Betty Jean Nickle
A Life Story
2 Birth and Childhood
The baby came breech. A doctor and Lena's sister-in-law Elizabeth Nickle attended the difficult birth, the doctor giving instructions to both the mother and Elizabeth. When the baby's foot emerged, the doctor told Elizabeth to grab it. She tried, but the tiny limb slipped from her hands back into the birth canal. "What are you trying to do, kill the mother and the baby?" the doctor bellowed. He gave Lena a whiff of chloroform, and the next thing she remembered was holding in her arms the infant girl she and Dan would name Betty Jean Nickle.1
Betty Jean entered the world on September 4, 1928, the anniversary of her Aunt Elizabeth's birth and the eve of the Great Depression. Her parents, four sisters, and sole surviving brother lived in the porched bungalow where she was born on Franklin Avenue in Springfield, Missouri.2
When first delivered, Betty Jean did not breathe and was thought to be stillborn. Eventually, she cried out, assuring those present she was very much alive and rewarding her mother for the most difficult of the nine childbirths she would have.3 Though her first cry came hard, Betty Jean's cries would echo often down the corridors of a sickly childhood.4
As an infant, she had croup. When six months old, she contracted pneumonia and whooping cough. Through what she would later credit as the prayers and faith in her behalf, she defied medical experts' repeated predictions that she would die. "For the next three years," she would recall, "I was a healthy happy baby."
Children of Latter-day Saint parents typically receive a name and blessing in a religious ceremony within a few weeks after their birth. Perhaps because her father still did not hold the priesthood, Betty Jean did not receive the naming and blessing ordinance until August 10, 1930, when she was nearly two years old. Then it was her Uncle Clem who performed it. On the same day, Betty Jean's eight-year-old sister, Lorene, received baptism, again at the hands of Uncle Clem.
As a very young child, Betty Jean grew close to her brother LeRoy Earl, two years her senior. Another sister, Norma Joan, was born in the house on Franklin three weeks after Betty Jean turned two. A year later, the family had moved to another home, this one at 2252 North Pierce in Springfield. But during their years on Franklin, LeRoy left his footprints in the freshly poured walk in front of the family home. In later years, Betty Jean would return to gaze at the little prints, one of the few tangible remnants of her first best friend, and the only brother she ever knew.
LeRoy was her hero. "My first memory is of my brother," she wrote a half century after the event. "I was 3 and he was five. We were next door playing and were barefooted. I somehow stepped on a Bee & it stung my foot[.] I went crying home. Mother came out of the house and comforted me. A few minutes later LeRoy came running up and told me not to cry as he had killed the Bee."
LeRoy and Betty Jean would walk down the street with their arms around each other, LeRoy leaning over from time to time to kiss his sister. "What I can remember of my brother I loved him a lot," she wrote as a young woman. Years later, she recalled, "Mother use to tell me how Le Roy was just crazy about me and took care of me and took me with him everywhere." And so it should not have been surprising that in September 1931, Betty Jean, almost three years old, and LeRoy, barely five, got sick together.
"[M]y brother and I one afternoon decided to go out in the back yard and eat all the green grapes, apples, and all the fruit off all the trees," she wrote eighteen years after the experience. "We accomplished almost the eating of all of it. We were both taken seriously ill. We were both in the hospital at the same time. The doctor said that I would die and that my brother would live. But for some reason that we do not know, it was to be the other way."
"What I can remember is being in the hospital," she recalled. "I was in a room and I slept in a bed that had sides on it so that I couldn't get out. I was terribly ill. I and my brother both had summer complaint. I can remember the room very clearly and mother being there holding my hand. . . . I soon got better and was taken home."
By Sunday, September 13, LeRoy had improved so much the doctors said he could go home too the next day. But he relapsed and died that night.
Apparently too stricken by grief to convey the news herself, Lena sent her eldest daughters, fourteen-year-old Evelyn and eleven-year-old Gladys, back to Franklin Street to tell their former neighbors of LeRoy's death and invite them to his funeral. Lena's daughter Joan, then only nine months old, later recorded what Gladys and Evelyn told her about this experience. "The girls would go from door to door and tell the neighbors that their little brother LeRoy was dead . . . and when they told this . . . the neighbors would then cry and the girls would cry and then they would go to the next house to tell the next family. I am sure this must have been an heartbreaking experience for my parents to lose their second son in death also."
