940, Elwood’s sister Elma married Orrin Beckstrand.  Elwood was the second of eight children born to E.M. and Abish Corry (also known as “Lyle” and “Abbie”), and Elma was just two years younger. Their older sister, Virginia, had married Bill Palmer in 1931, and the Palmers lived in New Mexico at the time of Elma’s marriage. The other sisters were in various stages of their studies and careers. Mel and Lloyd still lived at home with their parents in the family home at 264 South 300 West in Cedar City.

About this time, Florence had started working afternoons at the welfare department downtown. Kristine, about four or five years old, cried one day because she hated to see her mother go off to work. Florence quit her job just a few days later. Although the war would eventually send her back to work, for now she would stay home with Kris and baby Judy.

Culture (or, what the Corry family did for fun!)

The 1930s and 1940s saw the rise of quite a number of social clubs, so much in fact that Utah boasted its own Federated Clubs of Utah association. The Iron County Record reported in April of 1940 that the state director of that organization and the president of the Southern District of the Federated Women’s Clubs came to Cedar City to help organize several new organizations aimed at involving the young married women in town. Among those clubs was a new literary club named En Avant (French for “forward” or “onward”). Florence was named the secretary and treasurer of the new club.

The En Avant ladies met about once a month, usually in the home of one of their members. Generally, the program included a musical number and a presentation. The club apparently defined “literary” rather liberally, as they discussed a wide range of topics at their meetings, from essays and poetry to interior decorating and famous women. Kristine remembered that the club held a social every summer. The women clearly bonded through the years. In 1953, when Florence died, the En Avant ladies served as flower girls at her funeral.

Zion Easter Pageant
Florence also continued her acting. In the spring of 1940, for instance, she played the part of Mary Magdalene in the Zion Easter Pageant. For several years, from 1937 through 1941, the colleges and communities of Southern Utah, in cooperation with the National Park Service, presented an Easter pageant in Zion National Park on Easter Sunday.  It was a huge production, with a cast of 600 and an audience of over 10,000. Grant Redford of the BAC wrote the pageant script, and the actors presented the play on the mountainside east of the road going out of the park towards Springdale. The pageant began about sunset so that the final scenes would play out after dark in the light of huge floodlights. The climactic resurrection scene occurred on Zion’s Resurrection Rock.

Later in 1940, Elwood and Florence joined the cast and crew of another significant dramatic performance, a pioneer play titled “In the Tide of the Empire.” This time, Florence worked on costumes while Elwood took the stage as George A. Smith. This play, also written by Grant Redford, took to the road for several performances around the state.

Saying “good-bye” to Father

After his temple mission, Florence’s father returned to his home in Parowan for a time. His granddaughter, Trudy Adams Jones, remembers visiting him in the afternoons after school when she was a young girl. Her generation never knew their grandfather as the huge man who could toss a 40-gallon barrel filled with water onto the top of a wagon. Instead, they knew an old man with gnarled hands and crippled legs who walked with a cane. He used to like to say, “My name is Mahonri Moriancumer dig-a-hole-in-the-ground Decker.” And he sang. Always, he sang.

By the early 1940s, Mahonri’s children felt he should no longer live on his own. For a time, shortly  after their marriage, he lived with his son Woodrow and Woodrow’s wife Vera in their small house in Cedar City. Mahonri lived his religion strictly and had no tolerance for people he perceived as stepping over the line of righteousness. One afternoon, after he and Vera argued about religion, Mahonri parked himself on the front porch and refused to step foot inside the house. Woodrow took him down to Florence’s house to stay, and when he returned a few weeks later to check in on his father, he found that Florence had moved Mahonri across the street into an apartment. “Even that angel Florence had had enough,” Woodrow explained.

For the next couple of years, Mahonri lived across the street from Florence. She washed his laundry and cooked him dinner, but he rarely ate with the family, either preferring his solitude or not wishing to intrude.  Sometimes, 3-year old Judy and Nancy would sweep his floor to earn mints. Kristine remembers that her grandfather would get furious if his paper arrived late, one time taking after the paper boy with his cane. During the summers, he spent time with Virgil and Edith in Manti.

