AGNESS LORNA SESSIONS
Daughter of Mary Janet Nelson and Adolphus Sessions
My parents, Adolphus and Mary Janet Sessions, had eleven children,7 daughters and 4 sons. I had six sisters, three brothers and two half brothers. Charles was one of my half brothers and the other one died at birth. Dad’s first wife died when the baby was born. Her name was Rachel Emma Hickens.
My father was the first boy baby born in Heber City. My mother was born in Charleston, Utah, she moved and settled in Bysville, which is now known as Daniels Creek. She lived in Daniels Creek until her folks left and went to Victor, Idaho. She married and stayed in Heber City.
My father was a farmer in Heber, raised cattle, had a good garden with raspberries, currants and other things. He always took first prize at the Heber Fair for the pumpkins he raised.
My mother and sisters used to go up when the berries were ready to be picked. I never picked them, but stayed at home, and cleaned the house and fixed the evening meal for then when they came home at night. One day when they were picking the berries, my oldest brother heard a noise and it was a Rattlesnake. He heard it make its warning close to my mother, he jumped and pushed her back, almost knocked her down just as the snake struck at her. My brother was able to kill the snake. My father thought that was too big a chance to take for us to be bit by a Rattlesnake, so he pulled all the berries up.
Our father paid us ten cents a row to weed the garden, we also pulled Sugar Beets for a dollar a day, and thought that was good money.
I can remember how my father popped popcorn. He used to sit there in the evenings and he liked to play the game of Rook. He would say to us kids, “I’ll play a game of Rook with you tonight. I’ll pop the popcorn if you girls will make the popcorn balls.” He popped such great big kernels of popcorn, so big and good and us girls always fixed popcorn balls to eat in the evenings in the winter time.
Many times we would go up on the farm when we were kids. Sometimes in the summer time when my dad was haying, he stayed at the farm at nights and he didn’t come home. One brother came home and milked the cows. One thing my Dad enjoyed in his life was to fish. A river ran through our farm and at nights after they were through haying dad would fish along the riverbank and would bring fish home.
My mother took care of her family and worked at the Heber Hospital. She worked when they needed her as a nurse for the sick. When there was anyone in our neighborhood who needed help, she was always the first one to go and offer help.
My mother was also a person who had great love for everybody, especially little children. I remember Mr. Thager who lived here in Orem, she had known him all her life. When we went to his funeral and went to the cemetery, we were talking to people there and she told them she had about 89 grandchildren and 65 great-grandchildren. No matter how many she had, she was always happy to see them and said she never had too many. Her Patriarchal Blessing said her posterity would be as numerous as the sands of the sea.
As I grew up I remember going to the library many times getting books for my mother, who really loved to read books. It seemed like every other night we were going to the library, my girlfriends and I or, or one of my sisters and getting books for my mother. She always liked to read the Bible and church books, and she liked to study them.
On Sunday mornings, when Sunday came, she didn’t tell us all, as big a family as we were, she didn’t say “it’s time to get ready for church; you are going” she just called us all when it was time to get up. We got up and got ourselves ready to go to church, if we didn’t want to go we didn’t go. But if we didn’t go to church we didn’t go outside to play. After dinner was over, she would make us sit down and she read the scriptures to us all afternoon so we would get our church in anyway. If we wanted to go out and play with our friends we knew we’d have to go to church.
I worked in the Primary 43 years and loved all the years (by the time she was released the last time it was over 50 years). I’ve held other jobs in different wards for many different organizations but my love for the gospel still goes back to teaching the children in Primary.
I was taught as a kid to work. Each one of my brothers and sisters and myself had a job that we had to do before we went to school. We each did our own separate job, and we were not allowed to leave to go to school until our work was done My job was to see that all the bedrooms in the home were cleaned every morning. My sisters were to do the dishes and see that the rest of the house was straightened up. We would hurry home from school to do the assigned chores. My job, was to fix a meal for my family, my mother would fix a certain part of it and then I would finish.
