I took some night classes at the college institute and started meeting more friends. My roommate, Leanne, was dating a boy and she wanted me to double date with her one night, so they set me up with one of his roommates on a blind date. That was the night I met Arlin Bartschi. At the time I thought I was waiting for a missionary I had dated in high school, but we went out on a date and the rest is history. As soon as I met him I knew what I wanted.
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| Charles Arlin Bartschi |
We had fun and did a lot of things with them. When Christmas came, I went to Snowville for the holidays and Arlin went back to Nounan. I sent him a Christmas card and he sent me one too. I was excited to hear from him. He was what you would call tall, dark, and handsome. Ha ha! After the holidays we started dating more and more and enjoyed being together. Arlin had such a funny sense of humor, and loved to scare people. I guess I had told him once how scared I was of mice, so one night we were walking down the sidewalk on our way to a movie and he held out his hand and said, “Here.” I held out my hand and he handed me a rubber mouse. I jumped and screamed “Oh S---!” and he laughed even harder. He never let me live that down for a long time. Ha ha! He was always scaring me and loved to watch me jump.
My parents knew I was dating Arlin and were anxious to meet him, so we made the trip to Snowville. Mother and Dad loved him from the minute they met him. My Dad loved him so much he wouldn’t let up on me until I married him, so I think they influenced me as much as anything. Arlin was so good whenever we’d go out to the ranch he’d always pitch right in and help Dad with whatever he was doing, help him run the tractor, do anything. Dad just thought there was nobody else like him. He went with me to Dave’s mission farewell and spent all day in the kitchen helping mother wash dishes and she just thought that was wonderful. When he asked them if he could marry me, it wasn’t hard for them to say yes. Ha ha!
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| Bartschi Family: Legrand, Shirley, Beverly, Max, and Arlin |
I was scared to meet his family. After I met Arlin I remember feeling sorry for him when I learned that he had been raised without a mother, and I thought to myself, “I could really love him and take care of him for the rest of his life.” I knew I wanted to be a good wife and, in a sense, be nurturing to him like the mother he never knew. I remember going in feeling inferior, but they were all real sweet to me. Max’s daughters Jannie and Maxine were so cute. They were in their early teens, and Max and Vicky were real sweet to me. Grandpa Bartschi was nice and it was such a shock to see how Arlin had been raised and lived and how different it was from the way I was raised and lived. Even though he was a widower, Grandpa kept that little house just spotless for a man, and did all the cooking, and in a way I felt sorry for him. So I tried to do all I could for him.
Arlin shared this version of our courtship: “Like most other things I did in life I was a little slow in the uptake of dating and going out with the girls. I think I had one date in high school, and then spent three years on a mission. I didn’t get a running start. There were so many other things I liked doing running with the boys, I didn’t give it much of my time. As I got older, and with a little pushing from my sisters and others, I thought maybe it was something I should look into. When I was at Utah State, my best friend Karl Peterson kept encouraging me along those lines. There was lots of help trying to get me started. I did go with some nice girls, but some lived so far away I couldn’t get excited about going so far away from home. Ha! Then one of my other friends was going with a girl and wanted me to take her roommate on a date so we could double. Well, this girl’s name was Karolyn and she was from Snowville, Utah not too far from Logan. I remembered I had a classmate by the name of Joe Larkin who was from Snowville. When I told him I had gone on a date with Karolyn, he told me to keep going with her because she sure came from a good family. Well it wasn’t long before I went to Snowville and met her family. I felt right at home because they were farmers and lived the same lifestyle I had been raised with. It wasn’t long before I took Karolyn home to Nounan to meet my family. They all fell in love with her and took her under their wings. The rest is history and she is still keeping me around. I made a good choice.”
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| Arlin and his red chevy |
When Arlin proposed the following March we went for a little ride in his red chevy and we were up on the hill in Logan looking out over all the lights and everything and that’s when he gave me my diamond. We set our wedding date for June, and it was exciting and lots of fun having bridal showers, finding a dress, and making all the plans for our wedding.
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| Arlin and Karolyn Bartschi 1959 |
We decided to go to Sun Valley, Idaho for our honeymoon. When we got there, we couldn’t afford to stay there or even eat. Everything was so expensive, and we were rather poor. We spent one night in Ketchum, in a cute little log cabin with red checkered curtains. We went to Lava Hot Springs, Craters of the Moon, and then stayed one night in Idaho Falls by the river on the way back home to Utah and that was it. Little did we know that was going to be close to our future home the rest of our life. It was just a short weekend. We didn’t have a lot of time or money. After the honeymoon we went back to Nounan and had a reception there with Shirley and Vickie’s help.
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| Honeymoon |
Our first home was a basement apartment that had a kitchen, a bathroom, and a living room. Our bed was one of those hide-away Murphy beds that came down out of the wall into the living room and we hung our clothes in the living room closet. It was small, but in our price range. Ha! It took us a while to get used to living with each other. He would get quiet and really moody when something was bothering him, and I didn’t quite know how to cope with it. But I had to remember that he didn’t have a mother who could help him when he was hurting, he just learned to keep everything inside. So I had to encourage him to talk to me and tell me what was wrong so I could help him. After he learned to trust me it made our marriage a lot happier and he was real tender and sweet and knew how to do everything. I never had to pick up after him like a lot of other women would always complain about. But he did like to scare me and I wasn’t too fond of that. But he was a sweetheart and a good man. Arlin was so frugal, and when we’d walk into the store we wouldn’t do anything but look at the sale signs and go there, and I never did that with my mother. I was never taught that. So I learned all that after I got married. My husband had to train me to be frugal, and I ended up learning how to take care of all the financial books because he just didn’t have the time.
We received many wonderful gifts and had fun fixing up our little apartment. One of our wedding gifts was a Cuckoo clock that we kept in the living room/bedroom. I would be getting dressed and that cuckoo bird would pop out and scare me to death. Arlin already had me so jumpy from scaring me so many times. We kept very busy with our jobs and Arlin’s school work. I’d help him study and drill him on the nights before his tests. He did get better grades and our hard work paid off. I tried to support us financially as much as I could, and Arlin worked at construction and painting to help us get through school. He worked hard that first summer and tried to save as much as he could to get ready for school that fall. Elda was our landlady and she was a beautiful knitter. She taught me how to knit and I made sweaters that winter for Arlin, me, and our future baby.
