Grandma Adele's Eulogy Part II

Kiddos-

Remember that your dad gave this talk about his mother at her funeral. Many of the experiences are ones he had with his mother firsthand and many of them are stories he was told by her and by others. Everytime I read it I feel like I know her a little bit better than the last time. I hope you have the same experience.

In your dad's words...

While in school, she was a good student, but Geometry was not her best subject. When she was at Las Vegas High School, Geometry I think was the last class of the day for her and on the day when she was getting her grades she knew that she probably wasn’t going to get a very good grade in Geometry but she had the report card that she took with her from class to class throughout the day. By the end of the day, when she shows up in her Geometry class and gives the report card to the teacher, he looked it and it was straight “A”s all the way down. He couldn’t bring himself to ruin a perfect card, so he put an A on there. Straight A's!.

She sang in high school. She was in choirs. She was in the Mixed Choir, the Girl’s Choir, the A Capella choir. In the A Capella choir one day she noticed a particularly handsome young man with these beautiful brown eyes. She thought, “Well, that’s a nice guy. I should get to meet that guy.” And, you know, maybe flirted with him a little bit. One day after church she was sitting in the car and she looked out and she saw this guy walking across the grass and he was in one of the other wards in the building. “Not only does he have those good looking brown eyes, but he is a member of the Church too. I really should get to know that guy.” So, she started dating young Ronnie.

On February 6, 1954, they went to the El Portal and saw Knights of the Round Table. According to Leonard Maltin, it was a pretty but empty mini-spectacle of King Arthur’s courts. He gave it 2-1/2 stars. I don’t know what young Ronnie and Adele were doing in the theater, but when they bought the video years later and watched it, it was not familiar to either one of them.

She loved going to movies. She went to a lot of movies. Looking through the journals, she mentions times when she went to the movies. She used to go with her husband until he became an old fuddy duddy. He decided he was paying for cable and he owned a VCR so there was no reason to pay $7, $8 or $9 to go see a movie. But she had friends that she could go see movies with. She had grandkids she could go see movies with.

She dated this Ronnie guy for a while and they both ended up going to Provo in the fall. While at BYU she took a year of French, which came into play later. After a year at BYU she decided that school wasn’t quite for her. For some of us it took four years at BYU to figure that out. She was a little bit quicker. So, then, she decided to stay home the next year. Christmas of the following year dad decided that it wasn’t that nice being up in Provo when she was down in Las Vegas and so for Christmas he decided to give her a diamond ring. He put it inside a box inside a box inside a box inside a box inside a box inside a box and she was so worn out by the time she opened it she said, “O.K.”

They started planning for a June wedding eighteen months later. I guess it took longer back then to be engaged. They had the wedding date set for June 28, 1957. Someone admitted to me last night that she and a brother or two brothers were responsible for changing the date of that wedding because a couple of her brother Don’s kids that she was babysitting gave her the chicken pox. Probably a lot of you have never seen wedding pictures of Ron and Adele when they got married. I think there might have been one out there. It may have been the first time for a lot of you to see one of their wedding pictures. There are still a couple of little red spots left. They moved the date back a week to July 5 when they went to the St. George temple. They were sealed in the St. George temple for time and all eternity. That was what she wanted – that is what she had been preparing for in her life up to that point – to be sealed in the temple and to raise a family.

She and my dad made correct decisions that they were going to live the gospel. My dad knew what he was getting into when he married her. That she was going to keep him in line. That’s what he wanted. Keeping in line is not quite rocket science, to keep Dad on the straight and narrow path. I was thinking about this last night and I don’t know if I heard this in a lesson somewhere or if I just made it up. I was picturing the two of them as wheels or tires bouncing down a bumpy road and they kind of knock into each other once in a while and maybe go toward the edge. And then, after they got married, it was kind of like an axel between them and it just kept them going straight down. When she told him what he was supposed to be doing, then he did it. When he told her what she was supposed to be doing, then she did it. They kept themselves in line to go straight down the middle of that road. To extend the analogy further, I guess the rest of us in the family would be the car or the trailer or the boat.

She was always very diligent. She listened to the teachings of the modern day prophets as well as the prophets in the Bible and Book of Mormon times. If the prophet said to plant a garden, then she would plant a garden. If the prophet said to do genealogy, she did genealogy. If the prophet said to do missionary work, then she did missionary work. My sister was telling me – she showed me this morning a copy of the Thank You note from somebody that she had given a Book of Mormon to about a year ago. She mentioned that she had given one to her favorite checker over at Lucky [grocery store]. The prophet said to keep a journal and she kept a journal. She started about 1975 keeping a fairly regular journal. At one point she decided that she would stop because it was all just trivial stuff, that no one was ever going to read it. Well, she was wrong. I have been reading her journal the last week or so. I have decided that she has probably been visiting teaching at least 1,000 times, maybe 1,500 or 2,000 times, I was trying to figure it out. I don’t know if she ever missed a time and if she did it wasn’t through her own choice. She would see to it that these women were taken care of.

