Morgan 3: Jessie Christensen Morgan, Part VII

Jessie in Salt Lake City.

Harold and I were buying the St. Johns Observer. I ran the press and Harold wrote the stories and set the type. One time Harold shoved his hand under the press while it was going. I ran across the street and got Dr. Bolton and Harold nearly fainted. If he hadn’t had his hand full of type he’d never have used that hand again. The type smashed his hand and one knuckle was dislocated.

Harold got the news. He saw some Mineer lady pass by the window one day and she was just about to have a baby. He thought that by the time the paper came out that she’d have had that baby—so he put it in the paper that Mrs. Mineer had a big, bouncing, 9 pound boy. My land, I looked out the window the day after the paper was released and there walked Mrs. Mineer down the other side of the street still expecting her baby. Finally, two days later, she had a baby. Thankfully it was a boy. Harold was that kind of a guy. He wanted to scoop everything. He wanted to know everything first. He always liked newspaper work. He was the Editor of the high school paper and I helped him. I got so used to him making mistakes on the high school paper, it wasn’t anything getting used to him working on the St. Johns Observer. One time in St. Johns, the Professor walked over to see the Little Colorado River and some high school boys went over after him and dunked him in the river. Harold put it in the school newspaper and he got in a lot of trouble. He had a way about him that if he was in trouble, the whole student body would stand up for him.

We moved to Salt Lake and Grandpa worked on the Tribune. He was head of the copy desk. That means they sat at a round table and they went through yesterdays newspaper and got the news of the day and he gave each person a piece to rewrite. He was very good on news. He had a nose for news. I think he was one of the best newspapermen I was ever around.

When we moved to Salt Lake we lived down on about 8th South and Main Street in a little house behind a big home. We had two rooms and a cookstove. My mother-in-law lived with us and she had a good way of scraping her feet, like my house was so filthy that she had to scrape her feet. That used to irk me.

Helen, Alta, Paul, Calvin and Maxine.

We had the Deseret News, Salt Lake Tribune, New York Times, a Chicago paper, and the San Francisco Examiner every day delivered to our home. Harold would read them but I just read the headlines of some of them.

One time they chose out of each ward a couple of people to sing in the Singing Mothers at Conference. I was chosen to sing alto. I sang on the front row of the choir seats in the tabernacle just clear of the podium. I was always singing in a group, a quartet or a double quartet.


That was the end of the interview. I'm going to post some miscellaneous items and will probably miss a few days before starting to post Jessie's interview by one of her grandsons.