Memory.

From the ties that bind.

Utah memories.

There was an old family friend who wanted to start up a business along
side the highway, and across the road from our house.This was on the
other side of the irrigation canal, that was above our house too. Our
house that sat down below the irrigation canal. He had recently bought
a piece of property up there.
The highway from Ogden to Salt Lake, and up the Weber Canyon to
Wyoming, went past our house on the right side. A ways past our house
is where it forked, George Kendall had a store and gas station in
between the forks.
Well the family friend who's name was Danzik, wanted to have a cafe in
an old streetcar that he had hauled in to the new property he had
bought. The wheels and axels had been taken off and it had been set
on a foundation.
Then the highway department got a wild hair up their butt and decided
to cut my Grandparents pasture in half and move the highway up in back
of the houses, cutting thru the hillside and destroying the pasture in
the process. That cut off access to the new property with the old
streetcar.
Danzik abandoned the streetcar idea of the diner, and the streecar
was left to disintegrate by its self.
Anyway, years later, he put a new store and gas station on the new
road to Wyoming, just up from the end of my Grandparents upper
pasture. He also raised turkeys on a part of it. He had a big pen
with a couple of black bear cubs, named Barney and Buster as a tourist
attraction.
The old highway was still being used because it went on to Salt lake.
They even left the fork that went to Woming open. Why the new highway
was made was still a wonder. It served no real purpose. It screwed
Danzik and my Grandparents royally as they lost pasture due to
eminent domain. There was no way and no gates to get over the new
highway even if they could have used the upper portion as pasture.
Danzik let us kids have access to the old streetcar for a playhouse.
My Uncle Heward put up a swing in the part where the engineer used to
sit, since the whole streetcar had been gutted. Then he got a plank
left over from the making of the foundation and fixed it onto one of
the axels with the wheels still on it, for a teeter totter. We made
it a sort of home away from home. We hauled in furniture and lots of
other stuff we found in the dump, to fix it up. That ole red flyer
wagon got big time use there for sure. With lunches form home and
apples from an old tree down the irrigation ditch a ways, it was a
great place to play. We even let Max Kendell come and play with us.
Never his Sister Zelda. Max brought lots of sneaked goodies with him
when he came.