Richard C. Cornelison Personal Childhood Remembrances

I built a (canoe construction?) dingy that was 8 feet long. Balsam Lake is at least ten by two or three miles in size. The boat was started in manual training but I had to finish it back in Balsam Lake. The biggest challenge was putting the canvas on. You have to take the hull and we ultimately took the canvas and grabbed it. I don’t remember how we held it on the ends but two cars pulled on it to stretch it! You know when you take a sheet and stretch it how it forms a bow? Well we did that and dropped the hull right in to the fold and tacked it on and put on layer after of layer of, first orange shellac, and then followed by many coats of spar varnish and then painted it red and [put on] more coats of spar varnish until the canvas was all full and glassy.

Yes, I had a bicycle as a youth. I used to go up the canyon on my bike after school and on Saturdays with Jim Van Wagner. In fact when I saw him in Salt Lake recently a a reunion we remarked how much fun it was. They had no gear shifts, they were just—it was the hard way, it was really hard. I got my first bike I suppose when I was nine.

I was born in a protestant family, delivered by a Jewish doctor, on a Mormon holiday, in a Catholic Hospital. And all of that is true except the doctor wasn’t Jewish. His name was Harry B. Phelps and he was an old friend of the family and an MD of considerable note and was our family physician all the time while I grew up.

—from 1/22/92 JHHFC (sick with flu) “interview” with Richard C. Cornelison during a busy rush hour (!) drive from Cleveland to Hiram

No, I am not aware of any medical problems in the family history. There was no diabetes, no heart problems. There has been a rash of cancer in the grandchildren of both sides of the family which was not true of the previous two generations; they died of natural causes, or heart attacks or something at an old age. There’s something different [with the recent generations] but I don’t know the factors.

The typical morning for me would be to go down to the Dessert Bookstore which was operated by the Mormon Church and buy some postage stamps or maybe to the Pioneer Post Office window and buy some postage stamps. I almost bought a sheet of upside down special delivery stamps, that is the airplane was upside down. I missed that, I would be very wealthy today if I bought it. I had a collection of foreign and domestic stamps that encompassed a couple books that were two inches thick. I still have those. I learned a great deal about geography. I would go down in the morning and do that shopping and come back on the bus. Sometimes my father would go to work on Saturday and I would walk down with him. From the apartment house at First Avenue and T Street, it was a 30 minute walk to downtown Salt Lake.

Then on Saturday afternoon I would often spend time with my friend Orson White or with Walter Curr or Wyman Bellop and we’d play together. Later Orson and I used to do a lot of experiments. We’d go to each other’s homes. I’m talking about chemistry and physics and cars. Occasionally we’d want to hike up in the mountains. It was possible when I was a kid to see mountain lions in the foothills above Salt Lake. I saw them twice. Our favorite hike was to hike up Twin Peaks, right in back of our homes and to the west of what’s called Red Butte.

On Saturday night was the scout meeting, Troop 51, at St. Marks Episcopal Church. I would go to that religiously because I very much enjoyed the Boy Scouts. I was involved in scouts for probably three years and achieved the rank of Life. I had most of the merit badges for Eagle except for swimming which I found some difficulty getting because of the underwater diving requirements which I wasn’t too good at.

In the afternoon I might go for a hike. Sometimes my father would go with me in the foothills above Salt Lake. Sometimes Sunday evening we’d go for a drive with the Stewarts. They drove Cadillac’s typically and they would drive around with the parents and myself. I’d be in the backseat with the women and the two men would be in the front seat. We’d drive around the outskirts of Salt Lake and see the lights way off in the distance and comment on how beautiful it was. Occasionally the Stewarts would take us to dinner at the Salt Lake Country Club - with my parents or alone. My parents never wanted that because they neither had the money nor the desire. I caddied at the country club a few times and I was not taken with that as a good way to make a living or have fun.

I took up the flute when I was 8 years old, somewhat at the behest of my mother. She encouraged me and I had a teacher named Clarence J. Hawkins who was a very dynamic guy and also had a temper. He was the first person I came to know outside of my direct family that was both an authority figure and a teacher and someone who I interfaced with one-on-one. It was a very valuable experience for me so I took it to heart and practiced reasonably hard and finally when I was about 11 or 12 my parents gave me a sterling silver flute made by the Hine Haynes Co. in Boston which enabled me to play a lot better. I was in the high school band and actually the Salt Lake City Symphony was formed in about 1938 and I was the first flutist and the only flutist in the original Salt Lake Symphony at age 12! And one time we were playing a concert at the Mormon Tabernacle. The “Salt Lake Tribune” photographer came and had me stand on the stair next to the person playing the bass viola[?] and said, “This is what makes an orchestra.” That photograph is still in my scrapbook. I practiced a lot and it pretty much wiped me out of doing any sports except from intramural sports.

