S. Dilworth Young
General Authority, Scouter, Poet

by

Benson Young Parkinson

Copyright 1994

 To Dil, Gladys, Young Dil, and Leonore.

 Foreword

This book is based largely on interviews of Dilworth's friends and family. As anyone knows who has gathered oral history, facts become skewed, sources contradict themselves and each other, things come out in the wrong order, people imagine, confuse, and forget. The same holds for personal histories and journals. I have picked these stories, knowing that any given detail might be wrong, because the gist is there: This is how people saw S. Dilworth Young; or This is his voice in telling his own story. Sometimes oral history puts forward less of history, but more of the man.

This book has been over ten years in the writing. In that time, the old Young home on 24th Street in Ogden, which Gladys called Rosemont, has burned and been rebuilt according to a new plan. I regret to say that in that time too, many of those to whom this book would have meant most have passed on.

I decided to write this book after reading my grandfather's unpublished Life Story. Those one hundred and thirty pages, with his military and mission diaries, could have formed the core of Dilworth's best book, but he never wrote it. My book would not have been possible without the cooperation of Dilworth's widow, Hulda Parker Young, who gave access to these and others of his papers and recordings, suggested people to interview, gave several important interviews herself, allowed me the use of personal materials, and criticized the manuscript. Leonore Young Parkinson, Dilworth's only surviving child and my mother, also made available primary sources, helped develop numerous contacts, gave repeated interviews, and criticized early drafts. Some of these memories were painful for Hulda and especially Leonore, which makes their contributions doubly valuable.

Carlie Louine Clawson Young, Dilworth's mother, left a personal history. Gladys Pratt Young, Dil's first wife and my grandmother, was a haphazard journal keeper, but her letters during their courtship survive in Dilworth's scrapbooks. She also left charming stories of her childhood, which with others of her writings came to me through Mary Pratt Parrish, her niece. Louine Young Cromar, Dilworth's sister, shared materials on Dilworth, including a transcript of some of Dil's stories, her own personal history, letters, excerpts from their late sister Emily Young Knepp's diary, and Emily's personal history. Much credit goes to Dilworth Blaine Parkinson, my brother, who interviewed Dilworth or taped him telling stories on five different occasions in 1977-78, and who also filled two 90 minute tapes with his own memories. Other family members who helped include Dilworth's brother Hiram, his sister-in-law Louise Young, son-in-law Blaine Parkinson, and grandchildren Charlotte Parkinson Fry, Robert Alan Fry, Annette Parkinson, and Wendy Parkinson Asay. Relatives on the Young side: Harlan Y. Hammond, Phyllis Wells, and Gene F. Deem; on the Pratt side: Boyd and Mary Pratt Parrish, Berta Pratt Whitney, Gerda Pratt Haynie, and Stanley and Juliette Cardon. From the Parkers: James and Giana Nielsen.

For memories of Dilworth's early life, I thank his lifelong friend Merlon L. Stevenson. R. Lamar Barlow filled in background on the 145th Artillery and battle in World War I. Missionary friends who contributed valuable information include Francis G. Wride, Dilworth's companion in the backwoods of Louisiana and in New Orleans, and Alexandre E. and Ethel Kane Archibald, Bessie E. Kelly, and Grace Valentine Price, fellow workers in the office in Independence, Missouri. Leland P. Draney, a previous mission secretary, provided documents and took the time to type out answers to my lengthy list of questions on that calling's duties. For memories of Rey L. Pratt I thank Hugh Barnes and Dell B. Stringham.

Ogden friends who gave me stories include Delora Hurst, Myrene Brewer, Mary Wilson, Maggie Gammell, George Frost, Heber S. Jacobs, Lloyd L. Peterson, Martha Johnson Barney, Betty Peterson Baker, Ben H. Davis, Helen Grix Plowgian, and Margaret Wilson Barlow. Ena Barnes, and Dorothy West, Gladys' pageant aides, were also very helpful. Among scouters I thank Eden W. Beutler, Percy W. Hadley, Paul S. Bieler, A. Russell Croft; also the following scouts: Jack Davis, George H. Lowe, Thomas M. Feeny, James N. Oka, E. LaMar Buckner, Don Buswell, Max Wheelwright, Worth Wheelwright, and Wally Brown. The Ogden Standard- Examiner, in helping my grandfather publicize his program, in the process preserved his activities for posterity. Richard Sadler steered me toward Lyle J. Barnes' helpful master's thesis on corruption in Ogden. On this account too I must thank the Standard, also Cecil K. Parker, a juryman.

The following New England missionaries helped: Truman G. Madsen, Oscar W. McConkie Jr., Rex W. Williams, Blaine P. Parkinson, and D. L. Woodward. Boston students and friends include John Hale and Olga Gardner, Richard and Mary Lou Harline, Talmage and Dorothy Nielsen, J. D. and Barbara Williams, and Rosemary Fletcher. For his Salt Lake and Los Angeles years I relied mostly on published and family sources. However, for their varied contributions I wish to thank H. Smith Broadbent, Phyllis Peterson Warnick, Bruce R. McConkie, Levier and Cynthia M. Gardner, Eb L. Davis, and Reid and Thelma Brown.

Thanks and apologies to all those who helped whom I have neglected to mention. My thanks for secretarial assistance to my wife, Robin L. Parkinson, and to Charles Fry, also to my father, Blaine P. Parkinson, for financial support in this project. Finally, I would like to thank Covenant Communications and its managing editor, Giles H. Florence, Jr., for giving the family the chance to present this story to the world.

Benson Y. Parkinson
December 24th, 1993

Benson Young Parkinson was born in 1960 in Provo, Utah, and raised in Ogden. He spent 1978 as a Rotary exchange student in Sydney, Australia. After filling a mission in southwest France from 1979 to 1981, he graduated in 1985 from Brigham Young University with a degree in Comparative Literature. He lives in South Ogden with his wife Robin and four children, where he works full time as a writer. An avid hiker with an interest in computers and American Indian culture, he serves as scoutmaster in the South Ogden 58th Ward.

Origins

Seymour Bicknell Young, Jr. was born January 11, 1868, in Salt Lake City, Utah Territory. As a young man he served a mission in England, returning early to attend the dedication of the Salt Lake Temple in 1893, then serving a second, shorter mission to New York. Seymour was a striking man, lean and broad-jawed, with a rich, baritone singing voice. He sold wagons and later automobiles for the Consolidated Wagon and Machine Company, and did well. Once he sold a hundred small white Buicks in a hundred days. As a publicity stunt, he and a mechanic drove one to the top of Ensign Peak before there was a road. He would race the engine and lurch forward, then the mechanic would rush to block the wheels, then he lurched again, and so on to the top. Seymour was the eldest son of Seymour Bicknell Young, Sr., who as an infant survived the Haun's Mill Massacre. He too served a mission in England, taking part in the eastbound missionary handcart company of 1857. Seymour Sr. studied in the east and became doctor to his uncle, Brigham Young. He served many years in the First Council of Seventy, like his father, Joseph Young, one of the original Presidents, and Brigham's brother.

Carlie Louine Young Clawson, known as Lou, or Lulu, was born in Salt Lake on July 28, 1869. Family lore says once a middle-aged apostle gave her a lift in his buggy and in the course of the ride asked her to be his plural wife, but that she turned him down. Lou was softly pretty-- she and Seme made a striking couple--but was shy in company and retiring in the family. Lou was a daughter of Hiram B. Clawson, a pioneer entrepreneur with a dramatic bent, whose career included managing ZCMI and the Salt Lake Theater. Dilworth remembers the Clawsons always laughing. "They seemed immune to sorrow, they joked, they dramatized, they had physical fun." Lou's mother, Emily Augusta Young, was a daughter of Brigham Young by Emily Partridge, Bishop Edward Partridge's daughter and a plural wife of Joseph Smith. That made Lou Seymour's second cousin through John Young. In the days of polygamy, with its large families, this was not uncommon. Lou was old enough to have memories of Brigham, who called her his little beauty. Once when she was playing on the front steps of the Church Office building, he passed by and noticed her with a great mouthful of gum. "Lulu, I wish you wouldn't chew gum," he admonished her. "It is not a nice thing to do." She writes, "It made a great impression on me, for since then I never chew it or like to see anyone else indulge."

Seymour Dilworth Young, Seymour and Lou's second child and first son, was born September 7, 1897, at 5:00 a.m., in a house at 83 Canyon Road, Salt Lake City. The house sat on the west side of the street on a spot where 2nd Avenue now cuts through. "My father," he tells, "ran for the doctor. He had to go clear up on 4th East, to where our grandpa had his horses. And then he lost the key to the barn, and they had a dickens of a time, but they finally got a doctor there." "My mother," he writes on another occasion, "tells me that I cried constantly from the time I was born until I was about six months old, that I wore out her and half a dozen nurses. She also said that after that I would sit on her lap with my feet against her abdomen and constantly push, so that it was an effort at all times to keep me on her lap."

One of Lou's lullabies, a version of "A Frog Went A-Courting," goes:

A frog he would a wooing go
Hi-ho, says Rolly
And whether his mother would let him or no
With a rolly polly gammy spinach
Hi-ho, says Anthony Rolly

So off he set with his opera hat
Hi-ho, etc.
And on the road he met with a rat
etc.

Dilworth says his father was "a very good pianist, and he had a fine singing voice." He says, "In those days there was a lot of singing going on in our parlor. Father . . . gathered about him a lot of people who liked to sing. They had happy, good times, and I enjoyed listening to them." Seymour originally intended to become a musician and would have taught piano and voice. "Grandma talked him out of it, foolishly. Ought to have let him do it. He'd have been happy. That was his natural bent." Seymour was active and busy in the 2nd Ward, holding positions such as Sunday School Superintendent and Chairman of the Music Committee. Hiram says the Bishop told him at one time he might as well be bishop, as much time as he spent doing church work. One year Seymour put on a minstrel show for the ward. The normal pattern was to have a semi-circle on the stage, with two "end men" and the chorus, all in blackface. An actor without blackface, called the interrogator, sat in the middle and asked questions, while the two end men cracked jokes. Seymour's innovation was to make it a ladies' minstrel. Lou sang in the chorus, the only time Dilworth remembers her participating in any public performance or meeting of any kind. Hiram and another boy did a dance called "The Golddust Twins in Clogs." Golddust was a brand of powdered laundry soap with the twin girls on the label. Dilworth remembers the black underwear and greasepaint and yellow skirts and wigs and being so jealous he hardly knew what to do with himself. "I learned to do the clog. I said, 'Daddy, I can do this.' And he said, 'Well, let's see you. So, what are you going to sing?' I said, 'I'll sing, I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy,'" and he sang and danced but his father still would not put him in the show. Dil remembers the Danish members in the 2nd Ward.

In fast day meetings, testimonies were often unintelligible to me as the Saints struggled to testify in English, their new tongue. In Sunday School the room was divided into classrooms by green curtains hanging from wires overhead. If I was not interested in what my teacher was saying, I could choose from five other classes, all of which I could hear. It was always interesting to try to solve the problem of the identity of the boy who kept poking me in the back through the curtain at my rear.