Preoccupied by grief and making funeral arrangements, Dan and Lena did not spend much time explaining the meaning of death to little Betty Jean. But before the boy's burial the next Tuesday afternoon, her father picked her up to look in her brother's casket and tell him good-bye. As a young woman, Betty Jean would recall, "The only thing I can remember about his death is my daddy picking me up and letting me look into the casket and telling me that I would never see him again."
The little girl struggled with the idea of not seeing her brother again. "I did not understand death," she later wrote, "and understandably I was confused and hurt that this dear brother would no longer be around for me to play with." Her oldest sister, Evelyn, tried to comfort her. "I was crying," Betty Jean recalled, "and Evelyn came in and carried me out in the back yard and we sat by a large tree and she told me a story that had just come in The Children's Friend," the LDS Church's magazine for children.
"She told me about a caterpillar that had been sent to earth to grow and to become strong and after he had developed as much as he could, he made a cocoon and slept inside for a short time and when he cam[e] out he was a beautiful butterfly. I can still see the pictures in this book and how she explained to me that LeRoy was like this caterpillar, he came to life and when he was ready he got into a cocoon, and she told that this was death, and that when LeRoy came out from this cocoon (or death) he would be like a beautiful butterfly, but in a new world. Everyone was so grieved at LeRoy's death that it didn't enter their minds to explain to me about death, but Evelyn remembered and I have always appreciated her doing this."
Betty Jean soon had a chance to share her new knowledge about what had happened to her brother. "After he died," she would recall, "one day I was outdoors playing and the mail man came up and asked me where my brother was. I looked up and said 'He's gone to Heaven[.]' The mail man went to our house and with tears in his eyes told [Mother] this and expressed his sympathy because he had really liked LeRoy."
When Dan and Lena lost their first son, Paul Preston, they found solace in the doctrine of the LDS Church that death is but a temporary parting and that faithful families can live together eternally. When their second and only other son, LeRoy Earl, died, the teachings of the Church again brought comfort to them. Wishing to be united with their family members after death, Dan and Lena recommitted themselves to living the principles of the gospel they had embraced. If their first years as Church members had been marked by marginal activity, the rest of their lives would be distinguished by steadfast service.
On the Sunday after LeRoy's death, the Church branch held a special meeting at which the speakers addressed such subjects as "the Declining condition existing in this branch," "Reasons for attendance to All meetings, pertaking of the Sacrement," "The Priesthood of the Church of Jesus Christ and the Power and Authority thereof, the Blessings of the Labors in the Ministry and the Obediance to devine authority thru the Priesthood," and "the need the Individual has for the Branch and the urgent necessity for each individual to Obey the Requests of the priesthood or authority there of."
After the talks, the branch leaders asked the members to "vote . . . to sustain the Persons who are holding at this time offices in the Various positions of the Branch." Lena was sustained as second counselor in the presidency of the Primary, the children's auxiliary, and Dan as first counselor in the presidency of the Young Men's Mutual Improvement Association. On the same day, Betty Jean's sister Norma Joan, then nearly a year old, finally received the ordinance of naming and blessing, though not from Dan, who would be required to demonstrate a pattern of faithfulness before receiving the priesthood and being advanced to the office that would entitle him to perform such ordinances.
Dan's renewed commitment to faithfulness demonstrated itself two Sundays later when the branch held its monthly fast and testimony meeting. The meeting began with the congregation singing "We Are All Enlisted." After a prayer and another song, "Count Your Blessings," branch members were free to arise and express their feelings. Dan was the second to stand. The minutes of the meeting record, "Bro Dan E Nickle second Gave thanks to [G]od for sparing his little daughter and ask[ed] the prayers of all that he might live worth[y] to meet His little Son whom God Has ch[o]sen to take unto him." Dan also offered the prayer at the end of the meeting.
On Sunday, October 11, 1931—the very next week—the branch members voted in their evening service "to Sustain . . . Bro Daniel E Nickle . . . to be ordained to the office of a deacon in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints." That evening, Dan also fulfilled an assignment as the meeting's first speaker, addressing the congregation of fourteen members and eight visitors on the crucifixion of Christ. After the meeting, the branch president, John B. Hawkes, ordained Dan to the office of deacon in the Aaronic priesthood, an office that would prepare him for future offices in the Church.