She always made us get down on our hands and knees to scrub the floors. She wouldn’t let us have a mop stick in the house and taught us the right way to clean and we always knew how to do it. She was a hard worker and my father was too. They taught all of us kids to do the same.
I remember when we were kids and had an upstairs in our home. Our house caught on fire in the middle of the night. I had a sister who slept upstairs. My father was hurrying us all out of the house. We couldn’t find the sister who was upstairs. My mother ran up the stairs to see if she was in the bed. She had to roll down the stairs. My sister had jumped out of the window. It wasn’t far to the ground and she wasn’t hurt. So we finally found her and got mother out. All it did was burn the roof out of our house. The fireman was there and put it out. I remember having to go to Daniels Creek and live with some of my relatives until our home was build back up. It was in the fall and we going to school so I had to ride the bus. My mother and father stayed in Orem with my married brother who didn’t live far from us, and his family, until they could get our home built and we could go back to live in it.
One of my brothers was very particular about his clothes when we ironed them. He didn’t like a wrinkle in them. And if we didn’t iron them just right, he wouldn’t wear them. It got so that when I had to iron them I would leave them to the very last ones and if I didn’t do them I told my mother she would have to do them. She was the only one who could iron his clothes to please him. We girls couldn’t iron good enough to suit him. He was very particular when he put on his clothes and went out. Maybe it was a good thing to be that way, but sometimes he could be a little too particular.
I remember when my brother-in-law died in Park City, Francis Cunningham. It was in the wintertime and my parents took the team and went up to Park City. We had to go up over the hill. The road didn’t go like it does now. We had to go up over the hill. We had to go in a sleigh. My mother and father told me I could come to the funeral and I would have to ride the stage. I went and made reservations to ride the stage. The morning I was to leave I went up to catch the stage. Because I was a kid, the driver wasn’t going to let me go. We had to go in a buggy up until we hit the hill. Then we had to change from there into a sleigh to go over the hill. He said he was loaded and couldn’t take me. I said I’d had this reservation for two days and he wasn’t going to kick me off. I crawled on the stage anyway and he couldn’t get me off. So I went to Park City to the funeral.
When we got over the hill in the sleigh, after you got to the Deer Valley in Park City, then you’d have to unhook off of the sleigh and back on to the buggy and go down Deer Valley and into Park City. That’s the way we traveled when we were kids. But sometimes it was a lot of fun traveling that way. We used to heat hot bricks and put in the sleigh to keep our feet warm when we went to the dances. That’s the way we went in the wintertime in sleighs.
We always heated rocks or bricks and put them at our feet when we went to the dances. We had one guy in Heber who used to take his sleigh, put a cover on the top of it, his name was John Jods. He would just fill his sleigh full of kids and take it to Daniels Creek, to Midway, to Charleston, and he would just take young kids to dances and bring them home. He never used to charge them anything. He and his wife both went. He just enjoyed taking them. He always had a sleigh load full of kids to take to these dances. If you went with him, you had to return home with him. That was one rule he made. He always delivered you home. We had many a good time going to dances, us kids did, going with him. He was a good friend of the family. All the kids liked him and his wife because they were a lot of fun to travel with and go to the dances with.
I never remember my mother or father ever spanking any of us. I never remember my mother or father ever speaking a cross word to each other or ever having trouble between them.
I can remember back when I was little and my twin brother died. We held his funeral in the winter time with snow on the ground. We went to the cemetery in a surrey buggy, a two-seated one, with a top on it, and fringe all around the top. He was only about two months old when he died. I can remember going to his funeral and all about it. I was quite young at the time, but I can still remember. He was a twin to Rose. They were ten years younger than I.
And I can remember my youngest brother Irvin, who watched my father brand some cattle on the place. There was one small calf that wasn’t branded and he thought the calf needed to be branded. It was laying in our yard with a stack of straw that had been thrashed. He went out and built a fire in the straw stack and put the branding iron in to brand the calf and burned up most of the straw stack.
