Personal History

                        Patty Turner Ruggles--A Personal History

  THE EARLY YEARS

According to A.E. Bray in Traditions of Devonshire, “Friday’s child is loving and giving.”  I was born on Friday, October 15, 1948 in St. Rose de Lima Hospital in Henderson, Nevada.  This was the second marriage for each of my parents. My mother had two children, Richard and Judy Crabtree, from her first marriage, which was to Wally Crabtree.  My dad had a son, Steven Turner, from his first marriage, which was to Dorothea Callendar, and Steve lived with her.  I was to be the only child of Earl Mason Turner and Sarah Elaine Parkin because my mother died six days after I was born, of complications from childbirth.

            My dad owned his own business, so arrangements had to be made quickly for my care.  His mother, Mabel Rose Turner, lived in California with my aunt and uncle.  They decided to move to Nevada.  My uncle, C.L. Coleman, known as “Doc”, would go into business with my dad and my grandmother would move in with my dad to care for me.  She was seventy when I was born and that must have been quite a challenge, to take on a newborn at her age.  She had taught school and then married later in life.  She had never learned to drive, but she could still tutor students in algebra and Latin if I remember correctly.  She was an amazing woman.

            My mother’s former husband, Wally, came to pick up his children.  He was driving trucks over the road at the time, so they went to live with our maternal grandmother, Sarah Parkin.  All three of us were therefore raised by our grandmothers and we have very special places in our hearts for both of them.  So I have two brothers and one sister, but I was not raised with any of them.  I was raised as an only child.

            My dad found it difficult to talk about personal things, so he really never talked to me about my mother.  My dad’s family had only met her, had never been around her much, so I had very few people to share with me stories about my mother.  One of the people who knew her well was our next door neighbor, Lucille Ehret, who had been her best friend.  Lucille and her husband, Charles, had never had children.  They asked my dad if they could adopt me when my mother died and my dad told them no, but they could spend time with me and they ended up doing that a lot and taking me on many memorable vacations.

            Lucille and others told me what a “neat freak” my mother was. Her sister told me when the sisters got together to play games at my mother’s house they could hear the vacuum running before they got down the driveway.  My dad said she always had Judy dressed in clean, pressed dresses when they would walk to the station to see him during the day.  My grandmother has told me she sang in high school.  I really only have small snippets of information about her.  She had been born in Park City, Utah.  When she and Wally divorced, she moved to San Francisco.  She had a sister and a brother there and that’s where she met my dad after he got out of the Army in 1945.

            My dad was born in Bremen, Ohio, but the family moved to Denver, Colorado and my grandfather owned a hotel there.  He had been in business with his brothers in Ohio and had been successful in many business ventures.  My grandfather was diagnosed with tuberculosis and it was suggested he go to Arizona for the warm, dry climate.  He and my grandmother went, but my grandfather hated being away from home and the rest of his family.  They didn’t stay very long. My dad and his two sisters were cared for by his older, married sister-in-law.  The family would tell funny stories of the children’s letters to their parents.  In one of them, Dad was writing about learning to boil water as a boy scout.  We kidded him about that, and he assured us the point was to build a fire that stayed lit until the water in the pot boiled.  That did make more sense, but learning to boil water made a better story.

            My dad was mostly quiet and laid back.  He loved his boat, going fishing, and playing bridge.  His Friday night bridge game was seldom missed and I came to resent its importance in his life, but realize now that he needed this time for something he enjoyed so much. He had graduated from college in Colorado with a degree in business, but realized when he went to work for Standard Oil in San Francisco after World War II that he hated being cooped up inside all day, so he jumped at the chance to own his own service station (the only one) in Henderson, Nevada and he and my mother moved there in 1947.  They crossed the desert in an old Army jeep and her children thought it was quite a wonderful adventure.  Judy was three and Richard was nine. 

            After my grandmother came to Henderson to raise me, she soon realized the houses in Henderson, which had been built as temporary housing during the war for those who worked in the chemical plants, were very small.  There were two sizes—a two-bedroom, which had 550 square feet, and a three-bedroom, which had 850 square feet.  Those sound awfully small by today’s standards, but many families lived in those little houses for years.  My grandmother, whom I called Nana, told the family that she would buy the property and pay for the materials if the children (my dad and his sisters and their husbands) would build a cabin at Mt. Charleston, which was about forty miles from Henderson. She wanted the cabin large enough for family get-togethers.

            I was about two when construction on the cabin began.  She had purchased two lots and they planned a cabin with a large living room, a large dining room, two bathrooms, three bedrooms and a large closed in back porch.  When people in the area saw it laid out, they asked if it was going to be a brothel because it had the big living room in the middle with the bedrooms around it.  Only in Nevada would someone ask such a question. One uncle was an architect, so he designed it, but he didn’t want to claim it later because it had a peaked roof, but then a flat roof over the dining room which often suffered damage from heavy snows in the winter. He always felt bad that he had designed it that way. It took several years to complete the construction because the men could only work on it on weekends and not at all during the winter when the pipes would freeze if they weren’t drained.  But this became the family gathering spot for many, many years.  There was room for a large front yard and we played many croquet games there and even some badminton.  It was a great area to fill with tables for outdoor barbeques and all kinds of gatherings.  The dining room table could be extended to seat at least fifteen.  In later years there was a pool table in the living room and we often sat another ten or fifteen there.  My grandmother’s dream of enough space for the family to gather was realized and we used it and loved it for all of my growing up years and well into my adulthood.

