Transcription of Interview with Carol June Crouse Brand
3 April 2011, Taylorsville, Utah
I think one of the first memories of my mom and dad is of them dancing. They loved to ballroom dance and they loved to dress up and go to costume parties that they had back in the early 50s, mid-50s, and they were crazy. They would dance to anything, to any music; they would put a record on and just dance around the house. And, of course, because of that, came my love of dancing. One of the other favorite things that I remember about them was, in later years, we had horses, and we would go on backpacking trips, fishing trips, if you will. I remember one in particular we went on and we had a mule and his name was Sam, and my dad always called him Damn Sam. I don’t know why, but he was Damn Sam. We’d pack all our stuff, or provisions, for two or three days, and we took the mule and we went off into the wilderness; and we fished in the creek that ran through this area of the White Mountains of Arizona and we just had some great times. I went hunting with them a lot. Mom and Dad were avid hunters as well, having been pioneer people. The hunted for food, not just for the sport of it. Those are probably some of the favorite ones that I have of them, I’m sure there are many others, but there were those.
I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. When I was very little we lived really close to Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix. When I was about seven years old, they bought a house in what we called at that time, I don’t know what it’s called now, South Phoenix, and it was a pretty good sized place. It was in a neighborhood with other houses, a subdivision, if you will, but it was about a quarter of an acre in size, and that’s where we had the horses in later years was back behind there because we were allowed to have them. I remember it was a turquoise house. I can remember the front yard; I can close my eyes and vision that whole darn place. It was just part of being a great place to live. Dad had poured, or had poured – I don’t remember if he did it or if he had it done - a huge patio in the back, and it was red cement, I don’t know why. I remember, with vivid memory, my sister and I going out on that patio and tap dancing and learning our routines for our tap classes and stuff. Then, of course, behind that is where – in later years – we kept the horses. And because the horses were kept so far away from the house, the year that I got my very first horse, it was at Christmas time, and I would go in and out that back door, because the laundry room was in a room off of the patio, and we would go out there and do laundry, we didn’t have a dryer at the time, of course in Arizona, so we would go out and hang our clothes out in the back yard. Christmas Day came and I didn’t have a whole lot of presents under the tree, and, of course, as a kid I was disappointed and Mom says, “Well you still have one present out in the back.” And I said, “Well what’s out back?” Dad had gone out and lo and behold my big present was a horse. He had been out there for over a week and I hadn’t even paid attention - I didn’t even know he was out there. So I had a lot of fond memories of that place. It was a fun place to be.
Mostly, when I was a kid – my sister just older than me got married when I was ten. So I was pretty much raised as an only child because I was so young when she got married. Prior to her marriage, the time I had with my two older sisters were spent with Mom and Dad, hunting or fishing, or doing those types of things and my sister that got married when I was ten, she and I took dance lessons. And a lot of the things that we did together was just to dance. We did a lot of tap dancing together. I was into ballet some, I don’t remember if she was in ballet, but I think we were because we had been taking lessons from a couple of men whose last name was Scione. And they were extremely strict ballet teachers. I can remember them taking and at the barre, we would be doing our barre work and they would take a big, long stick and they’d stand in the middle of the floor and they would tap. And if you didn’t do it right, they’d hit your foot. They were pretty mean now that I come to think about it. But they moved on to California, and took jobs to do choreographing in movies, and asked my parents for us to be able to go and study under them in California – both my sister and me – and I was pretty young, and my mom said “Absolutely not.” And we did not go. She was not gonna let us go pursue something like that. The rest of the time I spent a little bit of time with my cousins, and we played cowboys and Indians. And the rest of the time was just with some friends up the street some people from school, I think; just kid stuff, I rode bicycles. Of course I had my horse and a lot of my time as a youth was spent with groups of people that rode horses. Not all of them were young kids, I spent a lot of time just with my parents and their friends; I didn’t have a whole lot of friends growing up that were my age.
