On June 3, 1976 we celebrated our 17th wedding anniversary, and the next day I planted all of our plants outside and had the yard looking really nice. Life was being so good to us, so we thought. Then June 5th happened. Arlin got up early and took Bryan with him up to St. Anthony to pour cement on a construction project he was working on. I had the house all cleaned and was just getting ready to sit down and sew the girls some simple summer dresses, and I couldn’t sew unless everything was clean and orderly first. The children were outside playing when Craig came running into the house and said that Mr. Barrus (our neighbor and Mayor of Sugar City at the time) said the Teton Dam had broken and we were supposed to leave for higher ground.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I went outside and the neighbors were all running around gathering up things. A truck came by the house with a loud speaker on it telling everyone to get out and that the dam had broken. I hurried and put the lawn chairs in the garage and saw Arlin’s new chainsaw sitting on the floor. I told Craig to take it up and put it in his bedroom so it wouldn’t get wet. I loaded the kids into the car and headed up the Moody road and turned up a hill where I figured we would be safe. A lot of people were standing in the Sommers’ yard, so I stopped there. We stood on that hill and watched a big cloud of dust come through the valley and then a big wall of water. It wasn’t very long until buildings, farm equipment, trees, and everything else started floating past. It was hard to believe what we were seeing. The Sommers had a telescope and Craig would look through it every once in a while, and could see the chimney of our house. He said, “Mom, our house is still standing” while other homes kept floating by.
After some time, the children were getting hungry and I didn’t know where to go or what to do. We had some good friends who lived down the road a little way, so I drove down to Garry and Mary Jean Parkinson’s place. Mary Jean and I had served together in the Primary presidency and were good friends. I stopped there because the water hadn’t come up that far, and she fixed us all sandwiches. I was worrying about Arlin and Bryan. I didn’t know where they were or if they had gotten to safe ground. In the meantime, Arlin had been trying to get back to Sugar City, but every road he tried to come in on was a wall of water. He ended up going toward Driggs and came back down that way as far as he could and turned up the road toward Parkinson's. When he stopped to ask if anyone had seen his family, we were already in the backyard. We knew the Lord had led him to us. It was evening then and the Parkinsons invited us to stay with them. They were so wonderful to us, and we spent a while with them until we could get settled somewhere.
We knew we needed to get our children somewhere else where they could be taken care of. I left Monday morning to take the children to Grandpa Bartschi’s house in Nounan. I didn’t have enough gas in the car to get there, but left with a prayer that I would find some along the way. I was on the outskirts of Rexburg going through Archer, and as I came to Gary and Sharon Smith’s home (friends of ours) she was standing outside. Being farmers, they had a big gas tank by their house so I stopped and asked Sharon if I could buy some gas from her. She filled up my car, but wouldn’t let me pay her, and just said she wanted to help me out. When we got to Grandpa’s house I walked in and heard him talking to someone on the phone, saying he hadn’t heard a thing and didn’t know if we were alive or not. I walked up behind him and touched his shoulder, and he looked up at me and just broke down crying. I will never forget the look on his face. I was able to call my parents and let them know we were all okay. Then I talked to Shirley in Salt Lake and she said she and Laddie would come to Grandpa’s and take the children. Craig and Bryan had a job with the Schwendimans in Newdale moving pipe, so they stayed with them. Arlin and I stayed with the Parkinsons for a couple of weeks.
President Kimball came to Rexburg and held a special conference at the college the next Sunday. I had taken Arlin’s suit to Grandpa’s so Shirley could take them to Salt Lake and get them cleaned to see if we could save them. Arlin knew he would need something to wear to the meeting, and having nothing we decided to head over to the lawn at the college where the church had brought truckloads of clothing and dumped them on the grass. He went through a few things and found a bright red sweater that would fit. Being as large as he was, it was hard to find anything that was the right size. The morning of the meeting we thought we could just slip in and sit in the back and not be noticed. Then when the meeting started, they announced that they would like all of the bishops to sit on the stand. So my good-lookin’ husband walked to the front of the field house in his bright red sweater, and took his place among all the other bishops in their nice suits. Where they got their suits we did not know, all he knew was that we didn’t have anything for him to wear.