Yes, it’s true I did do quite a bit of skiing. On Saturdays I’d often go skiing, once in a while on Sunday, after church. Brighton, up Big Cottonwood canyon, was opened up as well, but Alta was everybody’s choice. On February 22, 1941 I fell at Alta and snapped a cartilage on my knee and that kind of put me out of commission for awhile. It bothered me quite a bit. It took me a couple of years to get over that. Good ol’ Doctor Phelps brought a can of either up into my bedroom of my home. He poured it into a cloth, put it over my nose, and after I went to sleep he snapped my knee a couple of times and said, “That ought to do it.” When I woke up it hurt like the dickens but, sure enough, after about two weeks it was ok. I went around in crutches in high school for awhile. It hasn’t bothered me much since. That the way we did it in those days.

I went out for basketball but wasn’t so good. I was quite good in track except I pulled a tendon and I didn’t therefore [participate during the rest of ?] high school. I was elected President of my junior high school. I didn’t run for elective office in senior high, which was a much bigger school, East High School. I loved physics and chemistry when I went to school and I tolerated most of the other subjects. I did ok; I probably had a B+ average. I didn’t work as hard as I could have. I didn’t like senior high school so well, I was anxious to get on.

After 1941 I worked at Safeway after school and during the summer. That was my first job at 45 cents an hour. I got my social security number about 1939 or 1940. Then when I was in high school in 1941 and 1942 and 1943, and especially in 1942 and 1943 I worked at the Ogden arsenal in the tank division. We onloaded and offloaded tank parts on the railway cars going to the Pacific theatre. I made a lot of money doing that. During the after hours, we’d drive to Ogden from Salt Lake City. It was a fairly extensive time commitment. I used to go up with four fellows. We had a lot of action out of that, learned a lot about life. We worked for some old codgers there, some day laborers that showed us what real work was. Those tank gears were real heavy and you needed a lot of them in the Pacific theatre. Some of our older friends were out there fighting and we felt a real patriotic challenge and we got gas rationing stamps and that helped us get out there ‘cause we drove an old car up there every day. We got rationing stamps for tires.

Rationing was very much the thing after December 7, 1941. Rationing really slowed down what people consumed although it was said that one of the biggest reasons to put in the rationing was to remind people possibly that we were fighting a war and that we had to refocus our energies in that direction and support the fighting men. I think it was quite effective. Franklin Roosevelt did quite a good job in executing the war. He kept the taxes high enough that he didn’t run up the deficits too high.

(Also one summer Richard helped clean out the local electric utility’s boilers/generators which apparently was an incredibly dirty, hot mess.)

Otherwise on Sundays we might a long drive to Utah Lake or go up to Timpanogos Peak. We might drive up to the Strawberry Reservoir. We didn’t stay home too often. We read some, very often we listened to (pope boy???) on the radio. I would work on my stamps sometimes.

I also had a lot of electrical and electronic gear, radios and radio sets, coils to make high voltage Jacobs ladders, transfer(?) tubes, and vacuum tubes. I was very interested in electronics. I had quite an extensive mineral collection dating from when I was a kid, from when I was ten, maybe as early as eight. Mr. Kirstner made me a box with my initials RC on it which I still have. Yes, he was a very kind man, he took a special interest in me. More people need to do that these days. It did a lot for my self esteem to think that an older man cared enough to make me a mineral collection box. A lot of friends and my parents would bring me minerals and I collected a lot. I used to buy some from Wards Scientific. I had — and still have— a very extensive set of minerals that fluoresce under ultraviolet light.

No, I didn’t collect too many coins, although my father did. He had several thousand silver coins, especially U.S. dollars that he collected but I didn’t do that too much. He and Hugh Brian did and Uncle Stan Smith and he would go to the bank and buy a thousand dollars worth of silver dollars in a bag and bring them out and sort through them and pick out the select dates. And then they stashed those. Finally when my father died I sold those, many brought two dollars for every dollar in face value. It wasn’t a remarkable thing but we kept about a 100-150 of the best and they’re in a vault.

We couldn’t have any pets because we always lived in apartments. The only pet I really had any first hand dealings with was a dog named Zero who was owned by Helen Pearson of Balsam Lake, WI who I also had a crush on. She was a couple or three years older than I was. Zero and I were good buddies. I took a photograph of him on the dock at Balsam Lake one time and I won a prize from the “Minneapolis Tribune” as one of the best photographs of the year. And that ended my photographic career!

