JOSEPH HENRY FRANCOM

December 15, 1875 - July 5, 1955

My paternal grandfather

My grandfather was very dear to me and a grandfather who very carrying and attentive to a grandson. Being the oldest grandchild and arriving before the other grandchildren were around had it’s advantages. I was able to bond with my grandfather and grandmother Francom at an early age. I suppose that the first grandchild receives that special attention. However, I believe that my character and personality is more like my grandfather than any other person in our family. They were the type of people who loved kids and loved to be around them. From listening to my father’s and Uncle Joe’s stories it is easy to understand that their parents were wonderful to their kids.

My grandfather was of average height for that time period about five foot seven inches and had a stocky build of about one hundred and eighty pounds. When I was a lad, he always wore black and white stripped overalls and had a rotund build. He had an open and friendly demeanor and loved a good joke. However, if he became upset, he could come down on a person quite hard. He was very proud of his skill as and iron molder which was what he did for his livelihood.. He would often tell me about his work as a molder. I remember him getting upset with grandma and he could cuss a blue streak. Famous Francom temper. I never recall him getting upset or being harsh with me. He was a devout Mormon and would often times take me to Priesthood meeting with him.

From the time I was a toddler until I was about twelve years of age, I would visit with my grandparents in the summer time. I would often sit with grandpa on his front porch and he would reminisce about his times as a boy and young man. I recall hearing the same stories over and over again. When he worked as a molder, he would lay out the very large slag pots in the molding sand and then they would pour the hot iron into the mold and form the slag pot. They would then mount these pots on railroad wheels and use them to transport the hot slag from the Magna smelter to the slag dump out on the shore of the Great Salt Lake. His brother’s George and Emeron were blacksmiths. He was very close to his two brothers and their families would visit one an other quite often.

On one occasion, the brothers and their families got together over a Christmas holiday. They got snowed in together for a a period of three days and they had a great time together. My father told me about that occasion with great delight. Grandma just locked the boys in the kitchen and let them go. I suppose it got to be quite a rough-house on that occasion. My father relished in telling the story.

My grandfather became very active in the iron molder’s union shortly after the turn of the century. This was the period that workers were organizing into unions and attempting to gain better working conditions for themselves. Grandpa held some kind of a union office and apparently he was one of the men that went head to head with management. The iron molder’s union lost their fight to gain union status in the Salt Lake City area. My grandfather was subsequently blackballed from working as an iron molder in the Salt Lake City area. He told me that he did gain employment in a molding establishment in Ogden for a short time and that was the last that he ever worked as a molder.

My grandfather had a house on the west side of Salt Lake when he was working as an iron molder. He always had a fear of being unemployed. So, each fall they would purchase four or five sacks of flour and put them under their beds. If times got rough and they didn’t have money, they would always have that flour to eat.

After he got blackballed, he and his brother’s invested in some property on the west side of Utah Lake. It was a big land development scheme where they were going to build a large pumping facility on the west side of the lake and pump water out of the lake and irrigate farms in the area. Grandfather and his two brothers purchased a farm site there and were going to establish a farm in that area. He sold his home and everything they had to finance this venture. The development fell through and they lost their life savings.

They then bought a farm in Draper. This was the time of World War I and prices were very high for farm products, especially sugar beets. The farm was located on 12300 South, on the brow of the hill just before the road crosses the Jordan River when traveling from Draper to Riverton. It was a sixty acre farm. It had a very large two story house, cow barns, orchards and ground to raise mostly sugar beets and alfalfa. I was a very small child at that time, but have retained some vague memories of the farm.

My memories are of Uncle Joe’s horse and the rides he would give me. Making ice cream out on the lawn on Sunday afternoons. I especially remember the time that grandpa took me with him on the wagon to deliver the milk to the creamery on 12300 South and 7th East. That little building still stands. I remember sitting up on the seat besides my grandfather. It must of been quite a thrill for me at the time because I sure could remember the experience.

As time went by, my dad married and moved away from the farm. My Uncle Joe graduated from high school and moved to Salt Lake City to work. The prices on sugar beets and other farm products dropped after World War I and grandpa had a difficult time making ends meet. He had a large mortgage debt and was having a very difficult time in making the payments.

He either sold the farm or traded it for a house with three to four acres of land and some out buildings on Mansfield Ave. in the southern section of Salt Lake City. It had a nice small brick house, a barn and a couple of chicken coops. On the acreage, he had fruit trees, mostly apples and pasture land. There was a high water table in that area, in fact, there was a swamp full of cattails just east of their house. I used to play in that swamp. As I recall, the address was 602 Mansfield Ave. and the house is still there.

