Bonus Story of the Week for Halloween

I've been thinking the last week trying to remember my best scary story for Halloween. I've got a few but last night I got thinking about what truly is my scariest memory. I thought about all of the movies I have seen in my life trying to think of what movie was the scariest, what experience in my life scared me the most, when was I the most terrified. Here's a list of scary movies that were scary, (not slasher because I hate slasher movies. I have never seen any of the Friday the 13th, Halloween or Nightmare on Elm Street Movies): My favorite scary movies are: The House on Haunted Hill, The Haunting of Hill House, The Crawling Eye, The old Wolfman, Mummy, Frankenstein, and Dracula movies, Poltergeist, The Ring terrified me. but the scariest of all, hands down is the Killing Fields. Not a horror move you say, what could be more horrifying than genocide and senseless brutal war. This movie scares me most because it really happened, and it continues to happen all over the world.

So what is my scariest experience? I would have to say and just like my scariest movie it has nothing to do with the supernatural but with something that most if not all of us have had to deal with at sometime in our life, neighborhood terrorists Bullies. 

Bullies intimidate, they scare, they take away your dignity, they are incredible cowards always picking on someone they know is weaker than they are and they surround themselves with bully friends that terrorize neighborhoods and school yards.Why are they so scary? Because of bullies people especially kids can be afraid to go to school or to go out and play, they can make you afraid to do the most basic things in life. I hate bullies I always have. There is a quote that "no one can make you feel anything everything is a choice". Maybe that person never had to deal with a bully.

When I was 8 years old I joined little league baseball, one evening after practice I was riding my bike home when a kid a couple of years older than me who all of us in the neighborhood were terrified of came after me with a paddle-ball paddle and started hitting me with it, then he pushed me off my bike and smacked me around with the paddle until he had his fill then left me there laying in the street bawling my head off. I got back on my bike and rode home. My dad was working in the yard when I rode up and saw I was upset and asked what happened. When I told him, I had never seen him get so angry, he put me in the car and we drove down to the kid's house. I stayed in the car but I watched him knock on the door, when the kid's mom answered he told her he wanted to see the kid, she of course wouldn't let him. I couldn't hear all that he said but whatever it was he must have made a believer out of her and the kid because he never gave me any trouble after that although I was always in fear of retaliation and I was still scared to death of him.

That was my first experience with a bully but not the last. I have had to deal with a few in my life and hated every minute of it. Bullies come in all types the worst these days are gang members and kids still have to put up with these poor excuses for human beings. Experts will say that bullies are the way they are because they lack self esteem, well boohoo we all have some sort of self esteem or self confidence issues at some time in our lives but most of us don't deal with it at the expense of others.

There is no excuse.

Story of the Week #8 Innocence of Children

For the next few weeks I will be writing random memories of what I remember of our life in Woods Cross. We lived in Woods Cross until I was 9 years old.

I never understood adults as a child and as an adult I don't understand them any better.

Adults teach children that there are some things that are bad for kids but as adults they must be ok. Kids are taught that smoking and drinking alcohol are bad but adults do it. Some movies are "Adult Movies" and are not for kids. Kids are taught to get along with other kids but adults complain about their friends and coworkers and bad mouth each other, Kids get in trouble for swearing but hear their parents spew profanity every time they get mad about something. I think we need to be more like we were taught as kids and less like the adults we sometimes become.

A I said adults are constantly instructing children right from wrong and smoking and drinking are not only wrong but evil and people who used them were in our minds committing evil acts, and therefore could not go to heaven. It was impressed upon our minds from my earliest memory that not only are these things bad for you but using them is a sin. I remember seeing people smoke and thinking that they were bad people because they were sinning. I don't ever remember seeing anyone drink.

A block from our house there lived an old lady that had a Boston Terrier. We were always afraid of this old lady because we only saw her occasionally, when we did she was usually smoking, she never came to church which living is a small Utah town is where you met most people that were not your next door neighbor. She always seemed mad because when she talked it was always loud and in a raspy voice.

I remember walking home from kindergarten one day, I don't remember anyone walking with me and the old lady called to me from her door and asked me to do her a favor. I walked over and she handed me a piece of paper and a dollar and asked me if I would take the dollar to the Irve's, the little town store across the street and buy her what she had listed on the paper. Then she handed me a dime and said this is for you to buy some candy.