At Christmas time Dilworth tortured himself trying to figure how Santa Claus got through the six-inch stove pipe, around the kinks, into the stove, then opened the door from inside to get out into the dining room. (Christmas morning was held in the dining room, the parlor being reserved for formal occasions like Christmas dinner, Sabbaths, ward teaching visits, and "lickings.") One Christmas, probably when he was five, Dilworth pined for a wood jigsaw puzzle he had seen in a store window, showing an old-fashioned, horse-drawn fire engine. With the horses running and the dogs barking underneath and the smoke billowing out from the fire making the steam to pump the water, Dilworth couldn't imagine anything more exciting. His mother insisted they eat a bowl of mush in the dining room before they could open their presents, "to fortify us against the candy, I guess." Dilworth finished and went out to the dining room to his chair to empty his stocking, which besides the candy held an orange, a novelty in those days. Then on to the presents--a new clipper sled, which Dilworth says at that time beat flexible flyers "all hollow," and a smaller package. Dilworth recognized it immediately as his puzzle.

Their father let the children play with their toys for about an hour, then approached them and said, "Well, Boys and Girls, you remember that Danish family over on 7th South?" These were the Olsens, a immigrant couple with children more or less the same ages as the Youngs. Dilworth remembers not liking the boy his age. "His dress, smell, everything was different, strange and Danish." He admits to having had a "little tiff" with him a few days before. Seymour went on, "Now, we're going to take them our Christmas dinner. Are you willing?" The children agreed, though without really understanding the implications. Then his father said, "I want each one of you children to decide to give your best toy, the one you like the best, to those children." So it was decided. They would leave at noon.

I had an awful fight with myself. I sat there and looked at that clipper sled, and I wanted to give it to him, and I wanted to keep my fire engine puzzle, but Father said, "Give him the one you like the best," and I didn't want to disobey Father, so finally I decided I'd give that boy my fire engine puzzle.

And all the way home, I was walking on air. I don't believe my feet hit the ground once. I don't know why, I just suddenly realized what giving was. And to give our best and to give all we had was the finest thing we could do . . . When we got home, I thought maybe my mother had a Christmas dinner tucked away somewhere, but she didn't. She opened up a can of beans and we had bread and butter and beans for Christmas.

Dilworth remembers his mother as sickly, and he asked her about it when she was old. She said it wasn't a matter of disease. "I had seven miscarriages. If I'd had all the children I had conceived, I'd have had thirteen children." As it was she had six, of which five survived. The Youngs hired a woman to help with housework and tending, and she boarded with the family. Emily says, "She took pains with Dil and me to teach us to read before we ever started school. We could read the easy words in the newspaper when we entered the first grade." She tells of being asked to stay after school with Dil after only a few days (this would have been at the Sumner School, on 3rd East between 6th and 7th South), and standing fearfully before the teacher's desk, who asked them to read from a second grade reader. Both could do so easily, and on the basis of that, both were promoted to the second grade. Dilworth talks about reading in his history, but does not mention the incident. He writes he was a year behind Emily in the fourth grade, but then of the two of them graduating together. Given family circumstances, it seems likely one or both lost or gained a grade or two.

One thing is certain--Dilworth read well from early on, and he loved to read. Emily remembers him kneeling before a stuffed chair with a book on the seat for hours at a time. "Father would get out of patience when he wanted Dil to get a scuttle of coal from the shed for Mother to put in the range, for I can hear him say, 'Just a minute,' but he never could find the place he could leave his book, and Father would have to pull him up and see that he did it." His Uncle Lee (Levi Edgar Young) gave him a six-volume Horatio Alger set, the "Ragged Dick" series, and he read these and others. Once he gave him a year's subscription to "Cosmopolitan" (at the time a literary magazine). "I could not understand what I read, but I tried. It was my magazine, and I did my best to live up to it." Lee introduced him to "The Last of the Mohicans." "Ever after that the Delawares were my Indians and the Iroquois were my enemies. I read the whole series by Cooper." He read classics and the Standard Works and every religious book he could find. Emily speaks of him spending hours in "Grandpa Young's huge library . . . Dil would go to see them early in the morning and they would never hear from him till late in the day. He was curled up in a big comfy chair in the library." Once his father promised to give him any book in his own library if he would read it. He chose one called "'Character--Smiles.

I wanted to smile so I started. I didn't understand any of it except the "and's" and "it's" and small words. Later--long later--I found it among my books and correctly read the label, "Character--by Samuel Smiles", an essay for the middle aged, but Father kept his word and gave me the book.

Dilworth liked school, but he was "bedeviled by a boy named Sigurd Simpson, a dirty fisted boy of about eight. I was so scared of him that my life was miserable. I invented excuses not to go to school. Sickness feigned, hiding my cap, or losing my book until it was past 9:00." His father finally complained to the principal, who told him, "Seymour, you baby your boy too much. He's got to learn to fight his way, and until he learns he won't be much good." This took him aback. That night he told him if any boy licked him he could expect a licking when he got home, "and that I was to learn to stand up to the other boys." He bought him a pair of boxing gloves and arranged for his Uncle Shirl Clawson (later a Hollywood cinematographer) to give him a few boxing lessons. Dilworth does not say whether they helped, only that the family moved soon after to a house on the southwest corner of 9th Avenue and -C- street, across from the LDS hospital--this would have been in early 1907, when Dilworth was in the fourth grade. "I suppose that ended it, for I had no trouble thereafter."

"I enjoyed the school--no boys bothered me and I had little trouble except with arithmetic. I was not a good analyzer. English, history, spelling, grammar, were no trouble." The class at Lowell Elementary, where he now attended, put on several dramatic productions, including the Iliad and Odyssey and Alice in Wonderland. "I was the Cheshire Cat because I have such a broad grin. I was proud of the part; and when we presented it to the parents, I about split my mouth in two trying to grin as broad as that cat is supposed to have done." Dilworth and his friends were throwing rocks one day in the schoolyard. Dilworth aimed, but the rock went off at an angle, sailing up to the second floor and crashing through the window of his own fourth grade class. Red-haired Mrs. Burmister came to the window. Dilworth, paralyzed with fear, suddenly found himself alone in the schoolyard. All the others ran. She said, "Dilworth, did you break this window?" Dilworth, with the directness that always characterized him, said, "Yes, Ma'am." She called him in and took him to the principal, William Bradford. When he asked, Dilworth answered, "Yes, Sir, I broke the window. I didn't mean to. This rock slipped out of my hand and got going the wrong way." He told him he would have to take it up with the school board. Dilworth passed an anxious weekend, then on Monday "I was called in and told that, because I had told the truth and had not run, I would be excused from paying for the window. That was my first experience in honesty being rewarded, and I have never forgotten it." Dilworth recalls Mrs. Burmister trying to honor him with a kiss.

After Hours

Childhood games Dilworth remembers include kick-the-can, pom-pom-pull-away, duck- on-the-walk, mumble-peg, marbles, hopscotch, jump-the-rope, and tippy-cat. For this last, "one whittled the cat from a broom handle. The bat was a flat paddle. One struck the edge of the cat, flipping it in the air, and while in the air, striking it with the bat, driving it as far as he could." The opponent would allow a certain number of bat lengths. The driver could take them or demand more, in which case they measured. "If the driver was right, he got that many more points." Seymour bought the children a donkey while they still lived on sixth south. Dilworth remembers mostly the older boys in the neighborhood stealing it from their yard and his mother going after them. Once it balked on a set of streetcar tracks. Lou pulled and Dilworth and Emily beat with sticks, but they could not get it off. Finally, "the car came to a stop, the motorman and conductor and a passenger got off and pushed the donkey off the tracks and went on their way, much to the amusement of everyone on the car--and to Mother's embarrassment. I was embarrassed too."

Dilworth played with the Marron boys, Ben and Hen, back fence neighbors, "Irish kids, tough and mean, [who] liked to fight all the time." Once Hen and Lewis Larson ganged up on him. "I figured, well now, I've got to get Lewey out of this, because the Marron kid was quicker than he was, so I just kept hitting Lewey on the nose until he started to bleed, and that fixed him, he didn't need to go anymore, and Hen ran." The Marron boys and other neighborhood kids stole the Youngs peaches summer after summer, until Seymour got the idea of hiring the Marrons to watch them. "'You can have what you want to eat, Boys, but watch it so that the other boys don't take it.'" That did the trick "They, when on their honor to watch and protect, did not feel they should steal. It proved a good way to handle boys." When a streetcar line was laid down along 9th avenue, the LDS hospital put in a sidewalk to combat mud on visitors' shoes. Dilworth, Hiram and the Marrons waited until that evening when the cement workers went home and carved their initials in the cement--SDY, HCY, BM, HM and LCY for little sister Louine. There they remained over seventy years for him to read as an old man.

Dil and Hi also played with George Cannon Young, their cousin, who lived nearby. Once they got into some new houses on C street above 9th Avenue and played cops and robbers. "Our cap pistols echoed nicely." The owners arrived without notice. Hi and Cannon were caught, but Dil "went up over the hill like a frightened deer. That night Father told me I would probably have to go to the juvenile court. I went through the tortures of fear of going to court--whatever it was it had a fearsome sound." Seymour let his boys stew two or three days, then told them he had gotten them off with a promise never to do it again. "We were entirely unconscious that we were doing wrong, but we did climb to the attic through a hole in the ceiling of a closet--dirtying the plaster. I suppose Father paid for the damage."

Dilworth mentions smoking with Hi and Cannon. "There was lots of smoking done in those days by nearly everybody . . . We managed to find some old big corn cobs, and we thought it was kind of cute to make corncob pipes." For tobacco they used cedar bark from the back fence, which Hiram remembers made them sick. Dil says, "We sat there pondering the centuries and tried to decide where babies came from. Cannon held for the stork and I held for the doctor and we were both wrong." Their father found out and confronted them before the family, telling them if they were going to smoke, to do it in the open. That apparently put an end to it. Dilworth writes of himself, "My bump of honor and honesty must have been well developed. I didn't need to be told more than once that a thing was not right and I stopped doing it." Hiram tells of his father offering each one hundred dollars if they would refrain from smoking and drinking and keep themselves clean until they were twenty-one. When the time came he had no money and could only tell them he would make it up to them. Hiram said never mind, that they ought to pay him a hundred dollars. For all that, Seymour smoked--away from the family--and Dilworth remained aggravated and disturbed into old age after having found him at it one day.