After the special meeting, a former seminary student came up to us and asked us where we were living. We told him we didn’t have a place yet, and he told us he had just built a new home in St. Anthony. Then he told us he wanted us to move into his home and he would go and live with his brother. It was a wonderful blessing that came our way. We were able to spend three months there and have the children back with us again.
During the flood, Arlin was responsible for helping so many people in the ward as the bishop that he really didn’t have time to help me, and there was so much of it I couldn’t do alone. So the night before they were scheduled to come and demolish our house I finally said to him, “You’ve got to help me today. They’re going to tear our house down tomorrow.”
 |
| Teton Flood damage at Sugar City Home |
The garage was gone, and the only thing we were able to save from it was the chainsaw I had Craig take to his bedroom. What a blessing that was, as Arlin used it so much helping wherever he could to cut logs, trees, and other debris. Arlin took a crowbar and broke into the kitchen cabinets so we could save pots, pans, silverware, and anything that we could sterilize.
The picture slides and a lot of keepsakes were up in the storage closet in the boys room, but Max and Roseanne’s baby pictures and keepsakes were still downstairs in a closet waiting to be put into books. So we lost all of their things, but we were able to gather a few photos back from Grandparents that we had given them so we ended up with a few pictures of them. Arlin’s book of remembrance that I had fixed for him was ruined, plus our family group sheets. When it was time to demolish the rest of the house, I sat over across the street on Wilding’s lot and watched them tear it down and haul it away. I was crying and thinking of all the wonderful memories and good times we had enjoyed in that home.
We had a trailer up on the corner lot that we owned and rented and was lost in the flood, so we got reimbursed for that and bought a new one. I felt really blessed then, because I’d look around and see how people were living in the old HUD trailers and there I sat in a brand new trailer with new carpet and all new everything. Arlin built two side rooms onto the trailer, so we had an extra bedroom for Lisa and Cheree. It was a three-bedroom trailer with two baths, all carpeted, which looked like a castle after all the mud we had waded through all summer. Deseret Industries gave us mattresses, so we were able to have beds for everyone. We had three sets of bunk beds, and we were very comfortable. Wally and Ada Eldredge were good friends and invited us to put the trailer on their property on the outskirts of Sugar City, so we had it parked out by the old lumber yard and were there for a year while we rebuilt our home. Then after we moved back into our new house we kept the trailer and rented it out for several years.
School was going to start in October, and we knew we needed to get back closer to Sugar City. Arlin met with Steve Meyers and went through our plans for our new home. They pre-built all the walls in Salt Lake and brought them up on two big semi-trucks. Arlin had some of his students help get the walls, roof, and shingles up. It started to snow in November on the day they got the last shingle on. We worked all the rest of the winter on the inside.
Cheree shared this memory: “As a nine-year-old kid watching my parents work together to rebuild our house, I thought there wasn’t anything they couldn’t do. Dad built the framework and did all the physical labor, mom kept things orderly, and wood stained every piece of finished work in the house. He would do his part, and she did hers, and always had meals for us. They worked side by side through all of it.”
It was a lot of work, and our kids were so good to help out. Craig and Bryan were always there to work on the house with Arlin. Lisa took over as a little mother while I was busy at the house, and to this day she can’t stand to eat Spam ever again because that was all she really knew how to fix for their meals. Cheree remembers eating tuna fish patties fried with egg and saltine crackers, and she can’t stand the thought of eating one of those again either. We were ready to move into our new home by July 1977. What a happy day. I could write volumes about the flood and all that we went through, but there are books written and a slide show. We were just so thankful our lives were spared. We were blessed through it all in so many ways.
