My father, Earl Wallace Chapman, was born on February 1, 1931 in Richfield, Utah, and grew up primarily in Lehi and Price, Utah, before graduating from high school in Blackfoot, Idaho. After high school, my father was a Mormon missionary in Wisconsin and Minnesota prior to being drafted and sent to Korea. After his missionary and military service, Earl attended Brigham Young University where he studied business. After graduating from BYU he attended the University of Utah, where he earned an MBA. Despite his family being firmly rooted in the Mormon country of the American West, Earl dreamed of moving back to Wall Street, but, in his words, Wall Street wasn’t interested in him and he ended up taking a job at the Salt Lake County Water Conservancy District, a job he kept until he retired in 1993.

My mother, Barbara “Bobbie” Jane Cook, was born July 3, 1937, in Ogden, Utah, and grew up in Willard, Utah, the community where all her ancestors had lived since settling in Utah. After graduating from Box Elder High School, Barbara attended BYU, and then taught school for three years before she married Earl on June 15, 1962.

After my older brother John was born in 1963, my parents settled in a newly created subdivision named Paradise Park in an unincorporated part of Salt Lake County east of Murray. Except for a few of the older farm bungalows that pre-dated the Paradise Park development, all the houses were of three types: a small, flat-roofed ranch, a split-level, flat-roofed house, and a split-level house with a sloping roof. Of these the small ranch was the dominant design. These ranch houses were virtually identical, differing only in brick color and minor details of interior layout. Eventually the flat roofs were deemed to be insufficient and the home owners built up shingled, sloped roofs, adding an element of variety in both the shingle color and the number of gables, for example. I didn’t really think much about how all our homes were alike. If anything, the commonness of our homes reinforced to me that I was part of a collective group.

Lined up with the world like a little piece of iron mapping out a magnetic field, my house dutifully lay north-south along a road oriented to the city grid laid out by the pioneer Orson Pratt 121 years before I was born. There was no ambiguity about where I was: 5145 South 1000 East, the grid using the southwest corner of Temple Square as the origin of the coordinate system. Looking out my kitchen window I knew I was facing east, and if I was awake I could sit in my kitchen and watch in awe as the pinks and salmons in the violet sky above fled as the fiery gold of sun climbed above Mount Olympus.

In the interior of our home, my parents opted for plainness and simplicity, at least relative to our neighbors. Except for a display of decorative figurines my mother purchased in Europe as a college student, and a few pieces of “furniture store” art, the walls were free of decoration. Though simple in decor the house was blessed with many windows and looking out through these windows are some of my fondest childhood memories. From our large kitchen window I scanned the details of the Wasatch Mountains. While the neighborhood was young with flat roofs and short trees I could see from Mount Aire on the north to Lone Peak to the south. My favorite mountain was Mount Olympus whose twin peaks were due east from my kitchen window. My imagination vividly morphed the trees and rocks of the mountain into creatures and objects I read about: a viking dressed with a battle helmet and fur cape scaled the north peak; a Ute indian in a feathered warbonnet swooped south on his galloping horse; a flying carpet flapped in the wind; trains and covered wagons traversed the mountain ridge. The living room window looking west brought a broader, less detailed view. The Oquirrh Mountains that formed the western boundary of the Great Salt Lake Valley were featureless at this distance. Between the Oquirrhs and me only the two Murray smokestacks, one twice as tall as the other, caught my eyes. At night, however, the western view became more intriguing. I would watch the blinking lights from TV towers planted on the Oquirrh peaks, or track the airplanes as they descended to the Salt Lake airport. Looking west at night I would map out the sky, using scratch paper and pencils to map out the movement of the moon and planets among the few stars that penetrated the city lights and smog.