Dilworth speaks of his father as kindly but nervous and strict. "I always thought Father was fair with us most the time. He punished quickly, he had a quick temper, and he spanked us, oh, yes, you bet . . . [But] he saw what we needed . . . Father understood us and he got us things to play with." He says, "when we wanted to play, he made us a little ball diamond outside and bought a ball and a bat, and showed us how." The diamond extended between their house and the east-west ditch (which they sometimes dammed for swimming) about seventy-five feet away. "We managed to make balls or find an old ball and knit a cover for it if the horsehide was irreparable." Seymour would not let them "play sides" on Sundays, but allowed them to play "rounders." "I remember one time I knocked a home run through our . . . dining room window, right almost in the lap of the bishop, who was calling on Father." Dil says the bishop used to walk around the block to avoid seeing them on Sundays and having to tell them to stop. After the streetcar line pushed through their field, the boys played on another patch of "not-too-flat land" below 10th Avenue and between -B- and -C- Streets. At one time they had a team and coach. "We persuaded our parents to buy us uniforms made of outing flannel. The uniforms were flimsy but gave us a real professional look. The cost was one dollar each . . . Every Saturday in the fall and spring it was either football or baseball."

They sledded in winter, coming down the hill and over a footbridge crossing the ditch, the ground dropping away on the other side. "Sometimes we could leap three or four feet. Our bellies would be sore from the pounding when we hit." Riding in the Avenues, "we got as far as we wanted to go." Boys commonly "hooked" rides on the backs of grocery wagons. The wagons were reinforced with steel supports on the sides. The boys would pass a long rope through these and hold on while being pulled on their clippers. They steered by pulling on one end of the rope or the other. When they got tired they dropped off. Another type of sled was called a schooner, large enough to hold a dozen people or more. "They'd have a horse pull that thing up to the head of Federal Heights," (the Avenues were too dangerous for schooners), "and then they'd all get out and turn the thing around and . . . slide down around those curves on Federal Heights into South Temple. They'd go as far as fifth east before they stopped."

It may have been the schooners that inspired the four-man coaster wagon Dilworth's father built.

It was the only thing of its kind ever invented. Otto Oblad the blacksmith made it. It had real buggy wheels cut to about twenty-seven inch diameter. The steering was a bicycle rim run by a sprocket and chain beneath. It had a brake like a real wagon. We used to start at 10th Avenue and ride to Grandmother Young's on [48 South] 4th East. Then we would have to push it home.

The boys finally discovered where they could ride with less effort. Starting on -A- Street and 1st Avenue, they could coast east to -D-, then to South Temple, then back to -A- Street. Dilworth calls it "perpetual motion"--seven blocks coasting for one block pushing. Of course it was a steep push. Dilworth says the wagon took four or five kids to get up a hill when he first started, but that as he got older and heaver, he could finally push it from South Temple home alone. "That was my great thing."

Seymour paid forty dollars for a red Durham cow with the left front and back teats joined together, forming one large teat with two holes. The seller claimed she milked faster that way. "We children fell in love with her and proudly led her home." The double teat did give two streams, but proved hard to work, and before long the milk began to come out bloody. "Father went back to the man and told him that he had sold the cow under false representations and asked for our money back. The man just laughed and told Father that he should be less naive." With no money for another cow, they used the milk from the good side. Hi brought in the milk dirty two or three times, with some story about how it got that way. "Mother decided that we couldn't keep that up, so Hi was taken off the milking list. Years later he confessed to me that he had thrown a handful of dry barnyard manure into the milk each time to get out of milking." After about a year Seymour sold the cow to a butcher. "It about broke us up, for we had learned to love that old red cow. She surely was gentle and kind."

The Youngs attended the 18th Ward on -A- Street above 2nd Avenue. Dilworth writes of walking with Cannon and Hiram each Monday night to priesthood meetings as a deacon, also Sunday mornings to "pass" in Sunday school and again in the evening for sacrament meeting. "I used to envy the teachers who could carry the silver pitchers for refilling the silver goblets. These were passed from mouth to mouth." Hiram speaks of collecting fast offerings in kind and delivering them to widows in the ward. John D. Giles, the deacon's teacher, gave the boys pencils and books and had them write down points for attendance and participation. Dilworth won a prize when he was deacon's president, "a boy's history of 'Abraham Lincoln' by a man named Morgan. I read it altogether about ten times in the next few years." Dilworth thought highly of John Giles, "who made the business of being a deacon seem very real." Brother Giles writes of a presentation Dilworth made on behalf of the deacons before meetings were adjourned for the summer. "Dilworth arose and said in a rather commanding tone, 'Brother Giles, we would like you to stand right here.' I followed instructions. Then I listened to one of the most carefully prepared and appropriately presented talks I have ever heard from a boy." Dilworth then presented him with a book of poems by Tennyson.

Dilworth says, "I can remember that I wanted to learn and was very much annoyed by boys who wanted to disturb. I can't remember wanting to do wrong during that period. I heard of other boys and their mischievous acts and used to wonder why they wanted to be that way. But for myself, I didn't want to, nor did Cannon Young or Hi."

Most of the land north and west of the Young home was wild, still, and the boys liked to play in the hills. "Cannon Young and I would get the fever to build underground houses. And so every summer we would go over the rim of the canyon fifty feet or so and start to excavate." They heard of successful underground forts belonging to rough boys by the sand pits above -K- Street, but they never managed to get theirs covered. "We did not have the money to buy old lumber to roof them over and we would not steal any, so the holes were dug and the energy spent--with loss of interest when we could not complete them." Once in March Cannon and Dilworth went on an overnight camp in City Creek. They packed two quilts and enough canned food for a week, rolling everything in a wagon cover to be used as a tent. Each boy took an end and they started out for the new road cutting into City Creek from 11th Avenue. "The farther we staggered with our food, the more scared I got--and homesick. So I began to fake a stomach ache. By the time we got to the place where the road bends to go toward the State Capitol I insisted on going home." By now the sky was black and low with an approaching storm. "We staggered home with our load, much to Cannon's disgust with my babyness, and got there just at dark and just in time for supper. Father was just organizing a searching party for us." It snowed eight inches that night.

Cattle from the city roamed in the hills, which were covered in sego lilies. "We learned to recognize them and dug the bulbs for spring salads. As I look back, they seemed inexhaustible, but they are all gone now." Seymour bought Dilworth and Hiram a repeating .22 Winchester rifle one Christmas. "Every Saturday for about six months Father took us up on the hills in back of our house . . . and taught us how to carry the gun so we couldn't kill each other, how to shoot it, how to never shoot at wrong things, target practice only on tin cans, never shoot at animals or birds . . . before he let us take it out alone." Dil admits, "I think I lorded it over Hi by carrying it more and telling him when he could shoot, but he didn't seem to be very resentful." They never really hunted with it, though once they took a pot shot at a bobcat.

When Dil was ten, a boy named Clarence Olsen was showing him and Hiram and Cannon his mail-order Sears .22 pistol at the edge of City Creek Canyon. The gun's spring was broken, so he had stretched a large rubber band around the trigger guard and hammer. Clarence was demonstrating how Buffalo Bill shot, pointing the gun in the air, then aiming into the canyon, pulling the hammer back and letting go. The boys were standing in a half-circle facing the canyon, Dilworth opposite Clarence.

All of a sudden my hand went numb. I looked down and saw an ever-larger spot of red on my white shirt. I yelled, "I'm shot," and headed for home as fast as I could go. Over the back fence "belly buster" place, which Father had fixed to give us faster egress and ingress to our lot, Hi went. He had for once been faster than I. Into the house, "Dil's shot, Dil's shot!" Mother came out. The doctor came and soon discovered the bullet had gone through the arm and out, missing the bone and arteries, but ticking a nerve--which numbed my hand. The angle from which it was fired was such that it passed in front of my breast and into my arm. One-sixteenth of an inch to the left and I would have been shot through the heart. For three days I was a hero--then I was just commonplace--just another accident. I have often thought that the Lord must have had some purpose in my not getting the full load in the chest.

Mountain Dell

Seymour B. Young, Sr., in the early days, invested in four hundred acres at Mountain Dell, near Little Mountain, where the reservoir now stands. For a time he "grub staked" it-- outfitting miners to prospect for a month at a time in exchange for half of what they found. He eventually built a cabin on the land. Other families lived nearby, some who farmed, some poor Danish immigrants who worked replacing ties on the railroad. Towards the turn of the century the community of Mountain Dell was large enough to support a ward, dissolved in 1898 when the city bought many of the homes to protect the watershed. Seymour Sr. kept the cabin as a summer home. Dilworth's father, uncles, and aunts brought their families here to camp each summer, "usually about the 4th of July. We stayed until late August usually. We had a tent frame on the bottom land next to the creek, and did our cooking in a two hole tin stove in the tent." The tents were suspended on wooden frameworks, over raised wooden floors. They slept on cots. The men commuted fifteen miles to jobs in the valley, an hour-and-a-quarter by buggy, or stayed in the valley two or three days at a time. Seymour often had company cars. One Overland that he sometimes took to the canyon would quit without warning.

Father would get out, unhook the gasoline line and blow. The dirt would go back into the tank and we would go until the dirt settled and was again in the line. Our lights were carbide gas, and our horn was a rubber bulb. One pressed it and forced the air through a reed. We had plenty of horses and wagons to look out for and of course always worried that we might get hit by the Park City train as it wound its way up or down the canyon. There were eight crossings and we were glad when number eight had been safely passed.

Louine says her grandfather kept horses at Mountain Dell and that the boys rode them a good deal. She says they had trout from the stream for dinner nearly every day. One summer Dilworth's Aunt Elma read Les Misérables to the older children. Dilworth remembers listening without really understanding. He tells of horseback riding, berrying ("wild currents, chokecherries and serviceberries"), and grouse hunting, though he says he and Hiram never hunted with the uncles, at least not much. "The camp was the most fun when our aunts were being courted, and our uncles were courting." Then, especially, there was singing around the fire, "campfire fun and storytelling." Grandfather Young would tell of his adventures crossing the plains and on his mission. Seymour Jr., and Levi and Clifford (who both later became general authorities) told of their missions as well. Phyllis Wells remembers how entertaining they were, singing and joking and dancing and carrying on. Levi was known for his Indian stories. "Seme" and "Lee," she remembers, were both good mimics. Levi danced the Charleston with cousin Florence Bennion, who was much taller than he. The brothers teased each other about their "Chinese" names: Lee Young, Seme Young. They told Pat and Mike jokes. According to one, Pat and Mike were parked on the fifteenth floor of a fifteen story hotel in New York City when a fire engine went by below, then another. "Pat, come quick, come quick, they're moving Hell and two loads have gone by already."

One night Lou found a nest of field mice in the cupboard where she kept Richmond's diapers. She called Clifford over. He, thinking to catch the mother, left the babies exposed in a corner. Lou put out the lamp and went to bed, only to feel something crawling on her a few minutes later. Carefully she reached up, lit a match, touched it to the lamp, and then flipped back the covers. "Right there, lying on her nightgown, were three little naked mice. That mother mouse had brought those mice in under the covers and deposited them on Mother's lap." Lou called out for Clifford once more, who this time killed them.