Thereafter, Dan's and Lena's names—especially Dan's—would appear frequently in the minutes of the branch's meetings as they became two of its most active members. Their renewed faith would permeate their family life, stamp itself indelibly on the hearts and minds of Betty Jean and her sisters, and give the family strength to endure life's trials.
Among the trials the family would face were the financial instability and uncertainty of the Depression. A building contractor by trade, Dan's business more or less rose and fell with the economy. During the first few years after the stock market crash of 1929, Dan's skill and reputation seemed to keep financial disaster at bay, and Lena used her skill as a seamstress and cook to keep the children well clothed and fed with what few resources the family had. As a result, the parents managed to shield Betty Jean and her sisters for a time from the Depression's worst effects.
About 1932, however, their security collapsed in a financial chain reaction. Betty Jean's oldest sister, Evelyn, recalled, "Our dad had several homes that he was building and the loan companies and bank cut off all loans. People could not afford to buy them and he lost all of them, including the home that we lived in. We had to leave our nice house and rent a house. This was on North Campbell Street." Despite their financial reverses, the family remained true to their faith and continued to support their Church branch as they struggled to meet the challenges of the Depression.
The greatest challenge for Dan and Lena was providing enough food for their growing family. The family's staple food became biscuits—biscuits made with water, fried on the stove top to save the expense of heating an oven, and served with a syrup made from sugar. To daughters who were accustomed to more sumptuous fare, the biscuit meals seemed drab, and they responded with a mixture of sarcasm and make-believe.
"When we first moved to the little house on Campbell Street," Evelyn remembered, "my sisters and I were still a little touched by this, because while mother was serving us the water bisquits and the sugar syrup we would say quite loudly, 'please pass the chicken . . . we would love to have the ice cream, and mother, is the angel food ca[k]e ready?' Our neighbors were near our windows, pretending to be working in the yard, and they were really just trying to learn who their new neighbors were like. Mother, would keep saying, 'girls, girls, girls.'"
Despite the hardships, the Depression years included bright days, and among these was Monday, May 29, 1933, the day on which Betty Jean's sisters took her to the dedication of the new public swimming pool complex at Grant Beach Park in Springfield. Four hundred swimmers showed up to take advantage of the new facility, joined by about an equal number of onlookers and a crew of reporters and photographers from the local newspaper. For four-year-old Betty Jean, who would never learn to swim very well, the new wading pool provided a safe place to frolic in the water. Dressed in a dark swimsuit and a light swim cap, she caught the eye of the news crew, which had her pose for a picture.
The following Sunday, June 4, 1933, Betty Jean's picture appeared on the front page of the newspaper under the title "Cool." The caption explained, "Here is the season's first bathing beauty picture. The beauty is little Betty Jean Nickle, age 4, daugh[t]er of Mr. and Mrs. Dan E. Nickle, 2052 North Campbell street. Miss Nickle was snapped as she came up for a breath of air after her first plunge into the wading pool at Grant Beach park. The picture was taken last Monday, the opening day of the pool."
If Betty Jean imagined spending her summer at the new pool, her dreams soon evaporated. Within weeks after her picture appeared, illness struck, nearly killing her. "When I was four years old," she later explained, "I had measles, whooping cough, and pneumonia, . . . practically one on top of the other. And one time during this episode, the doctor pronounced me dead. But they soon got me back again."
Betty Jean's two-year-old sister, Norma Joan, became sick about the same time. At the time they fell ill, their mother, Lena, was enduring the advanced stages of pregnancy with her ninth and last child while bearing the burdens of Depression-induced poverty and suffering the slights of some well-to-do relatives who had never forgiven her for associating with the Latter-day Saints. On August 1, 1933, as she kept a lonesome vigil by the bedside of her two sick daughters, Lena penned a note that the girls would later treasure.
"My Dear Little Children—" it began. "While I am sitting at bed-side by my sick little girls—Betty Jean and Norma Joan, lomesome and sad—I hope you will never feel like I do. When I am dead and gone, remember dear children, help one another all you can. If one is in trouble, help all you can. Don't think you are better than the one that is poor. A friend in need is a friend indeed. So may God be with you and help you to live right and remember me as long as you live. Your loving mother."