I took the money and the note over to the store and handed it to Terry, Irve's son who ran the store with him. Terry reached behind him on the self and grabbed a pack of cigarettes and gave them to me. I almost died, I had never touched a cigarette, we had a few neighbors that smoked but none in the presence of kids. I was shocked and embarrassed and exclaimed to Terry "Oh these are not for me". He said he knew and that she always asks kids walking by her house to come over to the store and buy her cigarettes. I took them and walked back across the street and handed them to her, very glad to be rid of them. I was a little confused, even though she smoked and we were a little scared of her, she was nice to me, even though she smoked she wasn't a bad person. She never asked me to go to the store again for her but I do remember walking by her house no longer afraid of her and petting her little Boston terrier when ever they were out and saying hi to her from then on.

I don't remember what I did with the dime.

The Boogey Man

My Parents often went out on Saturday nights and left us with a baby sitter. I always looked forward to Saturdays when they would go out because it meant we would eat TV Dinners and usually get to stay up late. Back then TV Dinners were a treat, I remember mom putting them in the oven and the smell of chicken or turkey or Salisbury steak while the frozen dinners heated up. No microwaves in those days, it took a good 30 to 45 minutes to heat up a TV Dinner in the oven. We had some favorite baby sitters, there were Vaughn and Keith Behunin who always brought their box of plastic dinosaurs for us to play with. Then there were the two Hackee sisters, one was real nice and pretty the other was a tomboy and sometimes got irritated with us. We liked the pretty one best.

One Saturday evening my parents left and the pretty Hackee sister, I don't remember her name, was our baby sitter. All was well and we were enjoying staying up and watching TV. But eventually it got late and she sent us to bed. A few minutes after we went to bed the telephone rang and she answered it. I remember her getting excited and saying in a load voice who is this? then she hung up. A minute later the phone rang again and again she got very upset and hung up the phone. Then she came into our bedroom crying and carrying my moms biggest knife. We asked her what was wrong, she said there was some scary man calling. We asked her what he said. She said the first call he asked if this was Stevie or Kenny and he talked with a real raspy voice. Then what did he say we asked? Just then the phone rang again, this time she refused to answer it and she started crying even harder. I remember her holding the knife ready to defend us against this boogey man that she was sure was coming to get us. Again the phone rang by now she was beside herself, sure that any minute this strange man would come bursting in and kill us all. I guess I should mention that in our neighborhood recently there had been a strange man sighted walking around late at night and a couple of women who lived alone and one whose husband was a truck driver and was gone much of the time (who lived right next door to us) had found footprints in the flower beds under their bedroom windows, this fact I'm sure added to our babysitter's terror.

Fortunately within a few minutes my parents got home and found us huddled in our bedroom with this near hysterical baby sitter. Between her sobs she explained what had happened. While she was telling my parents who were becoming quite concerned themselves, the phone rang again. My dad answered it and started laughing, he said "well you sure scared the babysitter".

Had the babysitter just given the phone to me or Ken she would have known that there was nothing to be scared of, it was my grandpa. Grandpa Coleman did have a gravely voice and he always liked to tease us. The first phone call he made he thought it was either Ken or I that answered so he said something, I don't remember what, one of us would have recognized it was him, but it scared the babysitter near to death. All of the subsequent phone calls were him calling back to try and calm her down, but she was already too upset and just hung up on him each time and then stopped answering. He became concerned, he didn't want her to be upset but there was nothing he could do over the phone to get her to understand he was not the boogey man, but the more he called to try and calm her down the more upset she got.

I don't remember her ever babysitting us again after that night.

A Nightmare to Remember

Every Friday night when I was a kid, channel 4 played Nightmare Theater. The best and scariest part was the introduction where the scariest voice you ever heard introduced It's niiiightmaaaar. we later found out that the voice of nightmare theater was that of
Fireman Frank the host of the daily kids TV show.
We watched several different versions of Frankenstein, the Wolf man, The Mummy the Phantom of the Opera, Dracula and other vampire movies, The Crawling Eye, 13 Ghosts and others but the scariest of all for me was House On Haunted Hill. I saw it when I was 6 yeas old in the first grade. I thought I was tuff, I had seen so many of these horror movies and had no problems, but this one scared me half to death. In fact I couldn't sleep for several nights and it made me sick. It scared me so bad that my parents wouldn't let me watch Nightmare for several weeks.

There were so many things about House On Haunted Hill that got to me. I have posted pictures from the movie that were the scenes that scared me the most minus on the scene where Vincent Prices Dead Wife was floating outside the window of the young woman's room holding a rope that came through the bars on the window and coiled around her ankles then backed off and went away. Vincent Price was so sinister in this movie every time he was on screen it scared me. There was the vat of acid in the wine cellar that they showed several times and we all knew something bad was going to happen there. There was the dripping blood from the ceiling that always dripped on the older lady's hand, there was the severed head, but the scene that almost did me in was when Lance and the young girl were in the cellar he in one room and she in the other and the creepy old woman appeared above the young girl and floated out of the room.