On a Sunday afternoon once, when Dilworth was about seven, Grandma Young had invited everyone down to dinner in her cabin, when a cloudburst hit Little Mountain. Before long a wall of red, muddy water hit the cabin, picked it up, and floated it a hundred yards down the river, where it wedged against the brush and willows. Water flowed through the house two feet deep, so those around the table climbed up on it with the food. Dilworth ran up the stairs toward the attic and watched from above. "No one was hurt, nobody drowned, and the water soon subsided again, and then of course we had to be lifted out onto the higher bank, [with] mud everywhere. And finally around about 8:00 o'clock that night, they sent some carriages up from Salt Lake and took us home [to the valley]. All the bridges were washed out. They had a real time getting up and down." The tents were washed away. Dilworth says he learned never to camp in the river bottom, as storms even several miles distant could mean flash floods downstream. When they rebuilt the camp, they put it on higher ground. "If we'd have been in those tents . . . every one of us would have drowned."

Dilworth and Emily graduated from Lowell Elementary in the spring of 1911. Seymour had the money to send just Emily (perhaps because she was oldest) to the Latter-day Saint University, the Church-run, combination high school-junior college, located east of the Hotel Utah. Dilworth presumably would go to Salt Lake (later West) High. "I felt terrible. I had just turned fourteen and to be left out seemed to me awful. So I cried a lot, and Father somehow raised the extra money needed to pay my tuition." He remembers wearing knickerbockers to school. He says he did well enough in English and history but that "Latin and algebra were beyond me." That year Seymour's health turned bad. "He wasn't right down, but he was miserable for some reason . . . He thought he had kidney trouble, and he probably did because that's what he died of." Seymour resigned his job, and that April, before Dilworth could finish his school year, took the family to Mountain Dell while he recovered. "We couldn't afford to live anywhere else. We had no money." School was not really an option--certainly there was none in Mountain Dell. "Grandma Young helped us to get food, I guess . . . We ate food, I don't know where it came from." They slept in tents through that summer and the next, spending the winter of 1912-13 in Uncle Mel Well's cabin, "which was better than the others, although it was unlined for winter use." That meant just a board between them and the weather. Dil says, "We learned what living in an unlined cabin was--it was awfully cold." Lou hung drapes--she writes in her history of an evening when a cup of water froze three feet from the stove.

Other families had been around during the summer, but with winter here, the Youngs had the camp to themselves. The children skated on a pond. The Youngs made a little money pasturing horses for some men from Garfield. "Twelve head or so wintered over the high ridges west of the camp and we could count them. In the spring we finally got to them and discovered that one had a colt. Herding them was fun, although we knew little about how to care for them." Louine remembers standing by the train tracks and picking up coal one of the engineers would throw off for them. She says her mother put their foodstuffs on the table at night, away from the mice, and wrapped them in blankets to keep them from freezing. Relatives visited occasionally. One day in February, Dil remembers, Uncle John Robbins came up on a sleigh.

It was a warm day and the cabin had got warm through the roof and we didn't have a fire in the stove. Uncle John got out of his sleigh and he came in and he says, "My, I'm cold!" He went over to the stove and rubbed his hands on it and he got warm, and after he got warm Hi said, "Uncle John, open the stove door!" Uncle John opened the stove door, and there was no fire.

The second August in Mountain Dell, George got Dilworth a job pitching timothy hay on the Hugh Evans farm in Marion, not far from Kamas. (George pitched at the Wotstenholm ranch nearby.)

It was my job to . . . hitch up and haul hay for ten hours each day, milk five cows and feed them and the horses. The end of my first day found my muscles so sore that I could not hold my knife and fork if I had to put pressure on them. Mrs. Evans cut my meat. By the end of two weeks I was over my soreness and secretly felt my muscle each night and was pleased with its hardness. I consumed tons of food and must have eaten a pint of whipping cream each morning. I slept with Alva Evans upstairs and felt a little prickly at first. I did not realize it was bedbugs, but it was.

They all had horses and buggies and took in the country dances for miles around. These were long lasting, followed by buggy rides home with the girls. Often they would race buggies down the turnpike road, which had quite a high center. It is a wonder they were not killed . . . At the end of the first summer Mr. Evans said, 'Dilworth, you cannot do a man's work, but you are so willing and tried so hard I'm going to give you a man's pay.' I got two dollars per day for thirty days work.

Granite Years

One day that winter Dilworth, now sixteen and six feet tall, went "uptown," presumably on foot, to LDSU to ask if he could finish the half-year he had missed. Osborne Widtsoe, the principal, told him he could. Dilworth asked, "'Well, could I do it on the money I paid on that year?' He said, 'No, you can't do that. You have to pay a half-year's tuition.'" Dilworth had no money, and neither did his father, so that was the end of that. He thought to try Salt Lake High School, but the school had a rough reputation, and in any case, Granite was closer to his Sugarhouse home. So he walked the thirty-five blocks out to Granite High and up to the third floor to the registrar's office. He told the man in the window of his project of finishing the half- year, adding that he had no money for entrance fees. Willard "Wid" Ashton, a math teacher who had been filling in for the registrar, enrolled him in the freshman class, explaining there were no fees. Dilworth signed up for English, algebra, agriculture, history, and physical education-- Ashton taught this last. He asked Dilworth if he would like to sign up for seminary. "'What is that?' said I. 'It's a class you take in your spare time given by the Church for no credit unless you study the Bible,' he replied." So it was that Dilworth took seminary the second year it was ever offered.

"Those were happy days." Dilworth walked the three miles from home and back again each day. "I had no money to ride--rain, snow or shine." Many of the students lived on farms and were a year or two behind, like Dilworth, from staying out to help at home. Adam S. Bennion, later an Apostle, served as principal. Dilworth remembers him and Wid Ashton as "high principled men [who] always insisted on high ideals in the students." He adds, "I enjoyed the school dances, and the girls were especially nice."

Dilworth made a lifelong friend in Merlon Stevenson, later head of engineering and math and head coach at Weber College and Dil's neighbor in Ogden. The two had much in common-- both had been out of school, both walked long distances each morning and night (six miles for "Steve" at one point). Both liked sports, worked and studied hard, and had high standards. They resembled each other, too, at least enough to confuse their teachers. "Ike and Mike, they look alike," reads a caption in the 1915-16 yearbook. The picture of them together shows them with similar haircuts, in similar jeans and drooping, long sleeved shirts. They have similar pointed noses and similar jawlines. Steve says Dilworth was two inches taller and two pounds heavier. He remembers the two of them sitting in Wid Ashton's math class when Wid wanted to make a point about perspective. "He said, 'Well, a lot depends on the way you look at something,' and we kind of looked at him--'What?' So Wid came down and he had a book in his hand." Steve was sitting just in back of Dilworth. Wid showed the two of them the book and said, "'Now, what is that?' and we both spoke up at the same time . . . but one of us said it was a rabbit and the other said it was a duck. The bills for the duck were the ears to the rabbit, depending on which way you looked at it."

Steve thought Dil "as honest as the day is long, and that when he told you something you could depend on it." He thought him "just a good, solid American boy with high ideals, because everything that we talked about was on a high level . . . I never in my life heard him ever use any foul language or ever tell anything that was even shady." They had fun and kidded each other, but perhaps having had to stay out of school made them more serious than they might otherwise have been. Steve remembers many of their conversation turning on lessons and helping each other along. Wid Ashton noticed their hard work and counseled them to keep at it, to prepare themselves well and then decide what they wanted to do and go at it. "Now I think both Dil and I listened very carefully. I know I did, and I'm pretty sure he did, too."

One year Dilworth talked Steve into taking a public speaking class with him. Steve, raised on a farm, recalls that speaking was not his forte, but he went along. Miss Wolfe, the teacher, apparently learned late of a division extemporaneous speech contest to be held at LDSU. Rather than have Granite unrepresented, she got Dilworth and Steve to go. Steve recalls it was Dilworth who persuaded him. "I still can't account for how I even agreed." Topics were to be assigned from a list three minutes before each speech was given. The other schools had all had the list for weeks. Granite's representatives were obliged to wing it. Steve recalls his topic was "The Mosquito." Dilworth's account does not mention his own. Steve says he "felt that Dil did a fairly good job," but calls his own performance a "fiasco." Dilworth writes, "I did poorly. Steve opened his mouth in his turn but no sound came forth." For their trouble the boys were awarded debate team letters. The winner of that year's contest: Wallace F. Bennett of LDSU, later a United States Senator from Utah.

Dilworth speaks of taking plane geometry from Wid Ashton, "to his despair, because I am not a mathematician." He says he played basketball under him his first year there. "I was like a fence rail in width . . . Whenever I would get in the practice, within ten minutes my legs would be so numb I could not feel them. The coach . . . would say: 'What's the matter, Young, you baking?' I would admit I was, a little ashamed of my weakness, and he would bench me for the next fifteen or twenty minutes. He knew what was wrong, but I didn't. I was growing so fast I had no reserve strength." That summer he returned to the Evans farm, stronger and better able to pull his weight and happy to pay back Mr. Evans for his confidence the previous summer. He and Lloyd Evans loaded one wagon against Alva and Dean Evans--"almost grown men. The first year we could not keep even, but the second year we made them sweat to keep up. This was a source of great satisfaction to me, and I came back home that fall able to keep up on the basketball and football teams without 'baking out.'"

Dilworth tried ranching the summer of 1915 when "a herd of cattle went past our place.

Twenty-first South was a trail street from the stockyards on 8th West and 21st South to the mountains. These were wild Nevada cattle and dangerous. Get off your horse and you were liable to be charged by a cow or a bull. They belonged to Heber Bennion, and he was trailing them to Chalk Creek to the summer range. He had bought them from a rancher named McMillan. He, his son Heber Jr. (grown up), a McMillan boy and . . . a real Texas cowpoke . . . named "Big Jeff," were doing the trailing. I had a pony old and tough, and I asked for a job. Mr. Bennion hired me to help with the herd.

I started out--no coat, a hat, the pony. We drove into Emigration Canyon for the night and bedded down at Little Mountain. It was an all night herd job. Next day we went over the Little Mountain trail up Killyon Canyon to Parleys Summit. We lost nearly 200 of our 500 in the oak brush in that canyon, and I lost most of my shirt and my pants in the same brush. I learned why cowboys wear chaps and, too, why they swear at the cattle. We didn't have enough punchers, enough food, enough anything. We bedded the second night on Silver Creek. By that time I was so tired that during the night I became obsessed with how to spell "cattle." I tried all night but had no peace until daylight when I stopped and wrote it in the dust where I could see it.

Two days later we turned the cattle loose on Bennion's range on Chalk Creek--up near the Blue Lakes--and I ate one last breakfast of four eggs and bread and started home. I don't know how many of those lost cattle were ever recovered . . . I, who had never chased anything faster than a milk cow, really had my eyes opened to what a range cow can do. The McMillan kid had a good horse and a bullwhip. A bull was lying down and McMillan popped him with the whip. Before McMillan could get his horse moving, that bull was on his feet, charged, and had gored the horse in the hip. That ended the horse-- and the boy went home.

