LULU "LU" MAE (HUNT) HEBDON JONES WAITE
TRANSCRIPTION

Added during editing –  January 2009

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 How do you say goodbye to your very being, the person [who] not only gave you birth, but taught you the moral values and the ethics of honesty, wrong is wrong and right is right.  That it is a little wrong you don't do it, or a little right you had better make it all right or you don't do it, of hard work, compassion, tenderness, love and forgiving that would guide you through life?  If you started a job, you gave it your all and you stayed with it until it was finished.

Mom guided us through life with her exceptional gift of foreseeing coming dangers through dreams and they prepared us times untold to be watchful and careful during these times to avoid harm that would befall our families.

Mom was a single parent raising us six children after a divorce from our father when I was eleven years old.  The judge at the divorce divided the six of us up by saying the eldest stays with mother, next goes with father, next with mother and next with father and so on until three of us went with daddy to Rigby [Jefferson County] Idaho [on] his parents' dairy farm.  Three [children] stayed with mom in St. George.

After a summer of work on the farm, daddy shipped me back to St. George saying he needed me to go home and help mama with the money problems.  Grandpa couldn't pay him anything other than board and room for himself, Truman and [Clarissa] Kay.  He needed me to go home and find a job of some kind to bring in a little money for the [children] and mom.  I was only eleven years old, but said I would do the best I could and thus began my odyssey through life with mom.

I got some jobs baby sitting and cleaning house.  Mom worked as a waitress at Dick's Café and later at the Liberty Café, but she was ill a lot of the time due to a car accident that broke her back.  [This happened] right after she was married to daddy.  What little I could earn wasn't enough to keep the family going, so she applied for welfare and [received] it.  She hated receiving that check every month, but knew it was the only way we could survive, as daddy still was sending $50.00 every month.  I graduated to other jobs as I grew up, from working in the two theaters in town to waitress work.  With what mom earned, we were soon off the welfare rolls and, between the two of us, we got along.  DeLue was the little mother to us all, keeping the home fires burning during all [of] this.

I remember one summer mom telling me Uncle Bill Truman in Enterprise had called telling her they needed trucks and labor to haul spuds from the fields to the cellars and could she bring her truck and some help.  The pay was good.  Mom and I got up before dawn the next day and headed to Enterprise in our old International stake-body truck to haul spuds.  She would drive the truck part of the day and I would buck spuds onto the back of the truck to a [fellow who] loaded and stacked then.  For the rest of the day, we would switch places.  We made a good team and could do our share of the work.  We were not strong enough to lift like the men, so between the two of us, we devised a way to lift the sacks high enough to get our knee under the sack and boost it to the bed of the truck.  We could always figure out a way to get the job done no matter what it was.  If we could not do it with [our] back and arms, we would add [our] legs and brains, [but] always got it done.  She could figure out a way around any job and, when it was finished, it was perfect.  That old truck had such bad brakes [that] mom had to use the gears to shift down to stop.

One time as we brought a load of spuds into the cellar, Uncle Bill hollered at us saying it was lunch time and he would unload for us while we grabbed a sandwich.  Mama started to tell him about the brakes when he said he knew how to drive a truck and for us to go ahead and get something to eat.  [The] next thing we knew, Uncle Bill was yelling and cussing to beat the sputtering saying that gosh darn truck wasn't safe to drive and mama could just drive her own truck from now on.  The trips to Enterprise each harvest time were some of the great times I spent with mom.  We graduated from picking up spuds and dragging that sack between our legs to fill with spuds  oh, boy, what poor aching backs we had  to riding the sorter.  We thought we were in heaven then because we got to ride instead of walk down the rows, except we had to wear cotton in our ears because the noise was so loud [that] we had ringing ears for days after the job was finished.

DeLue married and left home and I took over her role and my own for awhile.  Together, mama and I got the family through the hard years.  By the time I married, left not only home but town, the rest of the [children] were old enough to find jobs and help support themselves.  By this time, both [Clarissa] Kay and Truman had returned to St. George and once again our family was whole.

During my senior years of high school, mama sat me down and convinced me I was good enough to go for the tennis singles championship at the BYU Inter-Mountain Invitational Track meet at Provo.  She bribed me [by] saying she had saved enough money to buy me an Alice Marble professional Wilson tennis racket if I would tell the coach I wanted to try for the singles spot that year.  She won me over for I was playing with a beat-up old racket at the time.  My best friend, Irene Blake, and myself had taken [the] tennis doubles championship at the 'Y' two years.  Mom had enough confidence in my abilities to win on my own for both of us.  Thanks to her faith in me, I succeeded and, from then on, I never questioned my ability to accomplish anything I set my mind to.

