Grammy's Story Begins

Doris Booth Mellor was born July 23, 1945 in Montpelier, ID at the small hospital above a store. She was the fourth child of Vidella and Lovell Booth. It was an unusual thing for there to be more than one baby born in the same month from the small town of St. Charles, but this particular month there were four babies all born within a two week period. Rexine Pugmire was born July 6, Mary Cleveland on July 18, Doreen Hirschi on July 21 and Doris Booth on July 23. So all four babies slept in the same nursery the first night as mothers were kept in the hospital for several weeks during that time period. These four grew up together and attended grade school and high school together. Doris and Mary continued on as roommates at LDS Business college together.

The first two years she enjoyed being the youngest of two older brothers, Darrell who was eighteen years older, Lynn who was twelve years older and her sister Linda, whom she adored, was four years older. The day Doris was brought home from the hospital, their family added another member, a dog named Tip. He was a black border collie. The story goes that Tip was so little that she was in a coffee can. When someone came over to visit they asked Lynn how he liked his new baby, he said, “Oh, she’s OK but I like the dog better.” Lynn always denied the story, but who knows.

Her father was always loved by the kids and he loved them. He would always joke with the kids, especially with stories about their dog Tip. He would make up stories about how Tip would take the car out for a drive, or how he lost his drivers license for doing something wrong. The kids loved hearing about Tip, the wonder dog.

For two years Doris and Linda were great friends. One day when Linda was in first grade she got up and went to school as normal. She came home from school and said that she didn’t feel well and laid down. Within a matter of hours she got really sick and was taken to the hospital. By the next morning, January 13, 1948, Linda was gone. She had died of viral pneumonia. In those days they didn’t have a viewing at the funeral home, it was held a the family’s home. Not realizing how cruel it was to her mother, Doris kept asking her mother to make Linda wake up. She remembers her mother being so devastated that for days following Linda's death she would put Doris in the buggy and take her on walks up to the cemetery to the spot where Linda was buried.

On her 6th birthday she remembers her brothers giving her a pair of cowboy boots. They were the envy of all the other kids. One of the boys came up and said, “ I wish I had big brothers like yours.”

She was never very close to any of her grand parents, most of them had passed away before she was born. But she did grow close to her Uncle Ock (Oscar) and Aunt Selma. In the summer it was Doris’s job to herd the cows on her horse for about 7 blocks down to the pasture each morning. Uncle Ock had one or two cows that he would herd to his pasture. Every morning when she would head out to take the cattle down, Uncle Ock would be waiting to go with her. They didn’t talk much on those many walks, but she remembers him singing “Dum, ditty, dum, ditty, dum” over and over again. Doris had to take her cows a couple block further than Ock, but he was always waiting for her when she came back on the return trip. When Ock was old and near death, Doris was pregnant with her first baby, Ock said that he wasn’t going until he got to hold her baby. He got to hold the baby in February of 1967 and he died within a couple of weeks.

Doris also had a special relationship with Aunt Selma. They always remembered her with birthdays or Christmas gifts. One time Selma brought her a special gift of a night light which was so neat. She was able to have a light on during the night. Ock and Selma lived in a little two room house just east of Doris’s and raised all of their children there. They never had an indoor bathroom or running water there.

She went to the same school with the same people for 8 years. Very seldom did anyone move in or out. It was called Wilson Elementary in St. Charles, ID. It was a four room school house with two grades per room. St. Charles was so predominately LDS, that when a new family moved in during 5th grade who was not LDS all the children were so curious to see what a non-mormon was like.

Doris always had an indoor bathroom but didn’t have an electric stove for many years and it got very warm in the house when they cooked, especially in the summer when they baked bread. It was a coal stove and got very hot. In the fourth or fifth grade they were getting a new electric stove and they took out the old coal stove and waited and waited but the new stove didn’t come. Finally they got a message that their new stove had burned up in a fire at the warehouse in Montpelier. So they had to go get the old stove and put it back in.


When he was 19, Lynn joined the navy and was sent off to Korea. One time he had come home for a visit and they had taken him to Montpelier to catch the train to go back. When they got back home, Doris was crying and crawled back in the corner behind the stove and burned her arm badly on the stove pipe.

There was an old store in town that used to be owned by Doris’s uncle Sam. If she wanted to go buy a drink or candy from the store she would gather a few eggs and take them to the store and they would buy the eggs to give her money for candy. The had old fashioned, glass covered cases filled with penny candy. She would choose which candy she wanted and they would put it in a small paper bag. Uncle Sam always wanted to give Doris free candy but his wife didn’t want him giving away stuff so he would get a couple pieces and stand around the end of the counter, cough to get her attention and sneak the candy to her. Candy was a penny, candy bars were a nickel and pop was 7 cents a bottle. She always walked home from school for lunch, except a few times during the winter she would take a lunch.