Just as Orson Pratt’s grid eliminated spatial ambiguity from my life, clocks, calendars, and theology eliminated all temporal ambiguity. A dark wood clock sat on the living room mantle piece ticking off the minutes and chiming out the hours, as long as my dad remembered to wind the mechanism with the key carefully placed to the side of the clock. Granite Furniture calendars of LDS temples hung in our kitchen and a green felt advent calendar marked off the march to Christmas every December. My church’s name—Latter-day Saints—and its continual messages regarding the “fullness of times” and the imminent Second Coming of Jesus Christ told me not only my local time, but my historical time.

By the Spring of 1976 my immediate family was fixed. I was the middle of five children: John (born 1963), Jane (1964), myself, Christine (1970), and David (1975). John and Jane were my childhood siblings. Christine, who had physical and other challenges, is nearly absent from my early memories, as is David.

My maternal grandfather had died on Christmas Day 1973 from multiple myeloma, four days shy of his 68th birthday. My other grandparents were all alive and healthy: Marion Nebeker Cook (aged 72), Ione Athens Gilchrist Chapman (aged 80), and John Davis Chapman (aged 83). (A more comprehensive genealogy can be seen here.)

We were a suburban family whose hearts didn’t look to the city at all. Whenever possible, we headed to the mountains: a picnic up Big Cottonwood or Mill Creek Canyons, fall camping trips to the Uintah Mountains, or family camp outs in Willard Canyon. For more exotic trips we went to southern Utah to Dead Horse Point, Arches National Park, or excursions to Snow Canyon where an old Hollywood movie set could still be seen. But the emotional heart of my childhood was not the mountains but the Cook farm in Willard. The aliveness of the farm, with its inexhaustible supply of fresh fruits for the picking—apples, raspberries, apricots, peaches, cherries—and expansive fields of wheat, overwhelmed any associations I may have made between the farm and my grandfather’s death.

I loved going to the farm—sleeping in the old pioneer house, exploring the barns, sheds, root cellars, orchards and pastures, feeding the horses, climbing the fruit trees, playing on the teeter-totters, hay stacks, and enjoying the vast, sunny, open space. Everything on the farm seemed the antithesis of my home: old, textured, spacious.

The oddest feature of the farm house were two black phones side by side in the dining room: one phone for a Brigham City line and another phone for an Ogden line. Geographically, the farm was in South Willard, while closer to Brigham City sat in a stretch of no-man’s land between Brigham City and the larger city of Ogden. Apparently having two local phone lines was cheaper than paying for long distance phone calls to the other town.

The farmhouse also straddled the present and the past, at least far more than my house. Built in the 1870s, the house had been modified to accommodate electricity, indoor plumbing, and heating—as was common, they never bothered with cooling systems. I could watch the color television in the living room and then walk over to the dining room and imagine polygamists hiding in the attic accessed from the small closet next to the curved-glass china cabinet. In the kitchen I listened to the same radio station my mother listened to in her Salt Lake kitchen, and then I would study the sepia photographs of stern-faced ancestors as I ascended the dangerously steep stairs to my mother’s second-floor bedroom.

The visits to the farm, however, were primarily about my grandmother. After my grandfather’s death, in the summers I would go spend a week alone with her, sleeping in her bed, marveling at the appliances and furniture that stretched back into what seemed the ancient past: a combination electric and coal-burning stove, a claw foot bath tub, a wringer washing machine. At her kitchen table we would play Chinese checkers or share peanut butter and jam sandwiches, the jam handmade by her from the raspberries, black caps, or apricots growing in her yard. We would walk down to see the horses as she told me stories about my mother as a child: her fear of mice, her dislike of cats, but mostly about her brilliance in school.

Economics

Surprisingly, my mother remembers few details about their income. In 1962 when they were married, she believes my father earned around $6000/year ($51000 July 2020). His income rose slowly until the mid 1980s when an office scandal promoted him to assistant office manager.

  • $500/month @ marriage
  • $550/month shortly
  • 1970/71
  • Retired at 1995 ~$65000

Social Status

  • Bishop