Mama had only finished two years of high school, but during our growing-up years she took a journalism and writing correspondence course and was writing a novel [titled] Ann of the Woodlands.  She would write the story in longhand and when I came home from school I would sit at the dining room table and type what she had written that day.  So I was the one [who] typed the novel that was published some eleven years later.  She continued her education with a speed-writing course and graduated first in her class.  She was always building her vocabulary.  Words seemed to enchant her.
Mom met and married Smith Jones of Enterprise and moved there with him.  I had married and was living in Provo [Utah County] Utah when mom's remarkable dreams helped save my baby's life.  Mom had come to help with the new baby and was sleeping in the room with Kathy when she had a dream the baby was suffocating and she had better do something fast.  She awoke with a start and ran to the baby and found her not breathing and blue.  She grabbed her up and started hitting and rubbing her back, flipping her on the feet and raising her arms up and down.  [Fairly] soon, the baby was breathing again and [was] okay.

One great memory was a vacation in Enterprise when I took Kathy and stayed for a couple of weeks.  You never saw two [more] ambitious people as mama and I.  I no more than [arrived] there when mama said she had just [been] waiting for me to come.  Now she would be able to get all the little things done [that] she had been asking Smith to do for ages.  Little thing, be darned!  It turned out she wanted to put a porch and sidewalk in the back and a sidewalk in the front of the house.  The morning after I [arrived], and as soon as Smith had gone to the fields, we got the shovels and rakes out and started digging and leveling and laying out the project.  Next came the framing up.  The back porch needed the landing and three steps down to the sidewalk.  We decided we couldn't mix enough cement to fill the whole porch, so we started hauling rocks to fill it up.  Then [we] started the process of mixing the cement in the wheelbarrow.  Then up a ramp we had made to dump it over the rocks [and] we got it filled up and smoothed out real good.

We got the sidewalk finished and were just starting on the front porch when three Mexican boys came walking down the street.  They had come to Enterprise to pick potatoes and hadn't yet started their jobs.  I guess they must have been in their late teens or early twenties.  They didn't speak English very well, but when they stopped to watch us for a few minutes, they made [known] their concerns about two women doing such hard work.  They wanted to help us if we would let them.  We said, sure if they had time.  They took the job over and wouldn't let us do any of the heavy work.  By the time Smith got home from the fields, the whole job was done and he couldn't believe what he saw.  We never did tell that we had had help.  [We] just let him think we were superwomen!

During this time mama, wrote Out of the West and it was published.  The Deseret Book Store in Salt Lake [City] carried the book.  It was such a good seller that, when it was out of print, Jim Mortimer, who was the editor-in-chief, convinced mama to have the book published by the LDS church, change the name [of the book] to Eternal Promise and let the church handle the sales for her.  The book was recommended by the church for the list of reading materials for all the young people of the church. [It] was at the top of the list for over ten years.  I remember mama coming to stay with me; I was living in Salt Lake [City] at the time, and the trips to see Mr. Mortimer, the many television and radio interviews, and the special friendship that developed between Margaret Master of KSL-TV and the radio station, me and mama lasted a lifetime.

Smith died [and] mama moved back to St. George.  After several years, [she] married Glenn Waite and moved to Las Vegas with Glenn.  They lived there for several years before moving back to St. George and the home she had bought after Smith's death.  DeLue, Iris and their [children] were the help that enabled mama to spend her time writing Downwind, Clouds of Fire.  They took over caring for the yard and cleaning house while she wrote.  Some man, I don't remember his name, came to mama with notes and documentation, with proof of truth, on the events and catastrophic results of the atomic test to the people of southern Utah.  They wanted her to write a novel using the information that had been gathered by them.  If it was good enough, they wanted to make it into a movie.  The book was a huge success.  Mama even [received] a letter from Governor [Scott N.] Matheson saying her book would be the future documentation of the atomic fallout and the horrible results we had all suffered from it.  The book never was made into a movie because the agent and the [fellow] couldn't agree on who would get the credit, how it would be filmed or where, and the money to buy the rights from mama or anything.