I can remember when we were kids and we used to thrash the grain. When the thrashers came to our home, we usually had them for three days. When they were there, our family had to prepare all the meals, three meals a day for the thrashers. When they thrashed the grain in those days they had a round circle and a team of horses. The horses would go around and around In this circle. That’s how they thrashed the grain. I can remember going out in our back lot when they thrashed the grain and watching the thrashers thrash out our grain. That was many years ago.
When we were kids we didn’t do too much harming and fighting among ourselves. I guess because we didn’t have it in our home. I remember my sister, Vilda, saying that when she didn’t do what my mother asked her to, she would have to sit under the table and tear carpet rags. My mother sewed them and she would have roll them up in balls. That was the kind of punishment we used to get when we didn’t mind or do as we should. We had lots of good times together when we were kids. We used to play in the evenings with all the neighborhood kids. We used to play kick the can, hide and go seek, and all the fun games kids used to play.
When we were kids we liked to go chokecherry hunting with all the neighbors around us. Our way of travel was by the horse and buggy, or wagon, whichever they had. We used to go up the canyons and take our families in bunches and take picnic lunches. We’d camp where there was a stream of water for the day and pick all the Chokecherries we wanted. Then we would all sit down and enjoy lunch together, then put our berries in the wagon and return home. Every Fall we would take these trips and make Chokecherry jelly.
We had good neighbors and they all enjoyed each other. If one neighbor killed a beef, or had a good garden he always shared with the other neighbor. The neighborhood we were raised in, everybody shared with everybody.
I enjoyed going to school and never had any problem in school. My family always encouraged us to go school and learn all we could. In the wintertime when we started school we went to the Heber School, which was three blocks from our home. In the wintertime when the snow was deep, my father used to hook up the team and take all the kids in the neighborhood on a sleigh to school so that we wouldn’t have to walk out in the snow. I can remember when it was real cold they couldn’t heat the school building and we’d have to turn around and go back home.
When I was out of school, we went eight years to grade school, we had no junior high school. I went to Wasatch High School and walked eight blocks to high school. They didn’t have hot lunches and no kids took their lunches to eat at school. We would walk home to get our lunch and walk back in the hour we had. If my mother wasn’t going to be home, my father would always be there and he would always cook us kids something hot for lunch so we always had a hot meal.
I remember when Christmas time came, my mother used to make lots of Gingerbread Boys and other kinds of cookies so she could be sure to treat all the little kids who came to her home on Christmas. She didn’t want any kid to come in her house on Christmas morning without some little gift to give them. I remember that my father would always buy a case of oranges and we would have apples, so that if she ran out of cookies we would have something else to give them. At 5:00 in the morning we’d hear the kids knock on our door and had many good times on Christmas day when we were kids. Sometimes we didn’t have much, but we always enjoyed Christmas.
My sister Chloe learned to play the piano and mother wanted me to learn to play the piano but I wouldn’t. I wanted to play the Violin, but mother couldn’t stand violin music, she said it reminded her of funerals She wouldn’t let me play the Violin so I wouldn’t play the piano, just because I was stubborn, and I wouldn’t learn any.
When I was through High School, I went to California with my oldest sister and her husband to help her with her children. I lived around Marysville, California for a while. While I was there, I worked in the peach cannery. When we left Marysville, we went to San Francisco where I worked at Laytons Cafeteria. There I met and married, on October 25, Charles Edward Gettle. We had two children, Ruth and Dale. When we separated, I came back to Heber to live with my parents. My oldest daughter from my first marriage, Ruth was married to Bob Richardson, Dale was married to Bernice Crook. After I came back, I went to the Heber Hospital to work until I married Ralph Henry Gines.
After I was married, we raised our family in Woodland and they attended school in Kamas, which is five miles from Woodland. They rode the bus each day to school. When Junior graduated from Kamas High School, when he was ready to start to BYU, we decided we would sell our place in Woodland and move to Provo. Our second son graduated from Provo High School. We moved to Linden, and our daughter graduated from Pleasant Grove High School. We then moved or Orem and our other son and daughter graduated from the Orem High School. Our son Boyd went into the service before he graduated but he worked for a Certificate of Merit and completed his work in high school.