Though the two girls recovered from the immediate illnesses, Betty Jean became asthmatic and began experiencing allergies for the first time, all of which she would attribute to her illness. Seventeen years later, she wrote about the illness that struck her at age four and the way it changed her childhood. "The doctors diagnose[d] my case as asthma," she recorded. "This caused most of my younger life to be spent in bed. Because I had asthma and spent most of my time in bed I became a great dreamer and was very bashful. I couldn't go swimming, play in the snow, run or do any of the things other children of my age were doing. The best thing I could do was to lay and play like I was doing them. I almost became an introvert. I also developed a terrible temper. I guess because I was ill I always got my way. I was a spoiled child."
During her sickly childhood, Betty Jean experienced not only summer complaint, measles, whooping cough, pneumonia, and allergies, but also mumps, chicken pox, tonsilitis, boils, reflux, and scarlet fever. She seemed especially susceptible to bad colds, which would sometimes develop into pneumonia. Asthma, allergies, and pneumonia kept in her bed for many months between the ages of four and fifteen, not only keeping her from playmates but also forcing her to stay home from school, thus hindering her education.
"Daddy used to say how he'd sit up all night just holding my nightgown and holding me up so I could breathe," she would recall late in life. "And there was many weeks at a time during the winter when I didn't go to school. And if you look at my handwriting right now you'll understand that I wasn't there when they were teaching writing. That's one reason my handwriting's so bad because I wasn't there. And many and many a mornings, Daddy would put me in the car, take me by the doctor's home or his office . . . and I [would] have to go in and get a shot of adrenalin in order to make it through the day.
On September 19, 1933, just a few weeks after Betty Jean came down with the sickness that changed her childhood, her mother, Lena, gave birth to hers and Dan's ninth and last child, a girl whom the parents named Wilma Nadyne Nickle but who came to be known as Willi. Willi's birth came during the most difficult part of the Depression for the family.
Evelyn, the eldest of Dan and Lena's seven surviving children—all daughters—remembered the poverty of this period most vividly and later recalled, "I was, at this time, . . . just starting the 12th grade. The depression was bad and getting worse. I can remember that the government had set up 'soup lines' for people who were out of work. Since [there] was little building and selling of houses, we had to get by on very little. The rental [the house on Campbell] that we moved into was only costing us $7.00 a month (with the water included). For us to have something to eat, daddy had to join soup lines that were set up across the country. You would have to bring your own kettle, and according to the size of your family, you would be allowed a certain amount of soup.
"It was very degrading to him and he would put on a coat . . . and hoped that none of his neighbors would see him. They, however, were in line with their overcoats on and their hats pulled down, and they were all trying to ignore everyone who was in line and just pay attention to the soup that they were getting . . . and in getting home."
As the Depression wore on, the family would benefit from government commodity distributions. Evelyn would remember, "They had beautiful, as I remember them, bananas, large bunches of celery and butter, and different things that we ha[d] not been able to buy until that time. Dad would go over and come back with a large sack with groceries over his back. Mother would do wonderful things with these as she was a wonderful cook. It wasn[']t really a very long time that we had to do without the good foods to eat. When we got th[ese] commodities she was able to make nourishing meals."
Of necessity, Dan spent much of his time out of the home scraping to support the family, which left Lena to care for newborn Willi and the other six daughters. The medical wisdom of the period required mothers to remain in bed for ten days after giving birth. Dan and Lena could not afford to hire someone to care for the younger children while the older ones went to school, and so Evelyn offered to stay home to babysit. "I was feeling rather tired of school anyway," Evelyn would recall, "so I talked my mother into letting me stay home since she needed help. . . . I bathed the baby and took care of mother and the other children. I always enjoyed talking [sic] care of my younger sisters," including Betty Jean.
Soon the ten-day post-partum recovery period ended, and Evelyn continued to stay home from school, serving as a second mother to her sisters. She would recall, "One of my duties after the children came from school, and when mother was out of bed, was that she wo[u]ld have me take the little ones out to play with them, while she did the house work. That was the easiest way to keep the little ones out from under foot. Then she would do all of the house work." Under these conditions, the bond between Evelyn and her younger sisters grew strong. "They were like my babies," Evelyn would later say.