That movie like most of the old horror movies of the 40's and 50's played over and over on Nightmare Theater but I never watched it again until I was grown and had kids of my own. I now own a DVD copy of it and pull it out every year around Halloween and watch it. In fact when I first got it I played it for my kids and my nephews. Of course to them it was kind of lame, after all it was black and white and after all the new movies and special affects they have seen, it just wasn't that scary to them. A few years ago they made a remake of it that someone let me borrow, I only watched about 15 minutes of it and turned it off disgusted. The new movie was all about how vulgar they could talk and how much sex they could throw in. The old movie has class and style and is one of the best horror movies ever made the new one was a disgrace.

So after all these years I have gotten over how scared I was and would have to say that House on Haunted Hill is my favorite horror movie and my close second is Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.

A Photo Shoot in the Rain

1st Girl Friend

The year before I started Kindergarten my parents put me in a pre-school called Kiddie College. We lived in Woods Cross and Kiddie College was in Centerville. A very nice lady, Mrs. Liffreth picked me up along with several other kids and drove us to Kiddie College. I don't remember a whole lot about it other than it was fun and that I met my very first girl friend, Mrs. Liffreth's daughter Carla.

I lived the furthest from the pre-school so each day on the ride to and from pre-school Carla and I got to play in the back of their station wagon. We became good friends for the few months we were in Kiddie College. Then we went to elementary school Carla at JA Taylor in Centerville and me at South Davis Elementary in Woods Cross and we didn't see each other again for 4 years.

When I was in the third grade my parents built a home in Centerville and we transferred from South Davis Elementary to JA Taylor. By this time I had all but forgotten about Carla until during a fire drill a few days after moving to JA Taylor, I saw her on the playground. Excited to see her again I went over and started talking to her thinking we would still be good friends, but she wouldn't even look at me, in fact she ignored me like I wasn't there. I was so confused, what had happened? We had been such good friends and now she wanted nothing to to with me. I hadn't done anything to make her mad, how could I? We hadn't seen each other for over 4 years. I didn't understand why we were no longer friends but go over it fast, by that time I didn't care about playing with girls anyway. I had plenty of friends and plenty of other things to think about than a girl that was once my friend and for no reason that I could understand now acted like she hated me. Oh well I got over it quickly, in fact I have no further recollection of ever seeing her again after that day, since we were not in the same class and I think soon after that her family moved to Bountiful.

The Curiosity of Children

This story may be controversial and I have debated the last two weeks whether I would tell it or not because it is a story that was never mentioned since the day it happened. But I have committed to tell all the stories I can recall whether humorous, serious or lessons learned, even the first time I remember really getting in trouble even worse than the "Chicken Thieving" story.

What made me think of it was a seminar I went to last week called "Think Like Da Vinci, Innovate Like Edison. One of the things the presenter expounded on was the importance of curiosity and how all the great people like Da Vinci and Edison were curious and that as little children we were curious about everything but somehow when we get older we loose some of that curiosity and that we should all keep the curiosity alive. But there are some things where curiosity must be controlled by our internal knowledge of right and wrong our conscience.

Well here is the story I was very young and this is not a story that has been retold at all so it is completely from my recollection as a 4 or 5 year old. It made an impression because we (my brother Ken and I) got in a lot of trouble as well as the other kids in our neighborhood.

Several kids in our neighborhood ages 4 and 5 years old, boys and girls were playing in the back yard of a vacant house. I don't remember what we were playing or how it got started but one of the kids pulled their pants down. Now Ken and I had no sisters at this time and it was the first time for me at least that I realized/found out that boys and girls were different. Before long we all had our pants down comparing each other. Pretty soon we heard mothers calling, so we all pulled our pants up and ran to our respective homes. It seems the lady who lived next door to the vacant house happened to hear us and looked out her window and saw what we were doing and called all our mothers and reported the scandalous goings on.

Upon arriving home we all got spankings and scoldings like we had never before experienced. I guess we felt a bit naughty doing what we were doing but none of us had any idea it was as bad as it was. None of us as far as I know ever did it again even though I don't think any of us understood why what we had done was so terrible. In those days such things just were not discussed. I'm afraid in today's world even 4 and 5 year olds would not be so innocent as we were.

At Lola's House I Can Be

A Swinger












A Swimmer











A Ball Player














A Cowboy















A Biker







I Love My Lola

Shingling Miracle

When ye are in the service of your fellow man ye are only in the service of your God.

Last Week Nery and I were the recipients of great service and love from our family, friends and neighbors. It was truly a miracle to watch our family and neighbors come over and help us get our house re shingled. Nery and I are grateful to all those who showed their kindness and love by helping us get our roof done. Here are some pictures of the project.