Also I liked girls a lot and I went out with Marilyn Stainer. But the first girl that I loved actually was Helen Pearson who I had known as a child and we used to play dolls together way back when I was five years old in Balsam Lake. And then Mary Coke and I always had a good time together. She was my contemporary from the Prescott apartments. Then I started to date Virginia Moyle in junior high and after a few years I went to East High and I started to date Marilynn Stainer who was a neighbor of ours. All those were all very respectable and nice, quality women I that knew and I’m very grateful to all them because they helped form my positive opinion of women.

I am very fortunate that—it was somewhat of a random selection—but in those days you could pretty much bet that the value system of those families that you were around in Stewart School and East High were very similar to your own family values because it was quite a homogenous population and the Mormons had their own mores that were pretty high standards and that rubbed off on the rest of the population. Virginia Moyer was a Mormon and I think Marilyn Stainer was as well, come to think of it. Some of my best friends were Mormons and two of my girl friends were Mormons. They treated me ok. Some of my best boy friends were Walter Curr and Tommy Reese and Dan Wagner and above all Orson White— a longtime friend who still lives in Salt Lake City with his wife Dora.

On a typical day my father would get up at 6:30. I got up about the same time. I’d leave for school about 7:30 and I’d invariably walk to school, both Stewart (teacher’s) Training School on the Salt Lake Campus and grade school and junior high and then high school which was about a 40 minute walk. There were no school buses in those days. We could have biked and I did bike some but it was quite the thing to walk with your friends over that distance—it was maybe 15 blocks. It was a nice walk and the weather was very seldom inclement.

So my dad would walk downtown to his office, probably leaving about 8:00, and I probably left about 7:30. We had breakfast in the breakfast room, typically a couple of boiled eggs and some bacon, always some toast, and usually some orange juice and always grapefruit. In the winter there was no grapefruit brought in from Florida and California. It was all served up in cans and it was called Shaffers grapefruit. You better eat your Shaffers grapefruit or you were in deep trouble! We usually had Canadian bacon on Sunday morning, otherwise somewhat the same, plus waffles.

I usually would get home from school, I recall, around 4:30 or 5:00. Then I had music lessons so often I’d get home around 6:00. If I got home early I would practice. Once in a while I’d play baseball or football with the guys at the school or on the playground. Once in a while I’d play tennis as well but I wasn’t all that good at tennis.

Very often in the evening when I was growing up the thing to do was to listen to Glenn Miller on, I think it was Thursday night, he was on every Thursday from, like 8:30 to 9:00. It was a big deal to listen to Glenn Miller and get up to date on the latest songs. My parents had a wind up Victrola that was bought around 1930. I bought all of Glenn Miller’s records and played them like “String of Pearls”, “Sea of Junction(?)”, “I’ve Got a Gal from Kalamazoo.” I played band music (like John Phillips Souza) and classical music, never or very seldom contemporary stuff like jazz or Glenn Miller.

I was sort of a natural leader in school because I was tall and my parents had taught me how to deal with people and school was small and it wasn’t as though I had a lot of competition. So Orson was the President of the junior high school the first half of the year and I was the second half of the year. I wrestled quite a bit. I was not too bad at wrestling. I don’t remember what weight class. I was second from the top.

In the evenings I worked at homework pretty extensively. The first book I ever read was “The Yearling” but then I began to get interested in biographies and I read quite a few of those. Then in my senior year I applied to Deep Springs College and won a scholarship there which helped enormously. I think my father didn’t have the money to send me to college and it was also a great privilege to go there. I consider it to be a great privilege.

L. L. Munn made his fortune in Salt Lake City and Provo and points south and he basically was the original industry(?) behind the Utah Power and Light Company which started out as Telluride Power and Light because he and George Westinghouse worked together and took the first high voltage lines to the mines way up high above Telluride, Colorado. The 100th anniversary of that pioneering effort by Nunn in the electrical engineering field was 1921 (or 1941?). [But electricity wasn’t introduced by Edison until the late 1800’s…?]

I went to Deep Springs when I was 16 years old. Salt Lake City chintzed on the amount of time a person went to senior high, and maybe there were only two years of high school. This saved the school system money. It was not a bad idea because everyone got out and wanted to get in the war anyways. I was too young to go in the war but I did go to Deep Springs for a year then I enlisted in the Navy. On March 12, 1943 we (Pete McDonald and I) went to San Francisco and I enlisted in the Navy and they put me in the V-12 program, officer’s training. I was sent to Colorado College where I arrived on more or less the first of July, 1944. Deep Springs was an amazing experience. It was an opportunity to interface with some really sharp students. [End of tape.]

—from Jan 22, 1992 after dinner JHHFC taped “interview” with Richard Cornelison. Priscilla helps with some tidbits.