School was fun. I enjoyed school. I struggled with some subjects. I had a lot of trouble with math in high school. Not just plain old math, I got that pretty well, but when we went into geometry and algebra, I just did not get it at all. I got ok grades in it, but I didn’t excel like I wanted to. I was a pretty good student. Had I known, and had I been given direction like I should have been given in high school, I probably could have gone onto college with a scholarship because I had about a 2.0 average – at that time that was a good average for us to get scholarships and stuff. I didn’t even know what a 4.0 was back then; they didn’t grade the same as they do now. But I had probably an A-, B average. I probably could have gotten a small scholarship of some kind; back then they were a lot easier to get than they are now. But nobody directed me in that direction, so I never pursued a college career. It wasn’t part of my family’s makeup to go on to school. It was get married and have kids. That’s what all my siblings have done, and we had had nobody go to college. My mother never even graduated from high school. I don’t know if Dad did or not, I can’t remember – he might have. But you’ve got to remember, my parents were born in 1910 and 1907 so we are talking about pioneer people who didn’t have the same values that are ingrained into the children today in our family, and the kids around us, because it’s just not who you were. School, though, was fun. I thoroughly loved PE. I loved to be athletic. I played volleyball, played softball; archery – you name it, I did it – played tennis. I was very, very athletic and I really enjoyed the sports and I liked those things in school. But I also liked the academic part of it. I was a very good speller – still am. I enjoyed reading – still do. And I really, really enjoyed English. And I like history. The only problem with history was that I took a world history class and I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I could not get good grades in that class; I did all the extra credit; I did everything I possibly could and I could not pull my grade up in there. I don’t really know why. The guy was a great teacher, but he just graded really, really hard. But I really did enjoy most of everything that I took in school.
I was in high school during the 1960s. I graduated in 1963. So most of the school things that were going on, and I was going to high school in an area that was becoming more and more predominately black, there were a lot of Hispanics at the time – of course, being in Arizona, but I had grown up around that culture a lot being in Arizona. The blacks, however, I hadn’t really socialized with because we were segregated, even though they went to the same school that we did, but when we would go into the cafeteria or assemblies, they would sit on one side and the whites would sit on the other side. And we were not supposed to mingle; we were not supposed to associate, except for just casual “Hello” or “How are you?” or whatever. I remember vividly, one time after I had graduated from high school I had a young black man, who had sat next to me in typing class. And we had become pretty good friends, and after I had graduated from high school and I was out with a group of girls, and we went to this popular place to get a milkshake, and after we were finished, we got up to leave and to pay our bill, and stuff, and this young man that I had sat next to in this class was in the restaurant, and I went over and hugged him ‘cause I was glad to see him – he was my friend. And I asked him how he was doing and had a little conversation and I left. And this one particular girl in our group turned me and said “Don’t you ever do that in the public eye again! He is BLACK!” and I was so upset with her because I was not prejudiced, and I could not find a reason on Earth to be prejudiced against these people. And I didn’t understand where these people were coming from. Needless to say, she wasn’t my friend anymore after that, because I figured if that’s the way she feels I don’t want to associate with someone that doesn’t have the same values that I have. And I just was really quite shaken up by that little remark of hers. But mostly we didn’t have peer pressure back then; either that or I was very naïve. But I just never experienced any of that stuff. I never had the ‘she’s wearing something nicer than me and I have to have it’ or the kind of peer pressure that I saw with my own children and I see with my grandchildren. We didn’t have that; at least I didn’t, at least where I grew up. And so basically the only thing that I really remember was the race part of it during the 60s, and that was pretty evident in the school when I went there.
You know, I really don’t remember my first date. I really don’t. Not that I didn’t have dates, I just don’t remember the first one. I think what it was, if I can make my brain work, we had a school dance every year, around Christmas time, it was called Silver Bells, and this young man that I had gone to school with forever, I think we’d been in elementary school together, he asked me to go to this Silver Bells with him. I remember my dad or my mother, one of them, drove us to the dance. I don’t even remember how old I was. I mean I was in high school, so I was at least a freshman; because we didn’t have middle school. We had elementary from first grade – we didn’t even have Kindergarten – from first grade until eighth grade and then we went right into high school. So I had to have been at least ninth grade, which isn’t all that old if you think about it, but I went to this dance with this kid. But I think it was probably my first date – if you wanna call it a date, having your parents drive you to something. But I went out on a lot of dates; I was pretty popular, I’m proud to say. I had a lot of dates. I went to a lot of dances. Mostly my dates involved going to a drive in movie, or dances, those were the two things I did. Later on, just before I got married to Karl, I had met up with some people who like to go and watch drag racing and so I’d go watch drag racing occasionally, you know. But, you know, those were just basically the kinds of dates that I went on, but I pretty much never stayed at home on a weekend. I was almost always out dancing. And even if I didn’t have a date to go dancing, I was dancing. Because I group of us girls would go, and we would go dancing at these places – mostly country dancing, western dancing.