I suppose he expected me to go with him to a bar, have a drink or two, and then seek out a house of ill repute . . . I realize now that I could have been in great danger, but somehow he sensed I was not the kind of boy who did bad things, and perhaps dinner at our house taught him a different culture than he was used to. He was a profane man but not meaning to be. It was all he knew, apparently, and I thought there was an innate courtesy in him that is in few men who work with their hands today.

Dilworth writes in his history of rummaging in a chest of drawers in the attic when he came across two large leather-bound "doctor books."

One contained the anatomy of women, especially sex organs. It was well illustrated with drawings of the process of birth, from conception to entry into the world. It also described instrument delivery and even what must be done if the baby's head was too large to enter. The second book was about marital relations, and while not entirely accurate in some details, was interesting reading for a fifteen year old boy.

It would have been a lot better if Father had instructed us in these things. It is odd to me that parents could assume adolescents would not be curious, but they were raised that way. It was hush-hush, but I suppose too that I personally was none the worse at the moment. Yes, I was too, for I often came back to those two books that year, and I am sure they indelibly impressed me like a phonograph record, constantly played, does. I am sure I thought too much about what I read--not analyzing, just caught up in the sex emotions it stirred up. Yet I did nothing physically--just imagined.

Emily remembers Dilworth calling her "his best girlfriend" and taking her to mutual dances. Louine, quite a bit younger, remembers the way he managed to get Rich and Hi to do his chores, sometimes trading books for the work. Louine he simply charmed into shining his shoes and helping him get ready when he went out. "I remember pressing his pants time and time again, and how I loved doing it." She remembers, when she was very small, him sending her after glasses of water while reading. "'That's only a sample! Please bring me another,' he would tease as I cheerfully trotted back and forth to wait on him." Dilworth was sociable at school and enjoyed walking with a large group of friends, male and female, including Wid Ashton's sister, and sometimes Wid. In his history he writes, "Those walks to and from were the best part of school." Most his group belonged to Forest Dale Ward, and Dilworth began to attend there, too. After a time he was called to teach a Junior Sunday School class. "I enjoyed that, although I can't remember making great preparations."

Dil's father, when he came down off the mountain, did not return to church. Perhaps he was afraid of callings because of his poor health. Perhaps he had gotten out of the habit at Mountain Dell and on subsequent long visits with Emily and George on the ranch. Perhaps he was embarrassed over not keeping the commandments--this is Louine's opinion. "Father and [one of her uncles] were close companions, and they broke the Word of Wisdom by enjoying their cigarettes. Father had his cup of coffee each morning, but he never let us see him smoke. He talked about having a taste of wine with Thanksgiving dinners, which he said was not breaking the Word of Wisdom. My mother was saddened by this, but she did miss church on Sunday, but did remain active in Relief Society, at least to be a Visiting Teacher." There may also have been an element of disappointment or bitterness on Seymour's part over being passed over. He was the oldest son. His father and grandfather had both been First President of the Council of Seventy. In 1909 his younger brother Levi was called to the Council. In 1941 another little brother, Clifford, was made Assistant to the Twelve, with authority higher than the Seventy. According to Dilworth's widow Hulda, this is the reason Dilworth gave for his father's staying home.

Louine remembers their father during these years as compassionate and given to service. "He was very thoughtful of neighbors, friends and relatives, visiting and cheering people. Often I helped him compose or correct letters of appreciation and encouragement to others." She remembers him as "solicitous of his own family, especially visiting and offering help for his invalid sisters (one deaf and one lame, and one completely incapacitated.)" She remembers family prayer and religious discussions around the dinner table. Her parents did not get around to arranging her baptism until she was eleven, but like the other children, she attended church and auxiliaries, and she feels her parents must have given her some encouragement. One summer when the family visited Emily on the ranch, Hiram held Sunday School for the children.

One day the bishop of the Forest Dale Ward told Dilworth he would have to release him from his call. He said the policy of the Church was that members could only hold callings in their own wards. He said he was unable to advance him in the priesthood, and told him he ought to go back to his own ward.

My ward, Richards Ward, was new and was at first meeting in a tent on the property of Willard Richards, 9th East and Hollywood. Later a chapel was built on Garfield between 8th and 9th East. But I was shy and strange and told the bishop that if I could not go to his ward I would not go at all. He said he was sorry, advised me to be obedient, released me from my class, and walked away. I was stubborn and scared and so I went home. I didn't enter a meeting house again until I was eighteen years old. I did no wrong things. I stayed home, read a great deal, visited my cousins up on the Avenues on Sunday afternoons, but attended no meetings . . . My father was not active and my staying home, keeping out of trouble, did not seem to bother him.

Ward teachers came and went; they paid me no attention. The bishop, if he had ever heard of me, gave me no signs . . . Knowing my disposition, I am sure if anyone had put forth the helping hand, been interested, invited me, I would have gone to Church, but I didn't have the courage to break the ice myself . . . My father should have. My ward leaders didn't think it to be their responsibility. We were classed as an inactive family and to be left alone to stew in our own juice.

Dilworth dated Morris Knott, a Methodist girl. "During my senior year, I took [her] to the school dances three times, which was tantamount to saying you were pinned." He visited her at her home one Sunday, where they sat on the porch swing looking at the family photo album. At 5:00 she invited him to church, and he went along. "It was a nice service. No kids cried, the minister was young and a good speaker, the music soothing." Afterwards Mrs. Knott invited Dilworth and two other couples to her home, where she served ice cream and cake, then brought coffee to all but Dilworth. "She said, 'I know you do not drink coffee, but I have milk, root beer, pop. Please name it.' I took root beer. My large glass was the envy of the other boys against their demitasse cups." He left at 10:30, "as all young men did," and walked three miles home.

The moon was out, the night romantic, and I liked that girl. But I thought as I walked along; and when I walked upon the porch at home, I made up my mind that I would never take out that girl again, and further, would not go with any girl unless she was eligible to go to the temple at the time I took her. I kept that resolve.

Sporting News

"While at Granite I tried all the sports," Dilworth writes. Track brought him the least success. He ran the half mile once without training, leading until the last 220. "My legs went numb and my eyes blacked out. I managed to finish but was badly beaten." Merlon Stevenson excelled at the high jump and pole vault. Dilworth says, "I liked the team games and played left field in baseball but was poor at batting." Steve, who proved a good athlete, remembers Dilworth as a consistent player and modestly refers to himself as the weak link. Dilworth's history describes an encounter at the mound with Stanley Johnson, whom the papers referred to as "The Terrible Swede."

He was about twenty years old and pitched with man's speed. He threw a ball at me and I stepped back and it curved over the plate. He did it again. I resolved I would strike it the third try. It came on--didn't curve--struck me on the left cheekbone. I struck at it and was declared out. My face was swollen badly but apparently it did not break bones . . . I was just plain scared in that game, or I would have ducked the last minute.

The team lost but felt good at holding them to 13-0. Dilworth got his left cheek kicked hard enough that his teeth went numb. "I thought it'd kill all my teeth." (His upper back left teeth eventually died and had to be pulled, but he didn't know whether to blame this incident or Swede Johnson's pitch.)

Anyhow, I was fine till the game was over with, and we went up in the hotel and bathed. And at supper I came down the stairs in that hotel in Logan, and halfway down the stairs I took my handkerchief out and blew my nose, and my face came up just like that, and my eye went shut just that quick, and puffed out till it was three times as big on that side. When Wid Ashton . . . saw me, he looked at me and said, "What in the world has happened to you." I said, "I don't know, I just blew my nose." But I was worried because if I went home with a face like that, Dad'd sure fix me. So I sat up all night hot packing and cold packing that face, and by morning I had it down to where you wouldn't notice it much.

Dilworth records, "Wid Ashton would not let us play dirty. If we tried to retaliate on dirty play, he would jerk us from the game. We were long on ethics and often short on winning." He says, "I learned a great deal from him on how to be honorable . . . Granite teams played clean." Steve agrees. "[Wid] was one who taught sportsmanship. He wanted us to play hard, but he wanted us to play it fair . . . Very seldom did I ever hear . . . any foul language, or any unsportsmanlike conduct on the part of any of our players." Of Dilworth he says, "I never saw him ever commit an intentional foul."

Not that they were short on winning. By 1915-16 Salt Lake High had been divided into East Side and West Side, with West the principle contender for the championship. Granite came from behind, though, beating West once and winning enough other big games that they looked like they might knock them out in their second meeting. West had developed what was called a "charging game," a fast, physically aggressive offense that overwhelmed the other team. Rumors that West was going to try to "take out" key players preceded the game. Steve's parents wanted him to sit that one out. Dilworth remembers, "As we dressed for the game, we could hear through the wall the coach instructing his boys. 'First, get Stevenson, then Smith, then Hausknecht.' Granite built up an early 10 to 5 lead, but then West began to overwhelm them. Steve reports that "very near the end of the first half, one of them came in and just smashed into me and tripped and tackled and took me down, and another came and jumped on top of me and batted my head into the floor. And it was some time before I even came to. And when I did I was seeing double." Steve had bouts of unconsciousness for three days after, and was out for the season. Granite finished the half down 10 to 15. The rough play continued. According to Dilworth, Hausknecht had both eyes blackened. Smith broke his front tooth. Neither was in shape for subsequent games, though Hausknecht played some.

West won this game 37 to 17. Dilworth reports, "at the game's end, Adam Bennion walked over to the other principal and told him about his bad sportsmanship and severed relations with West High until they could clean up their athletics. East joined West, and for several years LDS, Granite and Jordan played together, and East and West played whom they could get to play." According to the papers, this was accomplished through the five Salt Lake schools withdrawing from the State basketball league and playing as independents. The Deseret News reports the action was "the direct result of the West Side-Granite game . . . which Granite lost. There, it is claimed, is the heart of the whole difficulty--Granite lost. The coaches of this division claim that the 'charging game' which the West Side uses is dangerous and that it was this style of game which put Stevenson and Hausknecht of Granite out of the game." Adam S. Bennion is quoted as saying, "When in interscholastic contests winning becomes so important that the principles of true sportsmanship are only of secondary importance it is time that our methods be changed. The action of yesterday is designed to eliminate the 'win-at-any-price' spirit." Other principals make similar statements--also without mentioning names. West's principal says he knows of no wrongdoing on the part of his team, "but as dissatisfaction seems to exist, the best way out of it . . . [is] for the schools to withdraw." In any case, the move ended West's bid for the championship--there was no league left to win.

Steve graduated that year, 1916, one year early. Dilworth took over his position of center on the basketball team the following year, where he began to stand out. His history records only one event from that season. Dilworth wore a brace with metal hinges sticking out a half inch on both sides when he bent his knee. The LDSU captain examined it, made him bend it, then said, "If we were playing West, I'd make you take it off, but you're Granite so you can keep it on."