A few weeks before Christmas 1943, Mahonri fell ill. He had suffered from high blood pressure for some time, but his condition worsened significantly as the holidays approached. Florence and Elwood moved him into their home so that Florence could care for her father. They sent Kristine and Judy next door to stay with Elwood’s parents and gave Mahonri Kristine’s little room off the kitchen.  Always a stubborn man, Mahonri proved a difficult patient, refusing to take his medicine just to keep alive. Two days after Christmas, he passed away. He was 75 years old.

Calm before the storm

For Kristine and Judy, the war raging overseas had little impact on daily life for a time. Kristine later described the peace that pervaded her early childhood:

“When I was around three,” she said, “I recall waking up one morning in the baby bed that it seemed each of us did our time in until about age three or four. There was a sort of half light in the room, and I remember Mother standing by my bed with this kind of light in her eyes that she used to get. Dad was behind her. I still remember the good, warm, happy, safe feeling I had as they both smiled at me….That warm feeling is the thing that stands out most in my early memories.”

Florence with Steven, Judy and Kristine
In July 1942, a new baby came to interrupt the quiet of the house, if not the peace.  On July 12, Florence gave birth to her first son, Steven, in the hospital just half a block from the family’s home. The girls could not go inside the hospital, both because of their age and because three-year old Judy was recovering from a case of the red measles. However, Florence wanted the children to be part of this event, so Elwood and the girls stood outside while Florence held the baby up in the window for them to see.

The spring after Steven’s birth, Elwood was released from the Cedar 2nd Ward bishopric after serving as a counselor to three bishops over a period of nearly 10 years. About that same time, he was elected president of the Cedar City Junior Chamber of Commerce.

With their family growing and their finances improving, Elwood and Florence finally found themselves in a position to think about buying a house. In the fall of 1943, an opportunity presented itself for them to do just that. Elwood’s mother and her sister, Irene Andrus, together owned the family home at 246 South 300 West (next door to Elwood’s parents). Florence and Elwood had been living in the basement apartment of this home for some time. Hoping to buy property in Salt Lake City, Irene sold her half of the house to Elwood for $3,000.  For several years, they lived in the basement and rented out the upstairs apartment, first to the Smith family and then to the Howards.

In November 1943, the Cedar Stake presidency, under the direction of President David Sargent, called a special meeting and asked Florence to attend. During this meeting, they organized a stake committee to encourage the young ladies of the stake to maintain good Latter-Day-Saint standards and to provide entertainment for them. By this time, most of the young men in Cedar City had been drafted into the military. In their place, the 316th Corps of Army Air Cadets had been stationed in Cedar City, training at the BAC and the local airport. These young men came from all walks of life and brought rather different standards than those of the young LDS men they replaced. Sensing a growing need to support their young women in clean living, the church leadership organized a Girls’ Coordinating Council.  Florence was called as the committee chairwoman and served in that capacity for the next four years. She worked closely with her assistants–Bee Roberts, Elva Tueller, and Elene Jensen–along with Ione Bradshoaw, Abbie Riddle, and Morris Buhanan.

Another call to serve

The winding up scenes of 1943 brought a whirlwind of unexpected activity to Florence and Elwood and their family. First came the move into the new home, then Florence’s new calling. She had hardly had time to contemplate the enormity of the task ahead of her with the Girls’ Coordinating Council before her father became ill. Before long, it became clear that he would not live long. As Christmas approached, the extended Decker family came to pay their last respects to Mahonri.

The day before Mahonri died, Elwood unexpectedly received notice that he was being drafted into the army. Unwilling to add to Florence’s stress, he carried the letter around in his pocket for a few days, waiting for an opportune time to break the news. One evening, as the Decker family gathered in Florence’s living room, someone remarked, “Well, it is surely a good thing that Elwood is not being called into the army now with things as they are.” Elwood kept quiet then, but the next day he broke the news to Florence that he had been drafted. She was understandably quite upset.

Florence, Kristine, Steven, Judy, Elwood
Days later, they buried Mahonri. At the same time, Florence and Elwood began planning for his army service.  Elwood was to report for initial induction on January 10. Florence would take over the fire and auto insurance business.  A family photo taken just before Elwood left shows Kristine (age 8), Judy (age 5) and Steven (age 2).

1 comment:

  1. Their lives are such a contrast to what I have come to expect in my own.

    ReplyDelete