On top of her World

     "After a couple of semesters living there, at the end of that school year, a couple of my roommates asked me if I would be interested in moving with them down the hill to a different apartment, one of them was already graduated and she was a school teacher, Norah, but she wanted to live in the school housing because she wanted to be in the student wards.  She wasn’t married yet and she knew that would probably be the best place to be finding men.  Which she did! So we moved down the hill to 637 East 600 North there in Logan. And I was just there for the next several years until I graduated and until I finished my student teaching. It was the USU 18^thward and a wonderful place to be." 

     "Our bishop was Deniel Bockman who was an institute teacher, and great guy. He was a really great bishop.  There were so many outstanding young men and young women in the ward. And of the probably, 80 young women and 80 young men that were there – 25 girls of the 80 young women twere either return missionaries or endowed sisters.  So the bishop knew that he needed to have really worthwhile activities and callings for these young women. So we had two Relief Societies and we had two Elders Quorums. The first year I can’t remember what I was serving, the second year, I had the opportunity to be the Relief Society President. That was a great experience, that was the first time for me to be the president and it was a great experience.  I had some outstanding councilors, and I was extremely busy with school." 

     "I was an upperclassman, I was also performing with “The Sounds of Zion” which was a singing group at the institute, I was a piano player for that for the first year I did it, and the second year I was actually singing and performing on stage which was so fun, and we toured through the mid-west one summer – it was just a great experience.  I enjoyed it immensely – in addition to the other music stuff I was doing on campus and the music department. But it was a learning, growing experience for me to be a Relief Society President.  I found one of the best ways to get to know the girls was after I got home at night and had some dinner, to just go out and visit the apartments of girls.  We would sit on the floor and just visit and talk about what was going on in our lives and giving me an opportunity to get to know them but also give them an opportunity to know me a little bit. I was pretty down to earth and not a fancy-shmancy person and I was concerned about them and wanted to see what I could do to help them. Being in a student ward, it was a great way to kind of get your feet wet being a Relief Society president, we didn’t have family issues to deal with, we didn’t have Primary or young women’s or young men’s, we didn’t have a lot of problem with welfare issues going on.  Most of the kids were able to make their way. "

       "Most of the kids were students, there were several that were not, but a bunch of them were. We covered like a block area there in the ward as well as some of the floors over at the Mountain View and the Valley View Towers. We had some people that were incoming freshmen and some people that were graduated and were working in the community. We had 7 - 9 maybe a 10 year age range, 18 to maybe 28, but just a nice mix of kids. We had a lot of fun. We really had a lot of fun.  There were a lot of pranks going back and forth, we had our family home evening brothers who were just down stairs.  ended up with my roommate Loren ended up married one of those brothers downstairs."

     "I’d been there a year or a year and a half , my brother got off of his mission, my brother Craig had been in the Portland, Oregon mission, and after his mission he decided to come up to Utah State.  They had an opening downstairs and so he moved downstairs. It was through my roommate Tammy, about a year later, that he met his future wife Trina, who lived down around the corner.  Tami and Trina worked at the Hop John Hewlett Company there in Logan, they make a lot of yearbooks in the Western United States – including those here in Concord. Tami and Trina worked there and Kevin was introduced to Trina and it didn’t take too long until he figured out that this is the one for him.  So he got married and it’s been a great marriage. 

      "Other things about the ward: I was a gospel doctrine teacher, I was the music person, I was Relief Society President for a year. Great opportunity, fun, fun, jokes and pranks back and forth.  We came back from a ward activity one time, all the furniture in our living room was gone! Everything, including anything on the counter, anything that had been under magnets on the front of the fridge were all gone, it was all in the back two bedrooms.  It was this particular group of guys who lived down around the corner, that we did a lot of pranks with back and forth. One of the guys had a Volkswagen bug that we drove. It snowed a lot. We were down *there pushing as much snow as we could up underneath the Volkswagen bug. He wasn’t able to move it for a few days because it froze really hard that night and he wasn’t able to get out of there until the snow melted because he was kind of hightailed there in the snow. There were a lot of fun pranks there back and forth.  We would go to the midnight movies which cost all of a dollar, we would go down to the park and play, and we would go to ward activities, and it was a great, great experience.  We met at the institute, and it was a good experience. 

     "Other things about the institute: I graduated from there with an extra – I don’t know what to call it - you had to have 24 credits to graduate the institute and I had 30 credits to graduate from there. And so I graduated from the institute. I enjoyed my classes there I had a wide variety of classes, some great teachers there were very inspirational, you could feel the spirit, it was just a great place to be, and enjoyed my time with The Sounds of Zion.I’d originally been recruited to play the piano for the little ensemble that would be playing with them on tour. I was glad to do that, it was a lots of fun, and the next year they asked, “what do you want to do?” and I said, “I’d like to play the piano, but I wouldn’t mind also singing and dancing – because I had also sang choir part of it.  They were happy to have me do that – so that was loads of fun!  Loads and Loads of fun. 

      "So back over to the music department – I was a good student in the music department, they enjoyed having me there. I was hard-working, I was willing to try new things, I would be invited to be in different ensembles.  At this point I was a music major and I had declared my main instrument percussion as I was learning all these percussion stuff.  I was taking marimba lessons which was way fun. I did all the keyboard percussion instruments I was in the keyboard ensemble room I was in the percussion ensemble,  playing a lot of different instruments.  I wasn’t very good on snare but my percussion instructor was teaching me how to play on snare, I never did timpani.  I did a lot of bass drum, lots of cymbals, lots of triangle, and chimes, and any of the keyboard stuff was my forte. I enjoyed that immensely, I got to play some really, really great music and that was very nice."