Ilene Jenkins

Lyrad Riley - Shirley Ann McConkie - Ilene Jenkins (Born:  Jan. 29, 1923 / Married Lyrad Charles McConkie Sept. 13, 1941 / Died )

From Lyrad:  I remember when I was a little boy, going to visit Grandma Ilene's house was always exciting.  It usually took a long hot drive accross Nevada in a van full of kids to get there, but it was so exciting when we finally saw her dirt lane and house.  She was such a fun grandma for kids.  She would take us fishing, riding horses, and to a little store that sold Indian stuff.  She liked to tell stories and I liked to hear about when she was little- it seemed like remote history.  She kept a nice garden, and cooked good food whenever the relatives got together, which was for any excuse- baptisms, holidays, or just because someone was visiting from out of town.  

From Madison: I loved spending time at Gma Ilene's.  I loved her chicken noodle soup with mashed potatoes in it and the fresh raspberry bushes.  I always loved picking fresh raspberries and playing with her dog and her big bathtub.  But my all-time favorite thing about being at Gma Ilene's house was her water bed.  I also loved going through old photo albums with Gma Ilene and hearing about her experiences, such as when she showed me that she was in band and showing me what kind of music she played.  I thought it was really fun to see how times have changed, when she showed us the dance card that she used, where boys would sign up for dances with her on a little card she carried with her with numbers from 1 to 15 or so. I love her work ethic.   I love her and she was a great role model to me, always kind and loving.   From Josh:  I remember staying at Gma's house and she would feed us mashed potatoes and chicken noodle soup.  Her little dog Charlie never liked me much, though.  One day as I was walking out of her bathroom, he jumped up and bit me on the nose.  It was very bloody.  But I still like him.  I was put to bed on her waterbed, before everyone else because I was tired.  I was very little then.  My big sister told me not to bounce around too much because the water bed might pop.  I could hear everybody else having fun and talking and I wanted to join them, because it wasn't that late.  But I was terrified of moving because I didn't want to pop the waterbed.  So I lay there stiffly.  For some reason, I was scared to make any noise, too.  So I just lay there until I fell asleep.  I had traumatic experiences every time I came to her house, but I just loved coming back.  I wonder why that is. +++++++++++ “Ol’ pig-killing day was one big day.  The kids would get really excited.  Dad could really butcher his pigs.  He’d hang them up under that big ‘ol tree.  He’d dip them in a barrel of boiling water with a can of lye in it.  That skin’d be just as white and pretty as anything.  He’d scrape it with a hoe, then he’d get a sharp knife and he’d just soak ‘em down and clean ‘em.  Then after he cleaned the ol’ pig, why, he’d get the pig bladder and put a string around it and blow it up and tie it off and we’d have football ‘til it got caught in the road.  Then another thing—every day when Dad’d go to town, every time he came home he had a sack of candy in his shirt pocket and whoever kid’s turn it was to have that candy, he’d sit and rattle that sack, and we’d go up and then we had to share it with the other kids.  But when he’d get coal oil, he’d stick a gum drop on the spout; we never had a lid for the spout.  We’d even eat the gum drop with the coal oil on it. A lot of things I remember about Dad, he had nine children but I always felt like I was one of the pets.  Kids in those days had a lot of respect for their parents, when they was told to do something, they just said, “Yes, Sir,” and hurried off and did it.  He was a VERY hard worker.  He’d just work from daylight ‘til dark and he was quite proud of how hard he could work and he liked all his kids to work hard.  Right after Depression when everyone was real poor and didn’t have anything, we had a big cellar full of potatoes and lots of pork and beef and that.  If you worked hard, you got to play hard.  In the spring, we’d sort the potatoes from one bin to the other and take the rotten ones down to a bunch of pigs.  I was quite little but I remember us barefooted and we had a big ol’ five-gallon bucket and when we’d got down to that pig-pen, went to dump that big bucket of potatoes into an old sow that had a bunch of little pigs and she rared up and I thought she was going to jump out and I stepped back and there was a big heavy plank with a spike right up through the middle of it, and when I stepped back, the spike went right up  through the arch of my foot and I couldn’t pull my foot up off of it and of course I was screaming.  Dad come running over there and picked me up, took me to the house and all he did was just wash my face off and take me up to the doctor in Roosevelt.  And I can remember it so plain, they stuck a swab up there and turned it around and OH how it hurt.  When we come home, Dad told me I could stay in bed or stay in the house for a while.  That was getting treated real good, you know.  Then the next morning he whittled me a crutch with a tree limb, it made a “T” and he come and measured it, and it just fit under my arm, so I had a crutch and I could hop along.  I remember old Doc called me “Old Crip” for a while and Dad would spank him.  Dad was really kind to me that way.  One time when I was in school (and the teachers wouldn’t let us chew gum in school), we had some out on the playground and I forgot and left it in and I thought, “Well, I won’t chew it,” but I must’ve chewed a little and he called me up and said I had to chew a great big thing of scratch paper and I said, “Well, I won’t do it,” ‘cuz I’d heard they put horses’ hooves and glue in that scratch paper and I couldn’t have gagged it down to save my life.  