Betty Jean would never forget Evelyn's loving care. She would later write, "I'll always remember that Evelyn was 'assigned' by mother to take care of me whenever she was too busy to do so. I'll always remember the stories she read to me as I sat on her lap, but most of all I'll remember her songs and how she explained them to me. My favorite was 'Little Marion Parker' and also 'Frankie and Johnny,' and 'Oh Johny.'"
Lena's resourcefulness, Evelyn's help, and Dan's diligence worked together to make matters a bit easier for the family. "Things did improve some for us," Evelyn recounted. "One day daddy got a job building a transient camp. At this time there were so many men who left their home in search of employment. There were many, many men who were just riding freight trains because they had no place to live. The government was building camps like this across the country and daddy got the job of building one in Springfield. This way the men had places to live and to earn a little money to send home to their families. He, daddy, built many buildings, such as a hospital, office for dentist, barns etc. Men, who were searching for employ[ment] were people from all walks of life. This camp furnished for them many things. The salary for daddy was $90.00 a month . . . this seemed like a fortune to us and to many other people at the time."
Meanwhile, Betty Jean and the other younger sisters remained largely oblivious to the family's troubles. Recalling the Depression days on Campbell Street, Joan wrote, "I don't know how they managed, but I do remember many pretty dresses my mother made for me. I can especially remember a beautiful white organdy dress with big red dots, made with a ruffeled skirt. Betty Jean and I both had dresses alike...they were called 'Shirley Temple Dresses'. My mother was a very good seamstress."
As they grew, Betty Jean and her sisters became better acquainted with their neighbors. These included, as Joan later described them, "the sick old woman across the street" whom "all the kids in the neighborhood use to call . . . 'old lady Linquist,'" which "we really shouldn't have done because she was really mentally ill." Then there were "the school teacher, Miss Gruble[,] who lived on the corner" and "on the other end of the block . . . the school teacher, Miss Crippen." The most memorable neighbors, however, were the ones who lived next door.
On the left side of the Nickle home as viewed from the street was the largest home in the neighborhood, a stately three-story structure with a black, wrought-iron fence around it. Betty Jean and other neighborhood children would climb on the fence and swing on the horizontal bars, irking its irascible owner, the widow Nelson, who was perhaps fifty years old but seemed very aged to the youngsters. The woman smeared the fence with grease to dissuade the children from playing on it, but they simply wiped it off. Finally, she capped the posts with spikes.
Mrs. Nelson had a grandson living with her whose name was Billy. When Betty Jean was about four years old, she first saw Billy Nelson. He was standing by the fence and said to her, "Do you know what?"
"No," she answered, "what?"
"Stick your head in a coffee pot," he replied saucily. The audacity of the remark fixed it in her mind. Soon she, her sister Joan, Billy Nelson, and a boy named Jackie Botteram who lived on the other side of the Nickles became fast friends and would remain so into junior high school. Billy's expression "stick your head in a coffee pot" became a favorite saying of the foursome. "In fact," Betty Jean wrote three decades later, "even to this day I occasionally catch myself saying it."
Sometimes aided and abetted by such characters as Billy, Jean occasionally found herself in trouble. But despite the antics, her parents proved patient. "We had such good folks," she would remember. "I remember daddy spanking me only once and I was about five years old. He had just painted our garage red and I went out and along with Joan repainted the side white. I can still remember that spanking, but most of all I remember all the good things my mom and dad did for me. They spoiled me rotten but I love them for it."
The love of the parents found expression in the warmth of their family life. Joan later captured the spirit of the family home in a littany of childhood memories: "I remember mother doing our girl's hair up with rags on Saturday night. . . . [D]addy holding me on his lap while he sang and all the stories he use to tell us about [his dog] 'ole shep' . . . and the stories about when he and Uncle Dave were little boys . . . living in Arkansas . . . I remember listening to the 'Grand Ole Opera' over the radio on Saturday nights and . . . I remember the 4th of July . . . and how we would go to the Doling Park for rides and fun and fireworks."
