Move to Pennsylvania

Lisa’s dad was transferred back to Pennsylvania. This time they lived in Lebanon, Pennsylvania at 532 South Lincoln Ave. There were three homes “stuck together” and a big parking lot. The children loved to play in the parking lot and also on a big dirt hill. The Bills lived in the middle unit with a basement, main floor, and the upstairs floor. It was the basement, especially in the winter time that the children loved to go down and play. It was an unfinished basement with food storage shelves they could play ‘store’ in and they could skate on the concrete floor. Lisa reminisced, “We’d have to use a key - a skate key to get our roller skates on we would tie pillows onto our backside. We would use my mom’s old nylons to tie a big pillow onto our backside so that when we fell down it wouldn't hurt so bad. We had so much fun we had a great time down there, it was me and my three brothers. We had a great time.”

This is also the time that Lisa’s love of reading began. “I would sit down and read, my brothers would be running around and around – I would be sitting on the couch reading. That was kind of the way it was for a lot of my life. I really, really enjoyed reading.”

The next major talent she developed was learning to play the piano. Her mother played beautifully, and Lisa loved to listen to her and sing when she was playing. Her dad would sing and the whole family would sing along when she played. So, her piano lessons began when she was seven years old and though she didn’t like to practice (like any normal kid) she did enjoy playing the piano. 

“My parents both come from strong LDS heritage especially on my dad’s side, pioneer stock and back for many generations, beginning of the church, I have a great-great-grandfather who was a tailor to the prophet Joseph Smith as well as a tailor to the Mormon Battalion, and so church has always been extremely important – just what we do.

When we lived in Lebanon, we had to travel an hour to church. We traveled over to Harrisburg.  They had a branch of the church over there. That was back in the days when they would have church in the morning, and you'd go home and then they would have church in the evening, so we had about four hours of driving time every Sunday. We would get up in the morning and we would go to church, and we go to our Sunday school meetings and our priesthood meetings and then we would go home. Mom would make hamburgers for us because that was just what we had because it was something quick she could do, get the kids down for naps, and then we'd have we hop in the car and go for an hour again back to the meeting house there in Harrisburg.  We would have a Sacrament meeting, which was in the evening, and then we would travel home. 

Now, where we were situated in Lebanon, to travel to Harrisburg, we would have to go through the town of Hershey Pennsylvania and the whole town smells like chocolate. The covering of the streetlights was shaped like Hershey kisses. One would be of the brown color and the next one would be silver and would have a little thing like the pieces of paper going out of it, in the next one was Brown, and the next one be silver colored, and it would look like it had a little piece paper coming out of it. And we would love going through there except on fast Sunday when the whole town smell like chocolate. 

We had a home teacher that would come visit us and he worked at the Hershey factory, and so many times when he came to visit us, he would bring an end cut of the slab of chocolate that they had poured because they would just be throwing it away. He can bring those home, he’d bring us a slab of chocolate. How embarrassing for my parents when the home teacher would walk in and we would say, “where's the chocolate?””

Her father was usually in the branch presidency in the branches of the church they lived in. Traveling to meet members was just what was expected of those who were active in the church. Lisa watched her mother, “Traveling back and forth that’s just what they did.  That's just what you did when you are trying to help the members the church be strong. I remember my mom would travel when it was time for visiting teaching. It would take her two days to get her visiting teaching done. She would just load kids up in the car and then head on over to whomever she was going to visit.  It might take an hour, hour and a half to get to them and visit for a while and then drive home and the next day you go drive again and visit the next person.  That’s just what you did. That’s my heritage, that’s our heritage that you just go to church and do what you do. But even though it was a little far to drive and I'm sure it wasn't easy with four small children, to drive every Sunday twice to Harrisburg and bring the children. That's just part of our heritage, that’s just what we did. Harrisburg had a great little branch of the church there.”

Early in 1967 January Lisa has a special memory of her father waking them up, “I finally got a baby sister her name is Suzanne she 7 1/2 years younger than I am and I'll never forget the morning that my dad came in and woke us all up, brought all the kids in the same room, when he looked at me and he said, “it's a girl”. I was thrilled to have a sister, after three brothers it was great to have a girl.”