Then Ralph had three years of college and went to England on a mission for two years. Our second son had two years of college at BYU and then went on a mission in the states. Boyd was in the service and came back on furlough and was married to Sibyl Huntsman. While Junior was still on his mission, Donna Rae, our older girl, married Grant Gibson. When Jerry returned off of his mission, he married DeAnn Carter. When he had one child or two, he went back and finished his schooling at BYU to graduate. Russell went one year to Cedar City, then he decided to become a carpenter and work as a carpenter with his dad, because that was the kind of work he liked. Then Karen, when she graduated from Orem High School, went to LDS Business College. When she graduated from there, she went to Washington, D.C. to live with Junior for a while. Then when she returned from there she was married to Jay Keeler.
While we lived in Woodland, we went down on Ralph’s mother’s farm. His mother’s house was in the middle, we lived in a small home built on one side, and his brother lived on the other side. One day Ralph was in the field hauling hay from our upper field. He had Boyd with him, Ralph Jr. and Jerry were in school, Donna Rae and Russell were at home and we had a baby by the name of Melvin, who was asleep on a little bed by the kitchen. I went out to the chicken coop to gather eggs.
It was very cold that day. I didn’t even have a fire in our kitchen stove, it was very hot in our house. I had one of my nieces come to visit and she kept telling me how hot our house was. So we kind of opened the door to cool the house off, I didn’t have a fire but had some bread in pans ready to bake. I thought I would go out and gather the eggs, take care of them, then go back and build a fire and bake the bread. It just seemed to keep getting hotter. So I went out and while I was gathering the eggs, Donna Rae came out carrying Russell, and I told her to get him right back in the house because he’d had a terrible earache for two or three days. She just looked at me kind of funny.
When I looked back I saw that the house was all ablaze. I ran, but I couldn’t get in the house. I broke the bedroom window out, but I couldn’t get through that. The kitchen was all smoke and flames and I couldn’t get through that. I ran to the back and the ax was lying there and I started to chop a hole right through the wall. By that time, Ralph was there. He’d stopped at the neighbors and they had come running out to say our house was on fire. They called the fire department and they were there. The men soon put the ax through to where the baby was, but he had died from smoke inhalation. We didn’t save anything in our house, it was all ruined. What the fire didn’t ruin the water did. But we did buy another place and moved up on the hill. We fixed it all up and there we lived until we moved to Orem.
When our second son, Jerry, was about three years old, my husband Ralph took him and Junior to the upper field to water. He left them sitting on the ditch bank while he went further up along the ditch to turn the water in. there was a dam there where he left them sitting, and a board there by the dam. The water was quite deep there in the irrigating ditch and he told the two boys to sit there while he went up a little further in the ditch and turned the water, and then he would be back after them.
There was a little house there that his brother used to live in, and when he reached the corner of the house he turned around to see how the kids were. When he looked back there was only one of the boys sitting on the ditch bank. He hollered to Junior and asked him where Jerry was, and Junior answered, “ I don’t know I saw him start to walk across the board and then I didn’t see him anymore.” So he ran back and when he reached back there, he saw Jerry’s hat come to the top of the ditch and he fished him out. He didn’t have any life in him. His brother was down in the field and he screamed and hollered for him to get some help, but he couldn’t hear him. So he pumped the water out of him, jumped in the car, and hurried home with him. I was hanging clothes on the clothes line and he hollered and told me that Jerry had drowned.
We ran over, my sister-in-law Wilma Gines and I, took the scissors and cut all his clothes and pulled them off. We wrapped him in a blanket and jumped in her car and headed to the doctor’s with him. When we reached the crossroads to either take the oiled road or the dirt road, we decided to take the dirt road because it might be quicker. When we started over the dirt road, Jerry started to throw up the water. I was wet and there was water all on the bottom of the car. When we reached the doctor’s office, I ran in with him and the doctor checked him over. He was rolling his eyes. The doctor said he had gone down twice, one more time down and he wouldn’t be here. He said he would be all right, to take him home, and there wasn’t any more water in him. He said what saved his life, was us taking the dirt road and getting all the water out of him.