The family's Thanksgiving Day traditions proved especially memorable because in the early years, it was the one chance the family had to interact with Lena's wider family. Joan would describe the tradition that developed. "Early on Thanksgiving Day," she explained, "we would all get dressed in our warmest clothes and pile into the family car for our trip to Uncle Arthurs farm. I can remember mother putting blankets around our legs so we wouldn't get cold on the trip. After the food was packed and daddy's gun and supplies put in the car we were off to Billings, singing the song 'In an Old Red Barn, so cozy and warm, the roosters were roosting a pie... the pigs in the pen were a singing to them... 'we will meet in the good bye and bye'.......ringel-jing-jing, how those bells they would ring...the children were happy and gay...the turkey's will die and their feathers will fly...for tomorrow (today) is Thanksgiving Day.'"
The fun they had traveling to Uncle Arthur's continued after they arrived. "The men would all go hunting for rabbits; the cousins would all play on the haystacks and in the barn and ride horses; the women would stay in the house and prepare this wonderful banquet of food for Thanksgiving dinner. Everything always looked so good...I use to think it was the best food in the whole world. After the men came back from hunting, they would put tin cans on the fen[c]e post and let us kids take turns trying to shoot them off....we could shoot till all the bullets were gone."
The return trip also was eventful. "On the way home from Billings, daddy would look for persimmon trees along the road...when he would see one he would stop and we would get out an[d] gather some of the persimmons to take home."
Although holidays were memorable, they were only temporary respites in the routine of life for Betty Jean. Even though sickness often interrupted her schooling, school still became a dominant factor in her young life as it did for most youth her age. On September 4, 1934—Betty Jean's sixth birthday—she started her formal education at Bowerman School, which was just a few blocks from the family's home. Her first grade teacher, Miss Hargis, had taught Betty Jean's older sisters and would end up being the first grade teacher for all seven of the Nickle girls. "We all thought she was ancient when we had her," Betty Jean would recall, "but she was the sweetest, kindest woman and made for—good for school."
Church activity also played an important role during Betty Jean's first year of school. Her father, Dan, remained true to his commitment to God and served faithfully in the Springfield Branch of the Church, setting an example for the rest of the family. Finally, on March 31, 1935, Dan was ordained a priest by his brother Clem's son, James W. Nickle. As a priest, Dan held the authority to bless "the sacrament," as Latter-day Saints call the emblems of the Lord's Supper, and frequently after his ordination, he sat at the sacrament table during the branch's weekly sacrament meetings so he could administer this ordinance.
During the 1935-1936 school year, Betty Jean attended second grade, again at Bowerman School, where her teacher's name was Miss Gruble. Her family members also continued to be active in the Church. But the most notable occurrence of this period for the family was the marriage of Betty Jean's oldest sister and sometime surrogate mother, Evelyn, to Marvin McGee.
Evelyn and Marvin had dated for about a year by the time they married on December 7, 1935, and Betty Jean had gotten to know Marvin during this courting period. On September 4, 1935, Marvin gave Betty Jean a birthday present and message she would always remember. When he visited the Nickle house on that day, he brought a cupcake with a candle in it. Handing her the cupcake, Marvin said, "IF I had a lot of money I would have bought you a bike but since I didn't I bought you a cupcake." He then gave her some homespun wisdom that would help her throughout life. "IF," he said, "is the biggest word in the world."
Decades later, she wrote, "That saying has stuck in my mind all these years and has helped me many times to go on my way. When I stop and think 'IF' I had good health or lots of money, etc. I could do certain things. Then I remember '[I]F' is a big word and so I accept the fact that I don't have good health, or a lot of money, and I go on my way."
Three months and three days later, Marvin married Evelyn. He was nineteen years old, she eighteen. Both sets of parents had agreed to the marriage, and the mothers had even signed for the marriage license because Marvin and Evelyn were under age. In acquiescing to the marriage, Dan and Lena may have recalled how much Lena's parents had hurt them by not accepting their union.
Still, Dan and Lena consented reluctantly to their eldest daughter's marriage. Dan and Lena had become active Latter-day Saints, and their church taught that ideally Latter-day Saint men and women should marry members of their own faith and do so in a temple where they could be married by one authorized to wed them for eternity, not just until death. Marvin was not a member of their church, making a temple marriage impossible.
On the Saturday of the wedding, Dan had found a one-day job painting a building uptown for three dollars. At noon, Lena took Evelyn to town, where they explained to Dan's employer that they needed money for the marriage. The employer kindly advanced them the three dollars Dan would earn that day. Lena and Evelyn bought a three-dollar dress for Evelyn to wear, and Lena gave her a pair of hose she had been saving.
