GOLDEN S. ANDERSON, 1914-1993

I'm always stealing writings from my siblings.  But don't they say that "copying is the best form of flattery?"   Actually, I know that the saying is "imitation is the best form of flattery."   But why imitate when I can just copy?    

Which is what I've done with this biographical sketch that my brother, Richard, wrote for one of our Hall reunions.   Dad would be 99 years old today.   

As Richard wrote at the end of this sketch, Dad did consider himself a fortunate man.  And I, and my siblings, have always considered ourselves fortunate to have him as our father (and still do).                                            

Biographical Sketch

Golden was born in Provo, Utah, in 1914, the last of nine children. At the time, his father was a fruit farmer with orchards on the Provo Bench (now Orem).  As ill-fate would have it, the bottom fell out of the peach market around the time of Golden’s birth and his family lost everything.  As a result, a year later, following a two-hundred mile, nine-day wagon trip, trailing two horses and a cow, infant Golden and family found themselves homesteading a 160 acre piece of undeveloped land in southwest Wyoming, living through a cold winter in a tent while the father and older brothers literally built log walls and a roof around it.  The log house where Golden spent his boyhood still stands in the small community, composed of a dozen or so other homesteading Mormon families, later to be called McKinnon, Wyoming.  Much later in life, Golden, Charlet, and some of their children, would periodically make a journey to McKinnon to visit acquaintances who still remained, see the old log house in the hills, and pay a visit to the grave of Golden’s mother in the small cemetery there.

Living on that ranch in McKinnon until he was sixteen, Golden was obviously no stranger to hard work in his youth.  Nor to isolation.  All but one of his siblings were considerably older than Golden (and would, furthermore, hightail it out of Mckinnon as soon as possible).  And the nearest neighbors were a mile away.  So opportunities for childhood play and to be with children of his age were provided mainly by the schooling available there (five boys and one girl in his class) and Sunday church services, both held in private homes until a small schoolhouse, eventually built, served both purposes. 

When in 1930 his mother contracted pneumonia and died, only two members of the large family remained at home, Golden, age 15, and his father.  Each, in personal writings, speaks of the other’s great difficulty with the loss of wife and mother.  Golden speaks of his father’s great love for his wife and his heartbreak.  His father speaks of Golden’s heartbreak and loneliness.

His children hate to imagine what pain the loss of his mother meant to Golden and how difficult that following year must have been before he left Mckinnon at age sixteen to live with his oldest brother, Thomas Levar,  and family, first in Ogden, Utah, then in Salt Lake City, where he completed the 11^th grade at West High School and worked part time for Western Union, delivering telegrams around the city on a bike.

Golden then returned to McKinnon for two years to help his father on the ranch, a rough couple of years, for sure.  In 1933, Golden joined the Civilian Conservation Corps., a grand pet project of recently-elected FDR to help deal with the large and growing tide of depression-time unemployment among young American men.  In his stint with the CCC, Golden lived in a camp of army tents on the shore of Jackson Lake, helping clear timber for a new road, and, on the side, got his feet wet in amateur boxing.

Later that year, Golden once again went to live with his oldest brother and family, who by then had moved from Salt Lake City to Springville.  He had two main objectives for his stay in Springville: one, to finish high school, and two, to continue making a living for himself.  He would meet both objectives by working when he could find it, and attending high school when he couldn’t.  One vacation from school was a job with the pipe mill in Springville, and another was part of a winter in Boulder City, Nevada, where Hoover Dam was under construction. 

When he was not on a full-time job, he would attend Springville High School.  And here, of course, begins the story of the rest of his life.  Enter...the Hall family, E. Owen, Pearl, and the five famous (infamous?) HALL SISTERS.  In particular, in his case, the middle one.  No wonder he was intoxicated by her.  What a different world she represented from his.  What different backgrounds.  He was dashing, to be sure, older and devilishly handsome.  But who was this young woman in his class, this Charlet Hall? Spirted, smart as a whip, mischievous, fun-loving and from a background of normal, healthy family life, giggly, privileged, apparently well-to-do in depression-time America, big house on the hill with a front-porch swing.  No wonder he fell flat-face for her, with a devotion that lasted the rest of his life.