She always hated laundry day It was usually Monday and Mother would usually have to heat the water on the stove and carry it to the indoor porch where she did the laundry. They didn’t have electric washers. First they had the old fashioned washer then two tubs. The first had rinse water and the second had blueing to turn the whites nice and white. Then they would hang them out on the lines to dry. In the winters they would bring in the big frozen sheets and lay them all over the house to thaw and dry out. But when it was warm out side the laundry always smelled so nice. The first words she learned to spell were “Fab” (the laundry detergent), “Ajax”, and “Philco” (the brand of the refrigerator).

They didn’t have an electric water heater but there was a small one on the back of the stove that didn’t work very well. In the winter when it was cold out, Saturday would be bath night. They would bring in the old metal tub into the kitchen because it was too cold in the bathroom. Doris would get the first bath and it would go from youngest to oldest, ending with her Dad.

They didn’t get a TV until Doris was in the 8th grade. So on Sunday at 5:30 the neighborhood kids would gather at the Hirschi’s home to watch Lassie. When TV’s first came out, it was a much more formal event. They would all gather around to watch and then turn it off after that show. Doris’s family was the first family in town to get a color TV. So people in town would gather at their house to watch the color TV.

Phones were also quite a luxury. The few people in town that had a phone would take calls for other people and then deliver them to the families without a phone. Even then, what they had were party lines. You would lift up the phone to make a call, and if others were having a conversation, you had to wait until they were finished to make a call. Not much privacy there. When her dad was going to be called as Bishop, they had to get a phone, but until he was sustained, they couldn’t tell anyone that they had a phone or everyone would know who the new bishop was going to be. Doris was so excited about having a phone but couldn’t tell anyone until the new bishop was announced.

Doris was never good at athletics and always hated it when they would choose teams because she was always chosen last. Spelling wasn’t a strong area either, but she loved it when her teacher Mr. Wilkes started having a‘math bee’. That was Doris’s strong area and she was the first to be chosen for these.

Her parents were always a integral part of her life. Every year their family would go on a vacation to Yellowstone park. One year they were preparing to go and her mother got everyone's clothes ready and hung them on the door frame. Dad got his clothes and took them out to the car. Doris took her’s out, and no one got her mothers. So when they got to Yellowstone, everyone had clothes but Mother! On the way there they did stop in Afton, WY and bought her a red plaid dress—it was ugly and never seemed to wear out but things were never thrown away until they wore out.

They would sleep in the car on their trips, Mother in the front seat, Doris in the back seat and Dad on a cot outside the car. Once, during the night, Dad hopped in the car and calmly said, “Scoot over—there is a bear out there.”

Her father supported their family by farming. They always had a few milk cows, raised hay and had a garden. It was when Doris was about in the 4th or 5th grade that they came into the modern age and bought a tractor. As a kid growing up on a farm, you helped with the chores. In the summer when it was time to harvest the hay, they usually had to hire help. It was usually the town drunk, Bernie. They learned that they couldn’t pay him until the job was done, because if you paid him each day, he wouldn’t show up for work the next day. From the time Doris was little, she would take turns with her mother either driving the tractor to load the hay or stay home and cook a big meal for the hay workers. For this reason, cooking for large groups has come natural for Doris. Her mother would get the big meals started but Doris would cook the rest. There were often “hobos” passing through that would stop by for food. Mother would always give them a quart of fruit and loaf of bread.

Her mother was always making quilts and in her tiny home, the quilt would take up the entire living room. She would invite friends over to quilt and she would always make a nice lunch for anyone that would come over to help. It became a fond memory for Doris as she spent many hours laying on the floor under the quilts.

Doris started driving the tractor when she was only 8 or 9 years old out of necessity, but she got her drivers license when she was 14. One time when she had driven some friends to the nearby town of Paris for a drill team practice, they took the car on some extra trips to chase boys . Her parents had told her to go straight to drill practice and back home and she knew that they knew what the mileage on the car was when they left. They had a bright idea that if they backed the car home, it would reverse the mileage. Their idea backfired when she had to call her dad to pull them out of the ditch. He came with the tractor but couldn’t figure out how they managed to get the car in the ditch that way!

There were 42 students in the graduating class of 63 from Fielding High School.