My grandparents Heber & Effie Murdock’s Taken from Memories of the Farm Heber, Utah 1916-1930 Uncle Mort Murdock tells this story:
“I knew Mother threw the dishes out in the yard, she was mad over something. She was probably as mad as when Dad kicked the door off the stove. Well you know Dad’s father, John Heber Murdock, he always could put everything back together with bailing wire, gosh dang he used more bailing wire than the bailer’s on the bailing machines. One day this old stove my Grandfather must have got it out of the trash pile, anyway it was an old stove an old busted down thing and the grate would fall down inside of it and one day the grate fell down and Mother was baking bread and the grate fell down and that knocked the oven down and the oven fell and my father was there trying to get the grate up to the oven and the door fell down, burning himself, he kicked the oven door off and my mother picked it up and threw it out in the middle of the yard. “Well” she said “OK there you go” and Grandfather Murdock came along and said “don’t worry Effie, I can fix that, I can wire it back on and it will work just as good as it ever did.” And Mother said “you’re not gonna wire nothing on”, and that was the first time my mother took a stand against Grandfather Murdock, but she took a full stand on that one. She said “I’m gonna get another stove” and he said “there’s a war going on (WWI) and you can’t get one.” But she got one anyway. She got this nice stove and boy were we proud of that stove and so was she. I’ll tell you some nice meals came off that stove, awful good meals, my father he planted these potatoes and she’d get them while they were still young and scrub the skins off and cook them with peas and boy were they good. And she could bake the best scones you ever ate in your life, and her sour cream cakes all decorated with whipped cream and coconut, cookies and parkerhouse rolls, boy was she a good cook, and bread, when I come home from school there would always be bread, jam and milk, always something to eat.”
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