An Officer

Dilworth was elected Junior Class President for the 1915-16 school year. An article in the yearbook, possibly written by Dilworth or Secretary Morris Knott, lists the years' activities: The juniors beat the seniors in a tug of war, "awakening [them] to real life by means of a cold plunge in Mill Creek." Next they beat the seniors for the school basketball championship. "(Really we do not like to mention these things.)" One wonders which side got Steve, whom the Senior Class report calls "our Star." Then came the Prom, and an assembly, "a conundrum in pantomime, [which] amused the students after they had it explained to them." The juniors also treated the seniors to a matinee and luncheon in town and a dance in the evening.

Dilworth won the election for Student body President his senior year, which he was tempted to skip because, like Steve, he had enough credits to graduate early, or nearly so. "I wanted the experience." The student body council oversaw all extracurricular activities, including athletics, drama, debate, and of course picnics and dances. Dilworth says he has no particular memories of being president, beyond presiding at the meetings. "One time the student body wasn't very active and I bawled them out for not supporting the team better than they were supporting it, and that's what usually happens at student body activities." Dilworth could be gruff. Steve says Dilworth "showed leadership right from the beginning . . . And he was one of the most kindly men, but I noticed . . . that he was just a little bit rough at times on people. And as I knew him, I've never been able to quite figure that out . . . He really wasn't that way." He characterizes Dilworth's leadership as exceptional. "I never [knew of] anybody who took exception to [it] . . . They called it the Granite family. It was a very close-knit institution."

Dilworth decided he would like to be a naval officer. Noel Davis, an Annapolis "five striper" whose family had lived in the 2nd Ward and who visited the Young family each summer at Mountain Dell, gave Dilworth an introduction to Congressman Joseph L. Howell. Dilworth won the appointment. Adam S. Bennion told Dilworth he would graduate him on the strength of his Annapolis exams, assuming he passed. So Dilworth studied at home (the family had moved to 1882 South 10th East.) "Twelve to fifteen hours a day for [six] months I crammed information into my head--spelling, grammar, algebra, plane geometry, history and English." He came to school only for activities, games and meetings. He obtained a book with the Annapolis test question for the past fifteen years. "[I] solved every problem and answered every question in that book." In addition, he noticed the questions repeated every five years. "So I just figured that, five years back, I'd get that exam." Sure enough, that was the one he got. "I knew the answers. I knew it all by heart." And yet when he took the test, out of 4.0, he got 2.4, not quite passing. He received a letter telling him that, since he had come so close, if he could get another appointment, they would allow him to take the test again. Congressman Howell had been replaced by Milton H. Welling, who told Dilworth that with a first name like Seymour he must be a member of Dr. Seymour B. Young's family, and any member of that family could have the appointment. Dilworth dug into the books for three more months, then tried the test again. "I thought I was letter perfect. I knew every answer." And yet he only scored 2.6, barely passing.

"I was told to report June 15 to the Academy. Before borrowing the money to go East, I got an exam by the naval doctor in Salt Lake. He told me that I had a slight systolic heart murmur and that they probably would not take me."

I didn't believe him so I went to several other doctors, and three of them couldn't hear it and one of them could . . . They told me to do something like this, and I did it. "You leave this building," it was the twelfth floor of the Walker Bank building. "You walk home, four miles and a half, you cut wood all afternoon, (I had a woodpile and an axe), and then have your supper, and then after supper, wait awhile. Before you go to bed you will run a mile around the block, and take this dose of castor oil." So I took a big dose of castor oil and I ran around the block, a mile, that was [twice] around that block. "And the next morning you're to come up on a fast walk up to this building, and run the [twelve] flights . . . and come in our office." And they had three doctors there, and one was sure he could hear it and the other two didn't think they could.

But Grandpa Young said, "What's this?"

I said, "Grandpa, they say I have a systolic murmur."

"Let me hear it. Lie on this couch." So without any stethoscope or anything, he just stuck his ear against my chest, and he said, "Yes, you have it"--an old man 80 years old.

Dilworth was one of the speakers at his graduation. "It must have been immature speaking." He worked that summer on a crew surveying a railroad spur in Idaho, Firth to Goshen, six miles. "All that summer I pounded stakes and learned how to figure 'cut and fill' on the project.

We lived in a tent by the water tower at the Firth siding and ate our meals in a . . . freight car made into a dining car. We had a cook named Fred--an old-timer. It was an enjoyable summer and I learned a lot--about work and about men. These surveyors were foulmouthed, bragged about their sex exploits, profaned--but they were honest generally. I found I could withdraw mentally and lose myself in a book.

I went to the boss and said, "Do you think it's fair for me to do his rodding and him get the pay for it." And he said, "No, it isn't fair." I said, "Well, what you gonna do about it." He said, "Can't do anything." And I said, "Goodbye."

Artillery

At about age eighteen, Dilworth had a dream he did not understand. He saw a great field stretching as far as he could see, full of countless men stripped to the waist, "doing some rhythmic things--none alike--but in seeming unison, even so." During the War at Camp Kearny, he stood on the edge of the parade ground, two miles by one mile, and watched the 40th Division, forty thousand men. "All were doing calisthenics--all doing a different thing but all in rhythm. I saw my dream exactly."

Dilworth wanted to join the Army the fall of 1917. Seymour opposed him. "As I was not of legal age, I had to have his permission. I would not lie about my age." Seymour agreed to have Dilworth's grandfather, Seymour B. Young, Sr., settle it. Dilworth went to his home on 4th East and found him in his library. Dilworth explained his purpose and asked permission to go. He records the answer: "Your great-great-grandfather fought in the revolution. He thought the country was worth creating. Your grandfather fought in the Civil War. He thought the country was worth saving. I'm proud you'd want to make the world safe for democracy--by all means go." The 145th Regiment, originally envisioned as a machine-gun outfit but since reassigned as field artillery, was organizing at Fort Douglas with Utah volunteers, and Dilworth wrote Colonel Richard W. Young, a relative, about getting in. Colonel Young's response reads, "If an examination of your heart [showed] the murmur such as you describe, there would be absolutely no chance of your being accepted." Dilworth does not record the results of the exam, but he must have passed it, for he received one of the last posts in "E" Battery, made up of Salt Lake and Davis County men.

Seymour asked his son if he would like a father's blessing before he went. Dilworth said yes, he would. Seymour said, "We'll go to Grandfather; he's the patriarch of the family." They went to his home, where Seymour Sr. performed the blessing. "He promised me that if I would keep the commandments and behave, not one hair of my head would be harmed. He was prophetic for that is what happened."

R. Lamar Barlow, a fellow recruit, remembers mustering at the National Guard supply barracks on Pierpont. The sergeants would ask, "What size do you want," then plop down something on the counter, which might or might not bare any resemblance to the size requested. Dilworth was too late to uniform. "I wore a pair of my own 'khaki' pants, a borrowed army shirt, and a borrowed hat." The group marched from there to the train station, to the cheers and tears of spectators. "I was used to long steps and kept stepping on the heels of the man in front of me as we marched up Main Street, I for the first time."

Dilworth commenced a journal and kept it up throughout his training. He records that the towns they stopped in along the way applauded and sent out their school children and cheered. "This being heroized is quite the stuff," he writes. "I'll be getting so big-headed that I can't stand." In Los Angeles he and a friend swam, visited a "ten-cent dance hall," and toured a department store, bigger than anything they had seen. While the friend talked to the manager of the corset department, "I stood by and foolishly grinned, exchanging winks with the other clerks." Camp Kearny, a tent camp, was located on the upland desert northeast of San Diego. Dilworth, in his first journal entry after arriving, describes it as "bare and dreary on first glance, but one gets to like the place." Eight men shared one tent frame, each with a cot, mattress and blanket. Dilworth's entry notes three of his tentmates are "fine fellows as far as morals are concerned (they don't smoke or tell dirty stories). They are all a pretty good bunch who seem to be all there."

The journal mentions drill, lots of it, from early on, and practice with three inch guns, but without live ammunition. In January the big guns, the 4.7s, arrived. Lamar Barlow remembers real shells in these, which they fired over orange groves into a bank of hills. Dilworth records a shell misfiring in February, driving the breech of the gun a foot into the ground. The "number 2" man, who loaded and unloaded, just happened to be off getting more ammunition. "When he came back a moment later and saw what had happened he was pretty weak in the knees." They fired from pits, which they dug with shovel and pick. "The solid rock baffles our efforts and turns the soft point of the pick into little balls, which will not even make it feel badly." Dilworth speaks also of gas mask drills, made painful for him by a case of boils. He mentions guard duty at the stables, "seven to eleven on, eleven to seven off." He sat on an oat sack trying to recite "Crossing the Bar" to himself when it got too dark to read. He tells of shots for paratyphoid, and KP with the sore arm. "They stick a needle about two inches long up under the skin into the muscle. Then they shoot about a pint of germs into our systems. It is great dope--I don't think."

Dilworth spent his liberty in the mess tent or the YWCA hostess house, reading books and writing letters. He swam in the ocean, walking six miles overland to La Jolla to do it. He records "galas" and "smokers" in the mess tent. In one he sang in a quartet ("I didn't smoke," he assures us). Refreshments at another included "dainty sandwiches," composed of "two slices of bread--an inch thick--and a tough slice of army ham." He made a trip to San Diego, visiting the bay and browsing all afternoon in a bookstore. Sundays he attended meetings. Billy Sunday, a famous revivalist preacher, visited the camp--Dilworth found him flamboyant but effective. He refers several times to sermons by B. H. Roberts, who accompanied the troops as chaplain, here and in France. November 3 was payday. Dilworth received $163, all but $13 of it in Liberty Bonds. Up until now he had been borrowing stamps (fifty per month, he writes in his journal, at 3 cents apiece). He sent home tithing and a little money for the folks, which left him "so close to flat that I can't tell the difference."

By November 17th the soldiers were ready for their first parade. "It was a huge success from the standpoint of the general. Over 20,000 marched by the stands. Among others our governor was there . . . But in the ranks . . . the dust rose in such clouds that some of the time it was all that I could do to see the man in front of me. Dust behind, dust before, dust around. I breathed it until my lungs ached. My eyes were sore and my nose was clogged. [One] had to march at attention just the same." Governor Bamberger spoke, after which his daughter, "Miss Elsa," read personal messages to some of the men from the podium, a few of these "in the form of kisses." "Overhead twelve aeroplanes circled, wheeled and made evolutions in all shapes and forms." Dilworth fantasized about going to aviation school, though he suspected his heart would have kept him out.

Dust plagued the soldiers, sometimes whipped up by wind. The weather remained in the 80° range fall, winter and spring, but on November 20, Dilworth describes a blizzard, not of snow but of "fine particles of dust and sand from the surrounding country. We sometimes are able to see nearly 25 feet and the choking sensation is not much fun . . . I have literally eaten dust for the last three days. It gets in our clothes, our hair. It sifts through the folds of the tents. It is everywhere. It gets in the tightest boxes imaginable." During this storm Dilworth drew the job of disposing of a load of ashes. "That was the ashiest, dustiest . . . dirt that I ever choked or smothered in." The occasional rains cleaned up the air, though if they continued any length of time they turned the camp into a "sea of mud." Sometimes this meant tent-bound liberty, "with letters . . . books and noisy fellows for companions." Sometimes they drilled or went to the gun pits anyway. "Just a little taste of what we might expect in France if we ever go."