Wearing her new dress and hose and an old pair of shoes with worn-out heels, Evelyn went that evening with Marvin to the home of an elderly Baptist minister who had married Marvin's parents many years earlier. The minister performed the ceremony and handed around a bowl of apples for refreshment. Soon the newlyweds were headed back to the Nickles to greet Evelyn's parents and sisters, including Betty Jean. They found a somber group.
"Mom and Daddy were at home waiting," Evelyn would recall late in her life. "I remember that right after we were married we came back over to the folk's house and the thing that is most vivid in my mind is my six little sisters setting on a devan, most of them, their little feet just stood straight out. Maybe Gladys and Lorene's feet might have touched the floor, but not the rest of them. They all looked so funny. They were so quiet. Before we had such a good relationship, and they use to come running to meet me. And they were always glad to see me. I had played and cared for them many times, but this night they looked at me as if I were a stranger. They just set there starring at me. I guess that maybe it was because mother had cried and she and father were really upset because I had gotten married so young. I think that it might have rubbed off on my sisters that I had done something wrong and they were all kinda shocked that this thing had happened. So, when Marvin and I came in, they were all dressed and setting there just as quiet as could be. They never said a word, not a one of them ever said a word."
Distraught by the marriage, Lena would not sleep for several nights, yet still tried hard to make the young couple feel welcome. The day after the marriage, she had them over for a wedding dinner. But thoughts of the eternal consequences of marrying outside the faith would return to burden the family thereafter. Despite these religious differences, however, the family accepted Marvin as one of its members and tried to make him feel welcomed.
When Marvin and Evelyn first married, Marvin had a job driving a truck for Staton Cleaners six days a week for a dollar a day. Within a few months, he got a job as a presser at a garment factory where two of his older brothers were employed. In his new job, he was paid by the piece, and if he worked hard, he could earn seventeen dollars a week, nearly triple what the truck driving had paid. The work was much harder, however, as he labored fast and rhythmically, stomping on one pedal to close the pressing machine, another to open it, enduring continual bursts of hot steam in his face.
"During this period was when times were really hard," Evelyn would remember. "Work was so scarce. The factories were hot, they had [no] kind of air conditioning. The workers would faint quite oftern, and they had to be carried out. Every day, a bench would be placed in the door way[;] there were people who needed jobs so much that they would come and sit on the benches just hoping that some one would faint or become ill and that they would be right there waiting to take over someone's job. People would came there day after day, sittin in this lobby type space on the benches. There day after day. Marvin said that it was very frusterating to be standing there working, perspiring and wondering if he was going to make it through the day, just knowing that there was someone sitting and waiting to take over his job."
Sometime over the next few years, Betty Jean and her sisters Jane, Joan, and Willi would stop by Marvin's work place to deliver something to him at Evelyn's request. Sheltered as they had been by their parents from many of life's harshest realities, the girls winced to find Marvin toiling in sweatshop conditions. "He was working so hard and it was so hot that he was dripping with sweat," Betty Jean remembered. "When we left him a[n]d returned to the car, we were all crying. It really hurt us to see how hard he was working and under such terrible conditions and we prayed that he would soon be able to find another job."
Meanwhile, Betty Jean continued her elementary education at Bowerman School, attending third grade during the 1936-1937 school year under the tutelage of a Miss Miller. Betty Jean would later recall that it was probably during this school year that she, her sister Joan, and the two boys who made up their childhood foursome, Billy and Jackie, went home for lunch but dallied in returning to school. "On the way back we goofed so much we were late," she remembered. "We decided we were to[o] frighten[ed] to go in late so we decided to miss school and go to a movie. Jackie had some money which he always did. We got as far as an alley a couple of blocks from school and then got scared we would get caught if we went to the show so we spent three miserable hours hiding in the bushes, waiting for school to get out. It was our last time at playing hookey."
Besides receiving secular instruction at school, Betty Jean continued to receive religious instruction at church that helped her advance spiritually. On May 30, 1937, nearly nine months after her eighth birthday, Betty Jean was baptized by her cousin James W. Nickle in the lake at the zoo park in Springfield. James was serving at the time as president of the Springfield branch of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The same day, Betty Jean was confirmed a member of the Church by her uncle Thomas P. Nickle.