            The family member who had a lot to do with my raising, besides my grandmother, was my Aunt Mays.  She was my dad’s older sister.  She was basically the “family matriarch” after my grandmother passed away, but even before that she helped my grandmother a lot with me.  Her sons were older than I was by five years and ten years.  She often took my grandmother shopping or ran errands for her.  She was often consulted when decisions about me were made, such as cutting my hair or buying shoes.  She would “go to bat” for me with things that I thought were important, but my dad didn’t.  She talked him into buying me a sewing machine when I was older and sent me a corsage one year for Easter.  I called her and her husband “Mommy Mays and Daddy Doc.”  They were very important in my life.

            My dad re-married when I was seven.  Her name was Frances Taylor.  She was my Uncle Jack’s secretary at his architectural office.  I think she was a great secretary, but she was happier at the office than at home.  She and my grandmother traded houses.  Frances moved into our house with my dad and me and Nana moved into her house.  She and my dad each worked long hours, so I would walk to my grandmother’s house after school.  I preferred living with her.  She had raised me and was the only mother I knew, so I figured out that if I went to bed early, I would be asleep when Dad and Frances got home from work and they would let me stay there rather than wake me up and take me home.  Her son, David, was about six years older than I was, so he was old enough to stay by himself.  Before long I had moved in with my grandmother.  She and I were both happier that way.

            I was a good student and liked school.  I was in Girl Scouts as a Brownie and I remember that there were four girls in our troop with some form of the name Patricia—Pat, Patty, Trish, Patricia.  I think it was a popular name in the late 1940’s.  One of our leaders had been a nurse and she taught us to make beds with square, hospital corners.  That’s what I remember from Brownies.

            The couple who had lived next door to my parents when I was born, the Ehrets, stayed close to my family.  He worked for Union Pacific Railroad and Lucille would take me to Salt Lake City on the train to see my mother’s family.  Charles got two or three weeks’ vacation each year and they always planned a big trip for me to see some place new and different.  My dad owned his own business and definitely couldn’t leave during the summer, so I would never have seen the places I got to see if it hadn’t been for the Ehrets.  We went to Yellowstone and Canada one summer, to Mexico another, back east where they were both from another.  I loved seeing the places, but they didn’t get along well and on every trip they would get in a huge fight that would make things really uncomfortable.  Charles thought I should learn to read a map, so I would sit in the front and be the “navigator” and Lucille would sit in the back.

            Several summers when I was young I went to San Francisco to stay with my Grandmother Parkin, my mother’s mother.  I loved going there and being with my aunts, uncles and cousins on that side of my family.  I attended church with my grandmother, heard about the DUP (Daughters of Utah Pioneers), went to baseball games with my cousins, ate lots of ice cream (my uncle worked for the dairy), and saw the sights in San Francisco.  One summer when I went I stayed for several weeks and when I flew home I had only one dress I could wear on the plane.  I had gained so much weight that I couldn’t get into the others.  That was not a good thing.

            My grandmother (Nana) belonged to a women’s organization, PEO, which owns a women’s junior college in Missouri.  Then, as now, I read everything I can get my hands on, so I decided at a young age that I wanted to go to that school, Cottey College.  The Ehrets thought that if I wanted to go there, I should see it, so the summer I was about ten we went back east and on the way home we went through Nevada, Missouri.  I visited Cottey College and fell in love with the campus, the area, the idea of attending school there.  I was given a tour of the campus, they put me on their mailing list, and I knew for sure that was where I wanted to go to college one day.

 I was thirteen when my grandmother died.  I knew my life would change considerably.  I would need to move into the house with my dad, Frances and David.  I was old enough to know that I needed to make an effort to fit in and get along, that it wasn’t just up to everyone else.  I think we all made an effort and for a while, things went well.  But Dad and Frances weren’t getting along well at that point.  There was an apartment at my uncle’s office for clients who came in from out of town and Frances started staying there for days at a time.  She decided I could cook and take care of my dad and she would cook and take care of David.  I had hardly cooked at all with my grandmother.  I couldn’t even fry an egg.  I was pretty overwhelmed.

            About that same time, I had neighbors who were LDS and talked to me about the church.  My mother had been a member of the church, but I wasn’t raised around any of my mother’s family.  My grandmother and I went to a community, basically non-denominational, church.  My mother’s sister often sent me a subscription to The Friend and many of my friends at school were LDS.  I took the lessons and loved what I heard.  I read the scriptures they asked me to read and wanted to be baptized.  I talked to my dad and he said he had nothing against the church, but it was a big decision for me to make at that age.  I could attend any of the meetings or activities, but he felt I should wait until I was eighteen to be baptized.  So I attended as regularly as I could.  I attended on Sunday, I went to Young Women (or MIA in those days), in high school I even attended seminary when I could.  I loved the church and looked forward to the time when I could be baptized.

When I was in the ninth grade, my aunt and uncle decided to move into Las Vegas (from Henderson, where I was born and raised).  They asked my dad if they should look for a house big enough for him and me to move with them.  By this time, Dad and Frances were separated, but not divorced yet.  Uncle Doc, my dad, and my cousin Keith were all working in Las Vegas.  Only Aunt Mays was working in Henderson.  It made more sense to live in Las Vegas than in Henderson.  So the decision was made for them to move and Dad and I would live with them.

That was another big change in my life.  I was leaving my hometown and the friends I had known and grown up with, but I was very excited about living with my aunt and uncle.  It would be a much more “normal” life than the one I’d had for the previous year or two.  I had my own bedroom with a lovely new bedroom suite.  The house was in a very nice neighborhood.  I could invite my friends over and was so proud to have them come.  Aunt Mays cooked meals every night and taught me how to plan meals and help prepare them.  We cleaned house every Saturday and I was responsible for certain chores, but everyone pitched in and helped.  My uncle always whistled as he worked and I loved it.  They set wonderful examples for me in so many ways and I’m grateful to them for all they did for me.