Dean Burton’s funeral was last Wednesday at the Thatcher Chapel. Nina and I took mother and dad with us to go to the funeral. His will be the last funeral in that building as the Thatcher Ward is moving into a new building in Niter that they’ll share with the Niter ward. At one time in the area now covered by the Thatcher Ward there used to be a Thatcher First, Thatcher Second, Cleveland, and Mound Valley Wards. Over in the Niter area there also used to be a Lago Ward. They’re all casualties of the farm consolidation and people moving off the farms into the cities. A person used to be able to make a living on a 150-acre farm. Definitely not the case anymore. Further most of the farm land that’s not in the Bear River valley is in the soil bank … not being farmed at all. Very strange.
Dean was my First Cousin Once Removed. That is, my grandmother Mary Burton Smith and Dean’s father, Rulon Burton, were brothers and sisters (making him and my dad First Cousins). Uncle Rulon and Aunt Ann lived in Cleveland and ran a farm. They also ran the Cleveland Telephone Company where Aunt Ann was the operator and the switchboard was in their living room. We lived in a small building on their farm for several months when I was about four years old. Dean would have been about 15, but I don’t remember him or his twin sister Dorothy from that time.
My earliest memory of Dean is in about 1955 when Uncle Rulon was involved in a very serious automobile accident and nearly didn’t survive. He lost his right leg in that accident and spent a very long time in the hospital. My mother, who was a licensed practical nurse, spent a lot of time taking care of him at the hospital and during his recovery. Uncle Rulon was an alcoholic and the recovery was extremely difficult and painful for him because of the alcohol addiction. Dean came home from the Army to run the farm while Uncle Rulon was out of commission. He looked pretty dashing in his Army uniform. He got married shortly after that and then bought his own farm down the road from Uncle Rulon and they both ran the farms together after that.
Dean was skinny and I mean lean as a toothpick, but he was also very strong. He was one of the hardest working people I knew as I was growing up. Dean was five minutes older than his twin sister Dorothy. She married Don Workman from Treasureton. I worked for Don Workman during the summers of my twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth years. Don and Dean did some of the heavier farming helping each other out … that would be putting up the hay and harvesting the wheat. During haying season, after the hay was mowed, raked, and bailed, Uncle Rulon and Dean (along with their wives) would come over to help put up the hay. Uncle Rulon would drive the truck which had an attachment that would “catch” the hay bale and lift it onto the truck. Don Workman would be in the back of the truck and stack the bales until the truck was full. Uncle Rulon would drive the truck using his cane on the gas pedal, his artificial leg to work the clutch, and his good leg to work the brake. He drove like a crazy man out there!
Once the truck was full, it’d come over to the hay stack which was by a large wooden derrick. My job was to drive the jeep for the derrick and the big hay rake on the derrick. I’d back up one direction and the hay rake would go up and over to the truck. I’d then drive forward to let the hay rake down where Don would stick the rake into four bales of hay. I’d go further back, the bales would be picked up, then go forward to the right and they were moved over to the haystack where Dean would position them about where they were to be placed. I’d back up, pulling the rake out of the bales, and the operation would get repeated. Dean would then put the bales into the final position, making sure to tie in the corners. He worked tirelessly! I always had a heavy case of hay fever (which is why I was assigned to drive the derrick jeep) and was always amazed at how much weight that tiny guy could heft around the haystack. Once Don’s hay was up, we’d move the whole operation from Treasureton to Cleveland and put up Uncle Rulon’s hay.
The summer of my fifteenth year I worked for Uncle Rulon and Dean. In addition to milking the cows (my primary job that year), I also did babysitting for Dean and Lois’s children. Dean was a great guy to work for as a teenager. He was pretty much a kid at heart and we had a lot of fun. But, he was always up and going before daybreak and worked late into the evening. He loved to dance, as did his wife Lois, so they often went dancing at night, coming home quite late, but that didn’t change the fact that he was up early the next morning.
Dean was a heavy smoker. When I was working for him, he was smoking a couple of packs a day of Chesterfield cigarettes. No sissy filters for him. The smoking finally caught up with him and he spent the last several years on oxygen and eventually even that wasn’t enough. He became more and more limited as to what he could do until he was confined to bed and finally his body shut down because it couldn’t get enough oxygen.
He was a great husband, father, and grandfather. He was loved by all his family. He was an avid hunter and fisherman. He loved to water ski. Many Sundays when I was working for Don and then for him, I would go to Church (by myself) in the morning and then drive over to the Oneida Reservoir (on the Bear River just south of Cleveland) where they were all out on the water in Uncle Rulon’s boat and spend the afternoon with them water skiing and swimming. Uncle Rulon was just a much a maniac driving the boat as he was the hay truck! Goodbye, Dean. You’ll be missed, but we’ll see you again on the other side!