When she received her Patriarchal Blessing it had the line, “You have a calling to administer to the sisters of this church, to administer unto them the blessings spiritually and temporally and if you will let Him, the Lord will make you a mighty instrument in his hands for doing his work here in mortality.”

When it came to obedience, she kind of expected everyone to be good and she was disappointed when people made wrong choices. She would get upset with me over trivial things in my mind-if I was not keeping the Sabbath day holy or not attending the temple regularly. I would get upset with her for more meaningful things, like when she looked at the answers to the crossword puzzle, or she looked at the back of the book to see if a certain character was going to live or die. One time the mail came and I had about five or six catalogs from Columbia House Records. They all arrived on the same day and they were all addressed to different names, aliases that I was using. She looked at that and said, “I don’t think that’s very honest.” I said, “I’m not defrauding the company. I just happen to have several memberships under different names. I’m paying my bills. I’m paying for the CD’s I get.” She said, “I still don’t think that’s very honest.” There are many experiences in my life where I would have been able to get a small financial gain had I decided not to be honest. But I knew that I was supposed to be honest. My mother had told me I was supposed to be honest.

She went to a conference a couple years ago where the prophet said that women didn’t need more than one hole in each ear, that one set of earrings was enough. So, Mom came home and called Rozanne. Rozanne took out the other earrings. She has worn only one pair at a time since then.

Soon after Mom and Dad got married, she was a typist for Traveler’s Insurance. She didn’t really care for that job. She was offered another job that had better pay, was a better location, it was better work, it was a better environment. Dad thought maybe that would be a good job to take. She said, “I can’t take that job because they said sometimes there might come a time when I would have to work on a Sunday.” Sometimes you might have to work on a Sunday. It didn’t seem like they were going to have to do a lot of Sundays. She said, “Well, I don’t work on the Sabbath. I’m not going to take that job.”

She did a lot of service. She probably spent more time in doctors' offices than doctors do. “I took Evelyn to the doctor today.” “I took Martha to the doctor today.” “I took Margaret to the doctor today.” “I took Richard to the doctor today. He broke his arm.” “He burned his foot.” “He cut the back of his throat with a Lincoln log.” (She wasn’t taking care of me, obviously.)

One time she answered the phone and someone was calling and asked if she would take them to the doctor that day. She said, “Yes, I’ll take you to the doctor today. What time? I’ll come by and pick you up.” She hung up the phone afterwards and she said, “I don’t really want to take her to the doctor today. Does that make me a bad person?” She was intending to take her to the doctor. It was just the thought that she really wasn’t going to enjoy it and wondered if that made her a bad person.

She loves to play games. That is something that she inherited from her father. She and Grandpa were both into games. In the family we have all sorts of games. She would go to wedding showers and baby showers in the ward and after a while people thought that maybe they shouldn’t invite her anymore because she won all the games. But, at home she didn’t win all the games. She won a lot. She liked jigsaw puzzles and crossword puzzles. My dad would copy the Sunday crossword puzzle and make three or four copies for whoever was living in the house at the time so we would all have the crossword puzzle there. When they left on their mission, I finally got to do it on the newsprint myself; I had my own paper.

TO BE CONTINUED AT A LATER DATE. THERE'S STILL MORE TO SHARE!

Your dad mentioned the wedding ring that Grandpa Atchley gave her. Does it look familiar? It should because that very ring, is my wedding ring. It's special to me that I have this beautiful piece of jewelry that I am certain meant so much to her.

When your dad and I were dating and discussing the idea of getting married, his dad approached him and told him that if he wanted it he could have Adele's wedding ring to give to me. He probably didn't say my name directly because your dad doesn't talk about personal things very well so his dad proabably could tell that I meant more to him than the girls he had dated in the past. Maybe the fact that he kept me around for awhile told him something.

Dad was nervous as to whether I would like the ring or not. He told me that it was white gold, I told him that's what I wanted. He told me it was a square setting with a few small diamonds on the side, again I told him that's what I would pick for myself. One day he showed me the ring to make certain I liked it, which I did....it was PERFECT! After I said I love, love, loved it I think he was mad that he had showed me but he wanted me to have a ring I actually liked when he proposed to me. It's fun to share something so special with grandma. When he proposed to me on that mountain, in such the perfect way, with the perfect ring, and the perfect words, I was the happiest I had ever been! Well, that's enough for now but soon I will share the rest of the talk with you as well as some stories that your Aunts have told me.

All my love--

Mommy