CHAPTER 6

California

The first of the year, Clarence Wheeler told me of a job opening in the candling department of the Washington Co-op Egg and Poultry Association Plant in Tacoma where he worked. I rode the bus each day, ten miles each way, six days a week. We worked eight and a half hours each day, Monday thru Friday, and five hours on Saturday mornings so we could have Saturday afternoons free.

Riding the bus from the east side of Puyallup, a R.L.D.S. girl, Anna Stang, often saved a seat by her and we visited as we traveled. She worked at a broom factory farther on from my job. Often after work we would meet and attend a show or go to the Y.W.C.A. for supper and attend a study class. In October, she persuaded me to go with her to California where she had a married sister. So we went by boat from Tacoma to San Francisco, over night at Oakland, and by train to Portersville. We visited her sister and then rented a room at the Y.W.C.A. and Anna went to work in the Orange Packing plants where she had worked before.

Since Burr had left Washington, we kept up a regular correspondence during the nearly two years that followed. After graduation from high school, he spent one year at Graceland College in Lamoni, Iowa and then returned to California and to his job at Maurice Clapp's Retread Tire Shop in Redlands.

Burr came by car to take me to Redlands where we arrived in time to go to a Halloween party in the home of Ben and Edith Green. Burr's current girlfriend was somewhat put out at his having another date for the evening.

I worked a few weeks in the home of Mrs. Norwood, then for Mutual Orange Growers Packing House, east of Redlands I stayed with the Bronsons at 40 San Mateo Street. We attended church at San Bernardino, about ten miles away. There was no R.L.D.S. church in Redlands at that time. Hunter and Milla Ferguson and family lived in San Bernardino at this time, so did Hiel and Anna Bronson.