Needless to say, I spent many a weekend and during the summer months a couple of weeks at a time living with my dear grandparents. I was treated royally and it was a sad emotional experience when I had to leave and go home.

When they first moved on Mansfield Ave., grandpa had a cow and a couple of coops full of chickens. They tried to make a living from the chickens and grandpa took up paper hanging. I can remember grandpa squirting milk in my mouth when he was milking the cow. Grandpa had a big German Shepard dog named Prince. I loved Prince as if he were my own.. We were inseparable when I was there.

In time, grandpa went into the chicken business in a big way and had five or six coops full of chickens. He sold the eggs and I think they did quite well when they had a larger operation. He continued to do some paperhanging.

As I grew older, grandpa would let me go out in the coops and help him with the chores. I would gather and candle the eggs, clean the chicken coops and help him feed them. The candling would be a tedious job. He had a box with a light in it, and it was necessary to hold each egg up to the hole in the box to see if the egg was bloodshot. On one, occasion my grandparents had to go out of town for a couple of days and they left me in charge to take care of the chickens. That really made me feel like something.

He would get hundreds of new chicks in the spring and they had to be handled very carefully or he would loose many of them. He had to stay up all night and watch them to make sure that they didn’t crowd together under the lights that kept them warm. The chicks would tend to crowd together and suffocate. When the pullets became about six weeks old it was necessary to cull out the roosters from the young hens.. The males would make nice spring fryers. We loved those tender spring pullets.

My grandfather loved to work with wood and was always building or remodeling his house in one way or the other. He built all of his new chicken coops, built a little kitchenette onto his kitchen added a new closed-in back porch. I remember when he built a little water cooler box next to his flowing well so that the water flowed through the cooler to keep their food cool. There were very few refrigerators in those days. He then built a small fish pond next to the cooler to catch the run off from the cooler. He was especially proud of what he had done and grandma was pleased to have her perishable food semi-refrigerated.

Grandpa had a work bench in their small basement underneath a window. He had an old tool box with all of his tools stored in the box. I would spend many summer days in the basement working at the bench making mostly boats and small things. Grandpa would show me how to use the tools and give me free access to his tool chest. I’m sure that I gained my love for woodworking from him.

Grandpa and grandma had several friends who were very fond of them and they would come by and visit occasionally. I remember one couple who lived in a large apartment on South Temple in the city. He was a hat salesman and would always bring grandpa a new felt hat. Grandpa always looked sharp when he wore those hats.

Grandpa was always interested in politics and would get into some very heated discussions with his friends and family over political issues. That might of come from his union days, who knows. When Alf Landon ran for President of the United States, one of the promises he made if elected, was to give everyone over fifty years of age or over a pension of $200.00 a month. Grandpa really got excited over that and would tell me what he was going to do with the money when he got it.

There was an other couple that came quite often and buy a case of eggs from grandpa. Bill and Fredda were very close to grandpa and grandma and loved them very much. Fredda had been Aunt Louise’s closest friend before she died in 1925. Bill ran a bakery on the west side of Salt Lake and was quite prosperous. When they hit the house, the fun would begin laughing and joking and having a great time.

On summer evenings, grandpa would go out on his front porch and sit and cool off and rest. Prince his dog would always be there laying on the steps. When I was visiting, grandpa would reminisce about his life as a boy and young man in Salt Lake City. He often talked about the trotter horse that he had and thought that he was the fastest trotter in the city. He would race with anyone who would race with him. We would also listen to the Joe Lewis fights on the radio while sitting out on the porch. Those fights were the highlight of the summer. Grandpa talked about the fights that he used to have as a young man. I would think that he and his brothers were pretty rough characters in their younger days. They told a story about his older brother George knocking a man through a wall.

Grandpa was born in Evanston when his father worked for the railroad as a blacksmith there. I can’t recall him ever talking about Evanston but he did talk about living in Glenwood just outside of Richfield, Utah. He talked about playing on the hills around his grandfathers mill. He got kicked out of school there when he was in the second grade. He must of not learned to read very well in those two grades since he would read out loud with grandma’s help. Shortly before he died, he remarked that he wanted to see the place of his boyhood once more before he died and Uncle Joe drove him down there to see the place.

I can never recall him talking about his mother and father. I suppose he didn’t have the best home life. I have found that my elders didn’t talk much about any family matters that were not pleasant in nature. I once asked my father about his grandfather and grandmother and he stated “that his grandfather was a drunk and his grandmother died in the State Insane Asylum in American Fork.” Grandpa’s father died in Glens Ferry from a soaking he received from a street washer after he had passed out drunk in the street. I would imagine there was a lot more to be told but I was not made privy to any of them.