I had become inactive in church for several years. My mother and dad were very active at the time. We had gone to a recording that was being piped into the building that we went to church in from Salt Lake. And you were supposed to be eight years old and above. And I was seven and I was by myself. There was nobody at home to stay with me, so Mother brought me. And this brother in the church came up to my mom and told her that she would have to take me out, that I wasn’t old enough to be there. And my mother was a very strict woman and she said “She will not make a sound. I can guarantee it.” And I wouldn’t have because I would have been really in trouble. And I didn’t like getting in trouble with my mother. So she said “I won’t take her out because I know she’ll be quiet.” And he insisted, and my mother was offended and she was angry, and that was something that you didn’t really want to do was get my mother angry, and then to have her offended on top of that was really bad. So she took me by the hand, and we marched out and I didn’t go back to church again until I was seventeen years old. And I had, in the meantime, been running around and doing things that I should not have been doing, but I didn’t know any better and we were doing stuff with horses with the rodeo people and I was running around with cowboys and stuff. One morning, on a Sunday, I really attribute it strictly to the Spirit ‘cause there is no other reason for it, I had not had anything happen prior to this that would have led me to do what I did; Sunday morning came and I got up and I got dressed up for church in a dress, and I walked out to the living room and I was seventeen, so I was driving – I had my own car, and I remember vividly my mother and dad saying, ‘where are you going?’ and I said “Well I’m going to church.” And I went to church and nobody welcomed me, nobody asked me ‘where you been?’ ‘we’re glad to have you,’ nobody greeted me. And I sat down by myself, went to Sacrament Meeting and went home. But from that moment on, I had made up my mind that I was not going to stay away from the church, and I started going and found out about the dances that were held every night, but Sunday during the week at all the different wards around the valley of Phoenix, and so I started going to the dances. I didn’t necessarily go to church at that point, that I remember, but I went to the dances and met a wonderful young lady who became my very good friend, and she was the one that influenced me to come back into the church full fold. In fact, I was with her the night that I met my future husband. So it was a very difficult thing, it was hard to come back to church like that – by yourself – and then to walk into the building and have nobody, nobody, even acknowledge that you were there. You know that’s one reason why I have tried to be so friendly with people that are new in the ward. When you see people that you don’t know, go up and introduce yourself, because it is a very difficult thing, especially if you are by yourself to have that happen. And during that time, and this is a lesson to all that listens to this, never once did I have a Primary teacher come; never once did I have a Young Women’s person come, nobody ever came to visit our family, or come to see me to try to get me to come back to Primary or to Young Women’s in the entire ten years that I was inactive. Not one person. And so that didn’t help matters any. But I cannot, honestly tell you what caused me to get up that Sunday, but I’m sure glad I did because I have been active ever since.
WHAT WOULD YOU SAY TO THE FUTURE GENERATIONS IF YOU COULD SPEAK TO THEM NOW?
I think I would tell them to stay close to Christ. Work and strive and remain faithful, and work for a testimony, and once you get it, do everything you can to keep it. Everybody says our church is a very difficult church, but it really isn’t if you strive really hard to keep the commandments. I think I would just tell them and bear my testimony to them of how I know that this is the true church; and having not known that and now I do know that, makes a big difference in my life. And I would want them to be spiritual giants because they’re going to need to be. And I’m hoping that I can actually say that to my great-grandchildren someday (hint hint). I’m not that old yet. But I would just really like to let them know of my love for the Savior and my love for their great grandfather. And to strive to keep the commandments, and strive to live worthily for all of us to be together as a sealed family in the eternity because that’s what it’s all about. And just let them know how much I love my family. They’re everything.
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