So we brought him home, put him to bed, and he laid like that the rest of the day. He didn’t move. He’d just roll his eyes back in his head. The next day he was quite a bit better but it took him about three or four days to show much life.
I could tell you one about Boyd when Clinton hit him with the car. It almost killed him. When our boy Boyd was quite small, he liked to go a lot with his Uncle Clinton Gines. One day he came up to the house and my husband had been gone for about a week. When he returned Clinton brought him home. He came in the house and we talked a while. When Clinton left to go, Boyd ran out to follow him and got in front of the car. Clinton didn’t see him and started his car up and knocked him down. He went over him, but the only place he hit him was with the bumper none of the wheels went over. I saw it and screamed and jumped off the porch. Boyd wasn’t hurt, he was just more scared than anything. He had just a little scratch on his back where the bumper had hit him. But Clinton was so shook up that he just shook all over, he didn’t know he hit him. He wanted me to take Boyd to the doctor, but I knew he was all right, I didn’t take him. But Clinton was shook up and he wouldn’t go home for three or four hours until he knew there was nothing wrong with him and he was all right.
Sometimes with your children you have a lot of laughs and a lot of experiences. Our son Boyd took our daughter Donna Rae, when I was outside, and cut all of the top of her hair off. He made it look like a Mohican haircut all through the top of her hair. She had quite long hair, and it was curly. When I came in saw her hair all cut off, I was pretty upset. She had the scissors and was just going to cut his off. But it wouldn’t have hurt him so much since he was a boy, as it did the haircut he gave her.
Our son Jerry was quite a kid to get into the cupboard. Every time we’d bake a cake or something and go out and leave it on the cupboard, he’d get it. He was a great kid to like cake to eat. If it was still hot, it didn’t make any difference. He’d cut off a piece and eat it before I could even get it frosted. So you have quite a lot of laughs in your life in a family, as well as a lot of problems and trouble, too.
I remember that when Junior would do something wrong he’d always say it wasn’t he who did it, it was his little dog.
When we took Russell to have his tonsils taken out, we’d known a long time that they would have to come out. The day we took him, he wouldn’t wear anything but his Sunday clothes because he thought that was going to be something real important for him.
Junior, Boyd and Jerry had their tonsils out at the same time in the doctor’s office. In those days we never took our kids to the hospital, we just took them to the doctor’s office. Everybody said we couldn’t take care of all three of them on the same day, I said I could take care of three as easy as one. As soon as we were able, we brought them home, Jerry slept all afternoon, Boyd never shut up talking all afternoon and Junior had a lot of scar tissue in his mouth, and it was pretty sore, he didn’t have too much to say. We were lucky and got along fine with all three of them.
Three or four days after their tonsils were out they were outside playing around. Their dad went up on Bench Creek to get a load of hay. The three boys wanted to go and I said no, but they told their dad I said they could go, and he took them. I thought they were in for trouble, that they might have a hemorrhage or something over it. But they went up on the hay rack and came back on the load of hay. The doctor came to see them the next morning and when I told him the experiences he just about croaked. He checked them all over real good and said there’re sure tough little kids. It never hurt them a bit.
When our daughter Donna Rae got her tonsils out, she was in Pleasant Grove High School and was having so much of a sore throat. The doctors in Kamas said she never needed them out, but because of her sore throat when we go there, they removed them. She was a long time waiting for her throat to heal. It seemed like her skin wouldn’t heal or the soreness. They had to spray her throat and everything. She missed about a week of school and then there was a vacation. By the time the vacation time was over she was ready to go back to school. But she still had to go about twice a week and have the doctor take care of her throat to heal it.
When our daughter Karen had her tonsils out, we lived in Provo. She kept running a temperature, but wouldn’t let a doctor in Provo take her tonsils out, so I had to take her back to Kamas to Dr. Bingham to have her tonsils out. She really liked him.