Dilworth begins to lament "the straight and narrow trail between the canteen, the mess hall, and my bed." He keeps his chin up, does his part to keep the mood jovial. "The idea is to smile and make the other fellow grin." But he grows weary. "This sham of existence, this keeping up of appearances just to be talking makes me tired at times. To always brag about what a girl one has, to tell how many letters we get . . . This being in love so bad that they can't live if a letter doesn't come every day is comical." Dilworth figures only one man in the tent ever loved a girl enough to marry her while in the army--no, he assures, he does not mean himself. "The little infatuations that wear off in about two weeks are the ones which make me laugh. Any fellow who will let anyone read the letters from a girl is not very much in love with her."

He waxes lyrical from time to time. He thinks longingly on the mountains of his childhood. "The rugged grandeur of their lofty summits is equaled by none on earth. Thank God I was born in them. Glad am I that I received a portion of their strength. Happy am I that the heritage of my fathers is vested in them." He worries over his parents. Of his mother, he wonders "how many nights she lies awake wondering what I am doing. Never mind, Mother, you need never feel afraid for the morals of me. I am wondering how many gray hairs my father is developing on my account. He says little but the drawn look on his face was enough to tell me that his love for me was too deep to be expressed or told." He feels "the bitterest regret" on being left out of the regimental football game at Thanksgiving, regret "that the greatest game in the world would never bark my shins or tingle my nose with dust. It would never again take all the hide off my face or leave me a lump on my elbow . . . But if it had left me crippled I am still thankful that I can look back on a little of it in my experience and say would that it had been more." He adds as an afterthought. "I only hope that in the great game of war, I won't look back and wish I had had more."

There was some illness, but otherwise, death was as remote as battle in Camp Kearny. Dilworth's romantic allusions to it are mostly in quoted songs. "We march or we don't, we will or we won't/ Go to town on Saturday Eve./ We wonder if even we'll go up to heaven /If dead, or below on 'French Leave.'" He does his best to imagine battle in a passage composed between ten minute turns on a pick:

In the trenches--the magic place. Overhead the shrapnel bursts and batters around like rain. Aeroplanes are searching the air and earth for artillery targets. The dull boom of the guns rumbles like thunder. The wind blows the dust of a thousand battles in our faces. It tells of the thousands . . . "out there" lying exposed to the elements and the blazing sun. The stench is terrible. We gasp as we endeavor to make the trench deeper so that we may find some small protection for our bodies. The bombs are finding us--one by one. We wonder who will be the next to go on the stretcher to the everlasting rest. There is a grave earnestness in the men's faces, a horrible endurance which must break sometime. It seems as tho we would go mad from the heat, the thirst, the smell, the driving--driving everlastingly--forward. Fighting inch by inch for some steel-torn piece of ground hardly large enough to die in.

The journal contains several such sketches. He depicts a symphony concert in all its programmatic splendor. He describes the contrapuntal bustle of catching a train. He gives all the furnishings of the YWCA hospitality house, and all the garnishings of that year's Thanksgiving feast. He philosophizes: "They say that variety is the spice of life, and I guess that Seymour D. is getting some of the spice. It is mostly nutmeg with myself as the chief nut. Perhaps the thyme will help to make the pepper cool and the salt sweet."

He attempts poetry:

If you're on guard, or on KP
What's the odds, to you--or me
The work is there, so do it
The time will come, you won't rue it
A happy grin, will make lead time
And takes the weight from off the mind

Which isn't poetical. I do wish that I could write pretty things and make this a really interesting book.

Dilworth as a diarist aims for the "sentiment," yet in Camp Kearny as the months drifted by the dominant mood became languor.

It is in times like this that one likes to sit and dream--aye, dream. There is no harm in thinking--nay, floating around in an ethereal way, nowhere in the land of no place, when time is forever and the road is lined with trees that are perpetually growing and giving leaves and blossoms to lovers . . . The whole world is one grand whirl.

One other passage finds Dilworth with old friends:

Books--the right kind--are the only reliable friends that a man has until he is married and then I suppose that a wife is the best. But books are the thing which make life worth living. The expression of feeling and thought in the works of the poets and authors make up partially for the hardships, pains, mental suffering, loss of those whom we love--either through death or circumstances. Then the books are a solace--and the only one for me. So bring on the books and you may have the pleasures, fickle friends, joys, hates, and other passions while I shall roam in the world of books until the time shall come when I retire to private life or another sphere in the after ages--Selah.

"Wish it moved," Dilworth writes in late April. Wish something would come in a hurry. Sick of it--yet we haven't started." He speculates they might be off by September. He reports a total of $360 earned. "What a waste. It is certainly a shame that humans can't live peaceably together." The next month he is promoted to corporal, spending the first week sick. "We are soon going to be in one of two places--," he says, "over there or home." This time he is right. In late May sixty men from the battery received word they were shipping out as part of the June Automatic Replacement--filling slots in other regiments in Europe of those disabled or killed. Lamar Barlow remembers the enthusiasm. He says there lacked the moodiness of World War II-- people had not had a taste of death yet. Noncoms, to Dilworth's disappointment, were to stay behind. "We are to whip the June draft into shape . . . Another seven or eight months in camp and I'll be bugs." Dilworth records a several-day march before the Replacements left, up the coast to Santa Ana, including swimming in the ocean during rest stops, and dances and diners given by the towns they passed through. They returned to an empty camp and waited the new arrivals. "We are here for at least six weeks and probably until next spring." On the 28th of July he reports that "while I'm writing I am on the jump" because of rumors they would soon be leaving. Many of the other regiments had gone. "We are scheduled to be the last to leave Kearny and make up the rear guard." The next entry, August 5, is from the train.

Dilworth crossed the Atlantic on the Scotian, an English ship. "We were part of a large convoy of forty ships or so," he writes in his history. "Off on the horizon on both sides were cruisers, while occasionally a destroyer would weave in and out among the ships. At stated intervals the ships would change course, to confuse the submarines. This was the famous zig-zag course. Forty ships changing in unison was something to behold. His journal describes their quarters in the steerage as "a place of darkness and peculiar odors. With all of the ports closed and locked, our only air is through a temporary ventilator, so that it gets pretty sour here before morning." He is surprised at the variety of the sea, now a "heavy blue-green liquid slowly swelling," now "like frozen tar which slowly change[s] shape and color." He admires the moon, and the sunsets, "which rival those of old Saltair." He mentions lifeboat drills and the fear of U- Boats. He speaks romantically of a ship on the horizon going the other way--"Ships that pass in the night."

They rounded Ireland on the north and made land at Liverpool, where they spent five days at a camp called Knotty Ash, with inadequate supplies. The journal ends abruptly here until after the war--soldiers were not allowed to keep diaries for fear they would fall into enemy hands. He fills in a few details of Liverpool after Armistice Day--throwing pennies at the children, seeing all the sights, including an organ recital at the town hall, "(but we Utah boys are spoiled for organ recitals)." He remembers his disgust at finding prices at the YMCA as high as anywhere else--a pattern that persisted in France. They crossed from Southampton to Le Havre at night, then traveled by train (forty men or eight horses to a boxcar) to Vouille, near Poitiers, and after two more weeks to Bordeaux and Camp de Souge to continue training on the 4.7 inch guns. "These were built like the 3 inch guns but were much larger and more awkward to handle. We never were good at shooting them, and they were less reliable. These guns were likely the reason why we did not get to the front. We never could shoot them straight."

Lamar Barlow, one of the Replacements, found himself in battle by mid-September. He and his group were given a one-hundred-yard stretch of ground to take care of--beyond that they weren't told a thing. Then on September 26, 1918, the Allies coordinated an offensive--at zero hundred hours, every gun on the front extending from Belgium to Switzerland went off at the same time. From that moment on there were no more rotations--he fought straight through, seven days a week. Beginning at 3:00 a.m. the captain would give the signal, and they would fire as fast as they could on the enemy trenches with medium and heavy artillery. When the enemy came up out of the trenches, the allies followed, took up new positions, and dug in. Horses were brought forward to haul the guns, then taken back again. The daytime was business as usual--machine gun fire, shrapnel. Barlow says he was hit three times. At night they dug trenches six feet long and deep enough that their bodies were at least flush with the ground. He remembers casualties by the hundreds, shell-shocked soldiers, sickness, filth, infection, unsanitary conditions. Dilworth and his battery were a long way from any of this.

Dilworth says the German submarines must have been effective in keeping supplies out, because their rations were poor. "We lived on carrots alone for three weeks one time." They got bread and cheese from markets, picked blackberries from hedges, and bought milk warm from farms. Dilworth, who savored these roadside meals, says they soon learned "what blackberries could do to a person unwashed." He tells of whittling the mold from one cheese until the cheese was mostly gone. Once Dilworth approached a chateau. A woman sat outside the kitchen doorway milking, the cow's head and forequarters inside the door. He pointed to the cow, the pail, his canteen, and said "Du lait? Du lait?" She didn't understand until he got down beside her and pantomimed. "Oh, oui oui oui!" she said and filled his canteen. He thanked her and tried to pay, but she wouldn't allow it. When he insisted she led him around the cow and inside, sat him on a chair, pulled a box from a bureau, and carefully unwrapped the portrait of a young man in uniform. Dilworth surmised this was her son, and that it was for him she wore her black arm band. She pulled a bottle of expensive wine from the shelf, poured a thimbleful in each of two glasses, toasted him, "Vive l'Amérique!" and drank. "Vive la France!" he said, and held the glass to his lips, but did not drink. She seemed disturbed. He tried to explain the Word of Wisdom, but couldn't make her understand his English. He gave her his glass, took hers, and gestured towards the pail. "Oh, oui," she finally said, and filled the glass with still-warm milk. "Vive l'Amérique!" she toasted him once more. "Vive la France!" he said and drank.

Dilworth's unit was ordered to the front on November 1st, but before they could pack up and ship out, the Armistice was signed. "I took part in the celebration on Armistice night. Our band marched in a parade in the city and our job was to form a hollow square within which marched [the] band playing music. The guard was to keep the French girls from trying to kiss and hug the band members so they could not play." The parade finished at the Esplanade des Quinconces, packed with fifty or sixty thousand people, as he remembers, for the main celebration. The esplanade is dominated by the Monument des Girondins, a bronze statue of a woman, larger than life, in Grecian gowns, perched atop a white column several stories high. Dilworth says a drunken man climbed out on her upstretched hand, where he led the crowd in La Marseillaise. "He swayed--you'd think he was going to fall off, but he never did."

