"I graduated from Ricks College in 1976 at the end of April. Dad couldn't get a job with the Forest Service up there, so we came home. About a month later, the Dam broke and the place we were living above the Porter Bookstore was flooded--I heard they changed and rebuilt that old part of Rexburg. The flood waters came up part way on the football field where President Kimball landed in a helicopter. We lived a few blocks east of that.
"So we came home to Bloomfield. I had saved enough from my 3 jobs to pay for baby Carla. When Carla was born 9 August 1976, we rented and lived in an old trailer across from Grandpa and Grandma Snyder. We had our first Christmas there. After living in a trailer where the windows didn't open we were desperate to get another place. We had checked with FHA housing, and they kept changing our floor plan and coming up with more restrictions. We were looking at 3/4 acre on Mangum Road to buy from Brother Cluff. We finally gave up on the FHA loan and refinanced the car and took a signature loan for just under $10,000 for 1 and 3/4 acres. We still didn't have a place to live even though we now had an alfalfa field and we couldn't pay rent and make our loan payments that came to about $157 a month. Dad made abt $3 dollars an hour at General Supply in Farmington.
"Grandma Costner helped us put up the barn with a permanent foundation, so the electric company could place a drop pole, and we ran a water line beside the barn (our first water bills were about $5 a month.) The septic was a barrel buried in the ground, and we had a burn barrel for trash.
"Mom had an old Campers tent and I was investigating that idea (and Dad was saying, to himself, yeah right, she can go out there by herself), when Cecil and Alma Schofield heard about it. Cecil thought that was so funny, They offered us the use of their little camper trailer.
"Carla's bed was made every day by taking down the table and placing the seat pads across the table. We had a safety rod for the side, and we covered it all with blankets. We kept cans and jars of food and mustard and salad dressing under the seat on the right. The refrigerator held 1 gallon of milk and about 1 dozen eggs.
"It does seem like there were two lights in the camper, one electric, the other kerosene--we might have lit it once. We had an orange battery light."
Below are a compilation of several different trailers so you can kind of get an idea of what it looked like and how little space there was. Enjoy.