We’d had a quite a good experience with Dr. Bingham. He was our family doctor and had taken good care of her one time when she was run over with both wheels of an Oldsmobile car and they didn’t think that she would live. We had the Elders the night before they did surgery on her. The Elder that administered to her was an elderly man, and after he blessed her he told us she would live, she wasn’t going to die. I knew she wouldn’t die.
People who came to see her in the hospital called her a miracle child because she was alive. We had many people come to see her while she was in the hospital that we didn’t ever know. The Doctor told me that when she grew up she might never be able to have any children, and if she did, they would be taken Caesarean.
We had to have X-rays all along as she was growing up. The doctor who took the X-rays told me that whoever took care of her had done a wonderful job We know that he did, but that it was also the hand of the Lord. It was a wonderful piece of surgery that was done. He would like to have seen her X-rays but we didn’t get them. He said her body seemed to be in perfect condition. When she married she didn’t expect to have children.
When she did expect her first child and the doctor was quite concerned, he wrote to Coalville to get her X-ray pictures so he could see them. But they didn’t have them, they only keep them so many years and then destroy them. They took X-rays of her and took them to Salt Lake and had three doctors study them with him. They decided she wouldn’t need to have the baby Caesarean. They wanted me to come over and talk to him which I did.
He told me they weren’t going to take it Caesarean, but would let her have it normal. He talked to me about the accident, and I said “You don’t dare do that, Dr. Murdock.” And he said “We’re going to try it. But don’t worry about it If she can’t have it normal, I have a doctor in Salt Lake, a very good one, standing by to take it. There’s nothing to worry about.”
Once she did have the baby, it was born a normal birth. She has five children now, and everyone born a normal birth. And we know that it had to be the hand of the Lord that caused it to be perfect. Our Bishop, Bishop Thompson, came to the hospital the next day after she was run over and she had the operations. He administered to her and he asked the Lord in his blessing that her body be made the same as it was in the beginning. Her blessing was certainly answered. It is a strong testimony of the gospel.
I remember the day when my parents went to the temple and were sealed together and we children were all sealed to my parents. We were taken in a couple or three cars to take us down. I drove in the car that went down Parley’s Canyon.
My mother and father and the younger children came in a car that was one of these Model-T Fords that just had the top on it. It was open along the sides. They came down the Provo Canyon and was in the summer time. When they were coming out through Orem here, along the canal which wasn’t cemented then, it was just a dirt canal, something happened. I don’t remember just what it was, but they were coming with Johnny Montgomery, he was our neighbor who brought them down. They tipped over in the canal. A car passing at the time saw them and hurried and got them all out. There wasn’t much water in the canal and not one of them was hurt. They got the car backed out and pushed back up on the road, it wasn’t even hurt just kind of a dent or two in it. They wiped the water out of it and got in it and finished their journey to Salt Lake so we could all go to the Temple the next morning.
I remember when they were so late coming to Salt Lake and we waited and waited for them to come. I must have been about 14 then. Chloe was married and I had Bertie Mae with me. Chloe was sealed to Francis. Francis had died and Chloe was sealed to Francis. They had Bertie Mae and her sealed to Francis that day. When they were up doing the sealing work, I remember it was me that had to tend Bertie Mae while we sat in the long hall there and waited for them to get their work done before we all went up to the sealing room.
This is something that Pete can’t see about the church. He’s joined the church but he can’t see why Chloe has to stay married to Francis. He doesn’t know why she doesn’t reject it and go through the temple with him. This is Francis Cunningham. He was born and raised in Park City and wasn’t a member of the church. He became a member of the church when he married Chloe and they went to church all the time. When he died they held his services in the Mormon Church.
His mother and family were very unhappy about that. But she did have their minister talk at his funeral as well as a Mormon person. But he had joined the church before he died.
I’m glad that I was born to parents who believed in the gospel, that my mother and father were sealed in the temple for time and eternity. I hope these things might come true for me and have my family sealed to me. If they don’t in this life that maybe they will in the next. I do have a great testimony of the gospel.
Written October 1977
