Monday Memories.......Arizona

Arizona…..the Good…..the Bad….the Sad….the Ugly….

This is about a time in Doug’s and my life that was all of the above things. “Growth” comes from adversity.
Doug and I were married in October of 1971. I was finishing up my degree at Weber State in Radiology and Doug was deciding what he wanted to do. We had talked about joining the Peace Core [I know, hard to imagine], but then I got pregnant right off the bat and that ended that dream [Doug’s dream] It was at the “tail-end” of the Vietnam War, [but we didn’t know that at the time]. They kept calling up numbers in the draft and his number was 22. If you got drafted you were pretty much assured as infantry, with a free trip to Vietnam, but if you joined, you could sign up for what you wanted to. So since we were making little money, and living in Grandma Hokanson’s apartment in her basement, and Doug was not in school [again no money], we decided to join the Army. To top it all off I was pregnant with my first baby and due the middle of July. So off Doug went to basic training for 6 weeks. That was the longest 6 weeks of my life. I visited my sister in LA while he was gone and he got a chance to come visit for the weekend.

Doug at Basic training at Fort Ord California

When he got through with Basic, he was assigned to Ft. Huachuca, Arizona about 60 miles south of Tucson, and 11 miles from the Mexican border [near Nogales] and just 20 miles from Tombstone [and the OK Corral]. It was in a little town called Sierra Vista.

The UGLY:
Doug found us a little trailer outside of town [way outside of town] seriously, have you seen the sheepherder’s trailers? That is what this was like. It was green and white. You could not see anything for miles. It was Doug’s first [actually 2nd] lesson in “Colleen just can’t sleep any where”. He had lived in Brazil and I am sure lived in worse, but to me it was dingy, and lonely, and far away from anything and we had one car, which he drove into base everyday. Get the picture? There was barley enough room for a bassinet. However, Doug loved it for all of the above reasons. He was a country boy after all. So I got in the habit of going in to town with him everyday and staying with the Marlene, the wife of one of his army buddies while they were on base for the day. Exhibit "A" The inside of the trailer

The first weekend we were there we drove to Tombstone and visited the OK Corral. Note the curlers in my hair. I can’t believe I did that, but back then it was common to see people go to town in curlers with a scarf over their head. Or was it? Hey, maybe I was just oblivious to what was proper and what was not. That is why it is in the “Ugly” section. Anyway there I was all pregnant with curlers, me and Doc and Wyatt Earp at the OK corral.

OK Corral

The SAD:
The next week I had a doctor’s appointment on Base. In the military, you go to the infirmary and take what ever doctor happens to be on for the day. I saw a doctor Sisone. He checked me and said everything was OK. I was 34 weeks along by this time. I went back to Marlene’s trailer and then later in the day my water broke. I could not believe it! It was black and green. I was so scared, this was my first baby and I was not prepared. I hadn’t read any books, or taken any classes, or anything. Marlene took me to get Doug and we went to the hospital on base “Raymond Bliss Army Hospital”.

Raymond Bliss Army Hospital

Dr Sisone checked me and said I was in labor. Due to the color of my water, there was cause for concern. So they gave something to help me along and I started hard labor. I don’t remember anything good about this labor and delivery, I did everything wrong I am sure, not knowing what to do. Our little boy, “Brady John” was born. The only thing I remember about the delivery is that it seemed so dark and cold in the room. They had Brady off to the side and were working on him under a light. I could see his little body resting on a table and I have a vivid memory of his little hand waving. [My only memory of Brady] He weighed 4 pounds which was good size for a preemie. Then they took me to another room which just had curtains. Doug stayed with me. We waited to hear about our baby. The closest neonatal facility was in Tucson, too far away for his condition. His little lungs were not well enough developed yet and without specialty care, Brady lived only a few hours….then passed on. The whole experience was so impersonal. I never saw Brady, no one wrapped him up to let me hug him goodbye, or ever asked me if I wanted to see him. I was just a naive little girl really, certainly not prepared for this. It was a lonely few days at the hospital, I can’t tell you how many nurses told me, “don’t worry honey, you can have more children”. I wonder if they understood how “painful” their comments were. To me it was like dismissing Brady's birth as if it had never happened. Although I had a testimony of the gospel, at that time, so far away from family and friends, and knowing that I would see Brady again someday, was really no comfort to me. Doug tried hard to keep things together. We both reacted differently to the situation. He kept everything inside. He did not want to talk about it. I talked about it all the time, put together a little scrapbook, and wrote letters, read poems. It was not until years later that I realized how Doug had suffered that night. How he had cried all the way home on that long drive to an empty trailer, an empty bassinet, alone in our lonely place on the outskirts of town. I was so caught up in my own grief that I failed to see his.