I think once grandpa married grandma, he settled down. Grandma came from a more affluent refined family. However, grandpa stayed quite close to his brothers George and Emeron and their families through the years. I heard many stories about those family gatherings and the fun they all had together.

He had sisters but the only one that I can recall is the one that married a Dixon who had a ranch on the Bear River north of Evanston and near Randolph. We visited there ranch when I was a small boy of about five or six. I remember that they didn’t have electricity and we sat around a table at night with a Coleman lantern setting on the table. Dad and mother went horse back riding but they saw a snake and that ended the ride for mother. We drove a model T Ford up there from Salt Lake and the car broke down on the way home. Uncle Joe had to come and get us.

My grandfather loved to dance and was a good dancer. Grandma didn’t dance. We would go to the Ward dances at the Wandermer Ward on Seventh East. Grandpa would be waltzing all of the ladies around the floor having a great time and grandma would sit and visit with the ladies.

He liked to play horseshoes and checkers. He built a nice horseshoe pit down on the end of his orchard. He had it fixed up quite nice. Some of his old cronies would come around and they would throw the shoes. When he didn’t have any gentlemen to play with, I got involved. He would shorten the distance for me so that we could play. He taught me how to throw a shoe which I can remember to this day.

Being a handy-man, grandpa always needed some kind of hardware and Kresses Five and Dime was the only place that he could get what he needed. Grandpa, grandma and myself would walk up to Seventh East and catch the street car to town. We would go into Kresses and get his hardware and then I usually would get an ice cream treat. For a kid my age, that trip to Salt Lake was a great experience.

When his old Model T was running which was not very often. We would drive to Liberty Park and have a picnic. He would drive that old car as fast as it would go. Grandpa would take his horse-shoes and have a game or two, if he could find someone to play. Grandma would give me a quarter to spend which in those days could buy a lot of candy. The trip to the park is one of my fondest memories that my dear old grandpa and grandmother gave to me to cherish over the years.

We would go to the Ward movies up on Ninth East. Grandpa could hardly get on his feet and walk after the movie. He developed arteritis from being on his knees when he was a molder. Once he got moving he would work out of it and be okey.

As I have mentioned, grandpa drove his Model T Ford all over the southern end of town, and it was a wild ride if I should go along. The Model T had three peddles to operate. When the later models came out they had a clutch and brake pedal. My Uncle Joe purchased a 1932 Chevy which had a clutch and brake pedal. He taught grandpa to drive it. One day grandpa took the car to go to the neighborhood store up on Seventh East. As he turned in to park by the store he got confused about what pedal to use. He forgot how to brake it and ran into the store and knocked out a wall. He would never drive anything but a Model T after that experience.

As life goes on, I became a teenager and had other fish to fry and spent less and less time with my grandparents. We would visit them on weekends on occasion and have our annual Thanksgiving feast at grandpa and grandma’s house. Later, I went into the war and would write to them.

After the war, I bought a car and would occasionally visit and take them for a ride. As I look back, how sad it is that I didn’t take time out from my life and go stay with them for a weekend. They would of enjoyed that and I sure owed them some payback time.

I think that grandpa had a sister that lived in Carmel, California and they would take the train and stay down there during the winter months in their later years. They enjoyed those trips.

Not long after I was married, grandma was involved in an automobile accident and was hurt rather bad. She never totally recovered from that mishap and died from complications soon after. Grandpa always depended on grandma for everything and he was a lost man after she died.

However, he met a lady by the name of Louie. They soon married. She was a small lady about mother’s size and was a nice person. She was good to grandpa and the family accepted her. They were together for a few short years and then grandpa started to fail.

He had prostate problems and other problems that I was not told about. I think he was slipping mentally. Dad and Uncle Joe had to put him in a rest home. The rest home that he was in was an old home that they made into a rest home. As I remember, there were bed all over the place with old people all around-not a very comfortable place to be.

Dad and myself visited him after he had been there for a few days. He was laying in bed and when he saw me his face lit up and he clasped my hand and held it hard. He seemed to be very glad to see me. This was a very tender and emotional moment for me and for grandfather also, for we loved each other dearly. We had a very nice visit. He died a few days after our visit.

One of my blessing in life was to have such a great grandfather.

I have written this profile of my grandfather as I knew him and described my relationship with him as a grandson. Written by Hollis Terry Francom