In was the dead of winter in Rock Springs, Wyoming and I was working for the telephone company as a cable-splice when I slipped on some icy metal steps and took a bad fall down a manhole.  I ended up in the hospital in Salt Lake [City] with back surgery [for] the removal of the disk, post and part of the vertebra from my lower back.  After many weeks in the hospital, mama and Glenn came to get me and took me home with them for a year of recuperation.  They had made a special bed for me in the back of their pickup [truck] that had a camper shell on it.  That became my traveling bed [for] the many trips to and from Salt Lake City for my appointments with the doctors to make sure everything was healing right.  One year of being sandbagged flat on my back in bed.  Mama took care of me until I could get up and walk again  never once complaining.

I remember mama telling me about a trip in an airplane she was taking to an interview with some television station and she sat next to Bennett Cerf.  They [were] talking about writing when he noticed [a copy of] Eternal Promise on her lap.  [He] asked about it.  She said she had written it and, if he would care to read, it he could have it.  He told her he would be happy to read it and [would] let her know what he thought of it.  She received a letter a couple of months later telling her to keep writing, that she had a special gift and he had enjoyed the book very much.  She got much recognition for her writing, from being listed in the London, England One Thousand Women of Achievement of the World in 1972, Who's Who Writers Digest to an honorary Kentucky Colonel.

I had divorced and, after fifteen years, had married Ray Henderlider.  We decided to move back to St. George because of Ray's health problems.  We built a home in Bloomington Hills [St. George].  This was in 1984 and Ray died in 1990.  Mama had major surgery and her health was deteriorating fast.  She couldn't take care of herself and Glenn so she moved in with me a week after Ray's death.  Glenn moved in with his children.  Mom divorced Glenn August 1, 1991.  Glenn died November 17, 1991.  This man became a permanent part of my life again.

I sold my home and mama sold hers.  We moved to Virgin [Washington County, Utah] on the three acres of land Ray and I had purchased.  I built my home with a two-bedroom apartment downstairs just for mama.  It was one grand adventure for the two of us, getting settled in, finishing up the painting [of the] sun deck and porches for both of us, putting in the irrigation system with the help of Truman and Mike McMullen, Truman's son-in-law.  He came all the way from Florida and Mesa [Arizona] just to help for a couple of days.  I put the lawn sod down [in] both front and back [yards], planted trees and shrubs, painted and sealed foundation cinder bocks downstairs, planted mama's planter boxes with her favorite flowers, and buried rain gutter downspouts from the house to the gullies to keep the water away from the house.  When it was finished, we heaved a sigh of relief and settled down to enjoy our piece of heaven.  We had some wonderful times and some rough times.  Mama was a hard taskmaster and demanded much from me, but she never demanded anything she didn't demand of herself.  Sometimes I simply couldn't do what she expected of me any longer.  The old body was wearing out and I couldn't push it any further no matter how much I wanted to, and mama just didn't realize that I could no longer do the things I used to.

Mama had gone to visit Truman and Genelle in Florida in June of 1995 because I was not well.  It turned out that I had to have surgery on my right arm.  The surgery was not successful and I have never regained the total use of the hand and arm.  Mama came back from Truman's in September.  Nelda had her for three days when she fell and broke her pelvis.  She went from the hospital to the Red Cliffs Convalescent Home and, when she was well enough, she was transferred to the live-in side of the care center.  I could no longer meet her needs.  It broke our hearts when we decided she would have to stay there.  We had made a little home there for her to live in the rest of her life.

About a year ago, February 8, [1996], she fell and broke her left hip and it had to be replaced.  It was a hard surgery for her to recuperate from.  She never did get completely well when she fell again a week ago, Thursday, February 6, [1997] and broke her right hip, wrist and bruised her nose badly.   The doctor did surgery on Friday evening to replace her hip and set her wrist, which was so badly broken he could not even put pins in to straighten and hold it.  She came through the operation with flying colors, but didn't make it through recovery and died Wednesday, February 12, [1997].  Thus ends the odyssey of my life with mama.  I am here to tell her I will love her forever and cherish the memories we had together and try to live up to her expectations of me.  As I go through her belongings and look over the ten or so novels sitting there, all ready to be published, I wonder if she is telling me she needs me once more to get busy and help her finish her work?

Joy (Hebdon) Cannon Henderlider, daughterw


Two weeks before her death, mother fell while going to the bathroom one night.  She was a resident of Red Cliffs convolves home.  She broke both wrists and could not get herself up off of the floor.  Jeter Lang her son-in-law came to visit her and found her on the floor in her bathroom.  The shock of that accident and the surgery of fixing both wrists was too much for her body, she died within two weeks