So he kicked me out of school and said don’t come back ‘til you bring your parents.  So I went skipping home and I thought, “My dad will go down and tell him to go to h___; he’ll beat that old sucker right to death…”  I went skipping along home so happy and I went in and Dad said, “What are you doing home?” I told him and he said, “Well, I’ll get on my horse and, young lady, you better be back to school by the time I get down there.”  I could cut through the field, Dad went around on the road, and we got there just at the same time and he got me back into school.  But the teacher made me go out and dust all the erasers.  My dad just upheld the teachers, anyone in authority, you just minded them!   “When the depression and that was over, when Jay was born Dad had a big big building across the road full of alfalfa seed and when Mom got sick, they sent us kids over to play on them sacks of alfalfa seed.  And I remember when they came and told us we had a baby brother, everyone took off running, and I remember my legs just turning round and round in a circle.  I was the last one coming and I fell down and took all the hide off my arms and elbows.             “When Stella was born, we had no Maytag washer and Dad did the washing.  It had a wringer on it and something had been wrong and they took the guard off the wringer.  But I was getting out of the rinse water, sticking up through the hard rubber wringer, and somehow or other my hand got caught in the wringer and it pulled me up off of my feet.  Well, it was a gas motor, and Dad grabbed the gears with his hands and stopped that.  And it just tore all the meat right off his hands.  He was really a pretty good guy.  He sowed that seed and he got such a big price out of it  (it’s when there wasn’t any money), Dad come home and he let each of us kids hold that big check for a while.  It was a humongous big lot of money.             “…My childhood must have really been happy because I just hated for it to get night so you had to go to bed, and I couldn’t wait for morning to come so you could be up and out and doing things.  Our neighbors played out in the dirt all day, but us kids was working.  But we loved it.  At night, the parents would play cards, and us kids would all get in the road and play Kick the Can, Run Sheep Run, and Hide and Seek, and we’d swim in the old dirty ditch at noon to cool off.  It was just happy.  I hated to even sleep because life was so fun, and I’ve always liked work.  It’s just a good feeling to feel so good that you want to work, I think.” “Things are so different now.  Things are so fast-paced.  And I can remember the first old radio Dad had.  We, all the kids, no matter how many we was, sat there like mice while he listened to Amos and Andy.  My dad would get his ear right up to there and Mom, they just LOVED Amos and Andy, until it turned off (it run on a battery, you know).  And to have a hat full of apples, we’d go down to that cellar and get a bunch of apples at night.  That was a BIG treat.  Holy heck!  And an orange at Christmastime, gee, that was out of this world, you know.  And it’s just so different, kids have so much now that I wonder what’s a treat for them.  Because in them days, I remember I always wore boy shoes in the summer ‘cause they lasted longer, and my friends had little Sunday shoes and Dad, he gave Mom the money to buy me a little pair of black slippers with a strap over the front.  And I was riding that old horse down there, I was so tickled, I wanted to wear them 24 hours a day!  But I was taking his lunch down to the field and there’s a net-wire fence and I was trying to tickle my toe along there and buckle hurt and yanked me off the horse.  I didn’t care about breaking my leg, if I did, I just didn’t want to skin up my shoes!  And things like that, you got one nice dress or a pair of shoes.              I’ve told you about mine and Stella’s first permanent.  Dad was getting that seed in and we’d heard about these permanents, and my hair was as straight and froggy-fine, it was just terrible.  And all the other girls had curlers and stuff.  My grandpa cut my hair off clear up by my ears and my bangs, so it’d last a year til the next time he came, and I’d look in the mirror and just bawl, I looked so ugly.  I was an ugly little old thing.  Anyway, I wanted a permanent so bad, Dad said, “Well, on the ditch banks, next to the fence where they couldn’t cut it, was a lot of this alfalfa seed.  He said, “If you’ll gather that into sacks, if you get enough, you can have your permanent.”  And I think he taught us kids to work for what we got, he just didn’t hand it out.  If we ever needed anything, we got it, and he always treated us to that little old sack of candy and that, you know, but we gathered I don’t know how many sacks.  And Stella, she was four years younger than me, so she’d have been quite small, but she’d hold the sacks and we’d go and I had them old sheep shearers and we’d cut that seed and put it in them sacks.  When we had four sacks seeds, we took them up to the thresher.  I said, “Dad, now when they get through, you tell them this is ours for our permanent.”…And they wind them up on some old curlers, then they have clamps that come down out of a hood, and they clamped over that, and then it got hot and sizzled, you could smell that, OH, it was all your head’d hold up.  But we come out of there 2 of the curly-headedest kids you ever seen.  It was just really fun.  I was about 11, 12 years old.” Source:  cassette-tape interview of  Grandma Ilene, by Lyrad, July 1994