Their courtship went on a couple of years, on again, off again, Golden back to McKinnon for a while, working here and there, finishing high school classes; Charlet to Salt Lake for a while, attending LDS Business College.  Golden found a job on the railroad in Green River, Wyoming, but it didn't last, and missing Charlet, he returned to Springville.  Intent on marriage, the big event took place in early 1937. Charlet’s father, Dad Hall, Superintendent of Transportation at Ironton, provided a recommendation for Golden that landed him a job at the steel plant in Pittsburg, California, to which he at first hitch-hiked, Charlet following later by more customary means.  Later that year, however, Golden was called back up for his previous railroad job, and wanting to be closer to home, he accepted the offer and they moved back to Green River, Wyoming, where they lived for the next six years, and where Gary and Richard were born.

Preferring, however, to raise a family in Utah valley (and so Charlet could be closer to her parents and sisters), when the defense department built a steel plant there to assist the war effort, they gladly relocated to Provo, where Golden worked in the railroad transportation department of the new plant as linesman, switchmen, and conductor, until, a year later, the war ended and the plant closed.  Golden was unemployed once again, and for a year scratched out a living on part-time jobs and borrowed money.  Hard financial times ended for the rest of Golden and Charlet’s life, however, when US Steel Co. bought the new but abandoned steel plant, now named Geneva, and, because of his considerable experience with the railroad, hired Golden as a foreman, a yardmaster, for the transportation operation of the plant, a position Golden retired from some thirty years later.                                                                                                                                              

A few of Golden’s chief hobbies, interests, and personality traits

Golden had a strong creative tendency and an eye for beauty.  An early expression of these tendencies, remembered only by his older children, was a hobby he pursued for a short while of painting small china dolls.  These were figurines of women, eight to twelve inches tall or so, usually in elegant gowns and accessories.  He would buy them at craft shops in raw, white china, paint and then shellac them into beautiful finished products.  We remember the tiniest of brushes and the many tubes and bottles of colored paint for skin, lips, eyes, lashes, gowns, hats, sashes, gloves, shoes.  Whatever happened to those beautiful creations, I would like to know?

   China dolls laid aside, his creative drive never was. 

M r.  Prothero, as he was known to us, Uncle Walt's father who lived upstairs in the Prothero’s home on 4^th West in Provo, had a rather full woodworkers shop set up in their garage, all the different saws, drills, sanders, and lathes a serious woodworker would want.  Golden was welcomed by the Protheros into the shop, where, besides getting to know Mr. Prothero rather well, he learned all the intricate skills needed to become a skilled craftsman of wood furniture.  Later, following Mr. Prothero’s death, his family generously granted Golden possession of a good number of the machines and tools he had learned to use in their shop, which he then set up in a basement room of our house on Cedar Ave. as the foundation of his own shop.  Fully for half his life, Golden found gratifying and creative use of spare time in his shop, designing, then building and finely finishing beautiful furniture for our home, and later, when the kids left home, for theirs.  All of his children now have in our own homes cherished pieces of woodwork: dressers, china closets, hutches, desks.                       

Late in his life, he discovered oil painting.  He spent endless creative hours in retirement painting, then repainting lovely landscapes.  It was as if Golden would be unsettled, restless, unless he was engaged in some kind of artistic creation or another. 

 Related to his artistic temperament, I’m sure, is the fact that Golden was a genuine Romantic.  A romantic sees things through rose-colored lenses, sees beauty in people and things where others might not, is an idealist, seeing and wishing things as they should be, not as they often are.  Romantics favor mercy over justice.  Golden was once promoted to General Yardmaster over transportation at Geneva, a position involving a raise in pay as well as greater authority, but he stepped back down to shift yardmaster when he realized it also involved firing workers whose performance was sub-par, something that went strongly against his democratic, romantic disposition.  Charlet, much more a realist, who, in respect to romanticism,  in fact, very much Golden’s counterpoint and balancing force, was particularly and often at odds with him for his Madonna perception of the fairer sex, his unflagging idealization of women.  Her face would often turn crimson when she spoke of his gullibility toward them.

The relative solitude Golden grew accustomed to as a boy in Wyoming remained a primary part of his life and personality.  Although he genuinely liked and trusted people, he never much cared for socializing.  He was very much a homebody, preferring small gatherings of family to large social affairs.  His hobbies, his creative endeavors, too, were not social, but solitary ones.  Perhaps all those still, quiet nights above the prairie of his boyhood home infused him with a lifelong enjoyment and love of it.

One final word about Golden’s personality.  He was a gentleman in the true meaning of the word.  He was a gentle man.  His movements were gentle, graceful.  His mannerisms were gentle.  His voice and speech were gentle.  His thoughts were gentle.  There was simply nothing abrasive about this man. 

Golden always considered himself a fortunate man.