The BAD:
The week following Brady death; we prepared to take him back to Eden to bury him. My mom called and said the family would like to view him. I had not even thought about that. So I called the funeral home and told them my family would like to be able to view our baby. This is seriously what they told me “Lady we don’t embalm preemies, we wrap them in rags and throw them in a box”. I was without words. That's when I realized we weren’t in Utah anymore! So no one got to view Brady’s little body. The army flew his little casket home [a little white satin box], But we had to fly commercially. We had to drive to Tuscan to fly to Utah. When we got about 5 miles out of Sierra Vista, Doug noticed that he had a large hole in the seat of his brown corduroy pants. We flipped the car around and he hurriedly changed his pants back at our huouse in Sierra Vista, and we drove like crazy to get to the airport on time. It was at the height of the “high jacking” back in 1972. We were to fly a big yellow Hughes Air West Plane. There were federal Agents at the gate checking everyone’s ID before they would let any one on the plane. Doug reached for his wallet and realized that he had it in his “brown corduroy pants back in Sierra Vista”. They were not going to let us on the plane.......Well, all the drama, all the hurt, all the sadness, came to a head at that moment and I started to cry. “I just want to go home and bury my baby, please just let me go home”. Doug was so good, he was patient with me and in his quiet way, he took care of things. He did have his orders with him that showed he was OK to go to Utah. The federal agents called his CO who for some unknown reason was in his office [little ways we were looked after] and we were allowed to board the plane. I was still crying when we got on the plane. It was such a traumatic time for us. But we survived and were able to bury Brady John Wilson in the Eden Cemetery at a graveside service with friends and loving family close by. I can still hear Melba Hogge singing "Lullabye, and good night" while her daughter Janis played the violyn. Sometimes it is the little things that mean the most......

The GOOD
Having gone through an experience like this can do two things. It can pull you apart, or it can bring you together. In the long run it brought us closer together. I was so full of self pity, that I pretty much only thought of how this affected me at the time. Looking back, I think I went in to a sort of depression. I did not want to go to church; I think I must have been mad at God for a while. But Doug hung in there with me and just loved me. He even found an old army barracks turned apartment in town, next to the Bishops wife, Sister Mechum where we lived the rest of our time in Arizona. Views of our duplex in Sierra Vista & me in curlers again.

Looking back, I really loved Arizona. It was close enough to home that it did not seem like we were too far away. We had a great Ward there, with a great Bishop and Ward Family. Sister Mechum literally saved my life during that time as she had Doug and me over for dinner, and she and I had long talks which helped to heal my soul.

Sister Mechum and daughter Kay Dawn

Sierra Vista had a great Dairy Queen in town and because we were so poor, we used to look under the seats in the car for a nickel or pennies to buy a “soft serve cone”. That was a real treat. On Sunday nights after Sacrament meeting, you could see just about everyone in the Ward at the Dairy Queen buying ice cream until the Bishop mentioned in Sacrament, that it probably wasn’t the best thing to do on a Sunday night. We entertained our selves by driving to Mexico [Nogales] and Ward outings where they had the biggest rattle snakes I have ever seen. I have never seen bigger bugs or harder rain storms than they had in Arizona. Doug and I grew close there and did a lot of growing up as well. I am thankful for the blessings we received there and the hardships which made us stronger. I can see this all in hindsight. Sometimes you just can’t see it when you are in it. Doug finished his training. [He had a high security clearance and was taught how to read photos] Our prayers where answered when he received his next orders. They were for Hawaii. He and just one other guy got orders for Hawaii. The rest in his class got orders for Vietnam. The ones that got orders for Vietnam were later changed to Fort Riley, Kansas. Yes, we were blessed. Years later, the things that happened in Arizona would become a strength to me, a life line to hold on to. We were just two kids from Utah that had to do some fast painful growing up. We did it together........