Then it was more waiting. Once one of Dilworth's friends suggested they go to "'Hill 13,' the army house of prostitution, just to look in. I refused. He went, but would not look me in the eye the next day." Another time, after a half-day's liberty in Bordeaux, Dilworth was waiting for the truck to take him back to camp.

One of my battery mates came along and stood waiting under a dim street lamp. He did not see me and I kept quiet in the dark doorway. Soon a French girl came along and spoke to him in the universal language. He looked up and down the street, and seeing no one, went with her into the darkness. Later, when we arrived in Salt Lake City, I saw a woman, carrying a baby, rush up to him and thrust the baby into his arms. I stood watching and wondered what he was thinking--I'm still wondering.

They waited out the great flu epidemic of 1918 in pup tents in the sand hills of Camp de Souge, cooking their rations on tin can stoves. Rumors flew--there may have been some question as to whether these green soldiers should be made part of the army of occupation. (Lamar Barlow felt bad that his group, who had seen battle, had to stay behind.) Dilworth played football for the regimental team at his old position of fullback. They line up a half-dozen games against other bases in Southern France, going undefeated and un-scored-against. The team was to travel to Paris to play for the championship of the American Expeditionary Forces when the sailing orders came. They left Bordeaux on the Santa Teresa, a United States "shipping board" boat, on December 24th. "Very few of us ate Christmas dinner." Dilworth felt queasy but made it alright. Even with three-deep bunks he found the ship more comfortable than the Scotian. "The crossing was pleasant and warm for we were southerly most of the way, but the last night out we nearly froze as the ship left the Gulf stream and wallowed through the cold North Atlantic."

They arrived in New York Harbor on January 6th. Hence to Camp Merritt.

[Here] we were deloused . . . Stripped naked we walked down a narrow corridor where at one point a cup of coal oil was poured on our heads. We then rubbed it in "good" and entered a cold shower with a piece of soap trying to get it out. Our clothes were given a steam bath and when they came out of the tightly packed barrack bags . . . they were permanently wrinkled as folded. We looked bad, but clean. I never had lice in France and did not need the cleaning but had to have it anyhow.

Interlude

In early 1919, Dilworth took his second railroad job. A member of a "maintenance of way party," his duties included "watching" the track between Salt Lake and Pocatello, which the party did from a three-wheeled track motor car. The car had seats for three crew members and a box in the middle for instruments and the engine. It lacked a windshield, which made travel difficult in summer, when the grasshoppers multiplied. The crew also planned new business spurs, including surveying the sights, drawing the blueprints, and overseeing the construction.

In his history, he describes himself at twenty-one as "girl hungry," eager for female talk and laughter, though "I had not dated." (It may have been around this time that Dilworth broke things off with Afton Love. Phyllis Wells, a cousin, remembers him at his home, still in uniform, and Afton hovering near him, sitting on the arm of his chair, putting her arm around him, and him not reciprocating. "He was not in love with Afton Love," she discerned. "We all knew that.") Dilworth describes himself as moral and idealistic at this time, but lacking a spiritual center. "No one could have had higher ideals than I did, nor was cleaner minded . . . I had read all the books. I had been good and faithful to the principles, but I did not really know how to pray, and certainly I was conceited to a certain extent."

He drew the daily task of carrying blueprints from the Union Pacific Station to the office on South Temple and Main and bringing back others. Typically he carried books to work, which he read along the way. Each day as he passed two small houses set back off the street at about 150 West, he would hear a tapping on the windows and look up to see a girl in each, arm extended, gesturing to him to come and see. He hesitated no more than an instant, putting his nose back into the book and passing on. "One night during the summer I was sitting at home reading when my mind suddenly turned to those two houses. I felt that somehow I had to know what went on in [them]. My imagination was stirred almost beyond control. I had an overpowering feeling that I had to go to those houses. I arose (9:00 p.m.), walked four miles and stood on the sidewalk in front of [them]. The blinds were down, but light showed around the blinds. I stood there for about ten minutes."

Dilworth writes that he had not felt tempted in the army, but that this time the fire was hotter. "That summer, my constant passing by those houses plus some reading of sex material . . . lowered my resistance. That compulsion to go that night was powerful--and it was neither me nor my nature. That was the most powerful force I have ever felt." But he resisted. "Even while the urge was on I turned and walked back home. The further I walked, the less the desire pressed."

Not long afterward the bishop arrived at Seymour's house to say he wanted to call his son on a mission. If Dilworth was "conceited," Heaven conspired in the manner of his call to teach him humility. Seymour was glad to hear the bishop wanted to send his son, and called for Dilworth. The bishop said, "'Dilworth? I don't want Dilworth, I want Hiram." Seymour answered, "Bishop, in my family my oldest boy goes first, so take Dilworth or nobody." The bishop took Dilworth.

Dilworth's mission journal doesn't mention the incident, but he must have fretted. He frets a little fifty years later while writing his history. "What he had against me could only have been that I was noisy in meetings. I made the error of talking and kidding the girls on the back row in church. I guess I was a nuisance but all he would have had to do was to tell me about it and I would have quit."

He informed his mother that he would refuse a call to Missouri, Arkansas or Louisiana. Here the missionaries had been persecuted--the Saints had been driven from Missouri--and he had simply made up his mind he would not go. The word in the foyer was that a group of new missionaries would be accompanying President Grant to the dedication of the Hawaiian temple and then finishing their missions in the Islands. News reached Dilworth, perhaps through one of his high-placed relatives, that he would be part of the group. He liked the sound of that. "There were grass skirts and ukuleles there--and I was romantic." His call, dated October 14, 1919, reads "Dear Brother: You have been recommended as worthy to fill a mission, and it gives us pleasure to call you to labor in the Central States Mission. . . ." The mission at that time covered the states of Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Dilworth told his mother he was going to have that fixed and walked downtown to do it. "I thought it would be easy. Uncle Rudger Clawson was President of the Twelve, and Grandpa Young was the senior President of the Seventy, with Uncle Lee as a member. I went up to the building, started to enter and get it done, but somehow felt it wasn't right. After standing on the steps and walking around the building two or three times, I walked back home and let the appointment stand."

Dilworth's grandfather did make his influence felt in one way. He asked Dilworth one day if he were a seventy. When Dilworth said no, he told him to have his bishop start action. "Just before I left [for the mission field], Grandfather said, 'Has the bishop done anything about ordaining you a seventy?' I said, 'No, Sir.' He said, 'Sit in this chair.' Then he called in Brother J. Golden Kimball from the next room, and they laid hands on me and ordained me a seventy. Then Grandpa said, 'Now go tell your bishop you are a seventy.' I did not tell the bishop."

Writing of the time prior to his mission, Dilworth says, "I think that I did not have the spirit of the Holy Ghost. I had never experienced the warm glow." Yet in July came just the sort of prompting he would receive at many of the turning points in his life. "I learned that the ward choir was having a choir party up Lambs Canyon. I hinted around to one of our neighbor girls until she invited me to go with her." After breakfast at the lake at the head of the canyon, the group set out to climb the ridge in back of the camp. They overtook another party along the way, and joined them toward the summit. Dilworth's date, wearing "wool army britches, wrapleggings . . . and a pair of red three-inch high heel dancing pumps," was soon near heat exhaustion in the morning sun, and had soon lost her heels. Dilworth, coaxing her gently up the slope, had his eyes on another young woman, who bounded from place to place "like a gazelle," always seeming to have just lit on whatever boulder he happened to look on. This girl was sensibly dressed in men's blue jeans, hiking boots and a man's hat with a feather stuck in the brim. "I thought that if I had that girl as a partner, I would be able to really climb." Dilworth left his date to talk with the girl a few moments. Perhaps at her suggestion he climbed out to try to get her a little pine gum from a juniper, nearly falling in the process. He stumbled upon her again under the branch of a tree on the way down and slipped in beside for a moment, where they spoke of the columbines.

In camp his date went to sleep under a tree and he tried to take a nap himself. Suddenly, just off a little ways, there sat his "gazelle," among friends, gay, flushed and brown. His journal reminisces, "I wondered what excuse I could find for going over and talking to you. Then you said that you wished that you had some willow for a whistle." He proposed a search, though he knew there were no willows at that altitude--and wondered whether she didn't know, too. His journal reads, "I remember of picking a large bunch of wild flowers for you. I remember my three French words and your reply in Spanish." (Dilworth's French consisted of "potatoes," "beefsteak," "cheese," "butter," "bread." Her fluent answer lasted five minutes.) "I did not ask her name," he remembers in his history. "She apparently knew mine." She embarrassed him by telling him they had already been introduced on a streetcar. That afternoon the party broke down into water fights "with my new friend trying to organize the rest of the girls to give me a dunking." When his own party began to gather around the truck for the ride down to the valley, Dilworth considered staying behind to ride down with her, but knew he couldn't really. So he accompanied his date to her house next door to his own, then walked the thirty paces home.

As I walked in the house, Mother came to the door. She said, "You are home early."

"Yes, Mother."

"Did you have a good time?"

"Yes," I said. Then I heard myself say . . . "I've seen the girl I'm going to marry."

"Oh, who is she?"

"I don't know . . . But I am!"

I hadn't thought those thoughts nor was I thinking them, and I was about as much surprised as Mother was when I heard myself say them. At the time I did not understand the way in which the Spirit prompts one to hear messages. I have since learned that this was one prompting that was true.

Dilworth's call instructed him to start for his mission November 12th, 1919, but apparently there was some delay, as he and his group did not leave until January 13th or 14th, 1920. He received his endowment in the Salt Lake Temple earlier that month. "No one went with me. Father was inactive and was too honest about it to try to obtain a recommend. Neither he nor Mother nor any of my relatives nor the ward leader said anything about it. I just decided to go one morning and went." He describes himself as "unemotional about it . . . No one ever explained anything to new applicants and they went in with no idea of what to expect . . . The temple ceremony at that time was not as refined as it is today. It was more blunt in its penalties, and it could and often did shock new recipients of the covenant until they would come out of the temple ready to give up." He sees another side: "I hadn't gotten humble. That is probably the reason that I was cold." His farewell, held Friday, January 9th, featured a variety of musical numbers, both vocal and instrumental, according to the printed program. Speakers included J. M. Whitaker, "Dr. Seymour B. Young," the bishop and Dilworth himself. There followed a time for "voluntary contributions." Dilworth refers to the affair in his journal as "that blooming farewell." He alludes to "the blunder I made there," something to do with Gladys, "and that speedy try to make it right afterwards in the dark." He spent an evening with her in Kaysville shortly before his departure, missing the train back to Salt Lake and having to sleep on a sofa in the living room of the house where she boarded. He arranged to wave at her when he passed through Kaysville, only to find his train went via Denver.

Shifting

President Samuel O. Bennion met with Dilworth's party of a dozen or so new missionaries at the mission office in Independence. A stout man in a white suit and a walrus mustache, he peered at the new arrivals one by one over wire-rimmed spectacles, assigning each to his area of labor. "Elder Jones, you go to St. Louis. Elder Pe