In those days, being a "Mormon" in Missouri meant enduring myths and misconceptions that flourished among misinformed non-Mormons. Betty Jean would remember some of these preposterous stories for decades. One lurid tale painted Mormon missionaries as lecherous despots who lured unsuspecting girls into polygamous bondage. Betty Jean remembered, "They said that the Mormon elders would come out and kidnap these young girls and take them back to Salt Lake City and put them behind those walls at the temple. And they couldn't get out. And they tried to make them go into polygamy. And they said they know this is all true because one day this one girl from Springfield, they kidnapped her and took her there and put her in those walls. And she got on the wall and jumped into the Great Salt Lake and swam to safety and came back to tell about it."
Many years later, Betty Jean could laugh at the incongruous details of the story, such as the suggestion that one could jump into the Great Salt Lake from the temple in downtown Salt Lake City. "All I got to say," Betty Jean would remark, "is she must have had an awfully big trampoline or something to have jumped . . . several miles to the Great Salt Lake.
Far more compelling to Betty Jean was the devout example of her parents. "My dad was an example of somebody that was always volunteering to do things," she would relate. "He had a truck, and he was always going out and doing something for somebody or fixing their home or whatever. And one thing about my mother, she'd volunteer to clean the little glass sacrament cups at church every Sunday. And as a young girl, I remember us bringing those home. And she would spend the longest time washing them and drying them and cleaning them and fixing them up because these were the sacrament cups."
As the summer following her baptism ended, Betty Jean entered the fourth grade, again at Bowerman School, and once again, one of her friends would provide the most lasting memory of the school year. This time, it was Jackie. "Jackie was always a card," she later wrote. "He would do anything to get a laugh. In the fourth grade he would always come in and pull some trick. Usually it was to sit in the wastepaper basket. Our fourth grade teacher, a Miss Renshaw, one day made him sit in it all afternoon. Poor kid almost couldn't walk home. But the day after[,] he was thinking of other tricks to get attention."
The quartet of Jackie, Billy, Joan, and Betty Jean often dreamed up stunts to enliven their childhood. "Another time," Betty Jean wrote later, "the quartet decided since it was summer and they didn't have anything else too do they would put on a circus and charge everyone a penny to come. It was a tremendous circus, wild animals (cats, dogs, birds etc.) side shows, and food (candy which we had swiped from Jackie[']s home)[.] The first couple of days the circus went fin[e]. It wasn't until the end of the second day that our parents came and upon entering one side show, the circus was immediately closed."
The side show was bound to create concern in any caring parent. Why? "O[h]," she wrote, "it was just that we stood Joan up against a big cardboard and with knifes and hatchets that we had confi[s]cated, we were throwing them at her to outline her body on the cardboard. Of course we were a little nervous having our parents in the audience and as they sat down, Jackie threw a knife and it took the skin off the side of Joan[']s face right by her eye, another inch or two it would have been in the eye. Good by circus."
Betty Jean would remember other childhood antics that could have cost Joan and her their lives. "At other times to pass the time away," she explained, "(without our parents permission) we would take a couple of big umberalls [umbrellas] and go to the big foot bridge over the train tracks and open the umberalls and jum[p] down onto the tracks. Guardian angels were watching over us again, if one of the umberallas would have turned inside out, or if a train had been coming it would have again been Good by."
A favorite place for Betty Jean to spend her time was at the home of a girlfriend whose parents were often gone. Betty Jean would later record, "Another friend who lived up the street (Delores Sheppherd) parents owned a big grocery stroe and bakery and as they were working most of the time we really had a ball at her home. It was at her home we found some wine and thinking it was graper juice had enough to make us sick."
The absence of the girlfriend's parents made possible other whimsical endeavors. Betty Jean later described a favorite activity she and Joan would enjoy on occasion when they went to visit their friend. "We'd go up to her house," she recounted. "She had a two-story garage by their two-story house, and we'd take the mattresses off the twin beds. And we'd put one down on the ground. And then Joan and my girlfriend and I would go up on that roof and take the other mattress and go sailing off of it and land down on the other. It's a miracle I'm still here." Many years later after the birth of her own children, Betty Jean recorded some of her childhood antics in a written life sketch and concluded, "Enough of these stories (although there are many more) as I don't want my children to hold them against me."
In the summer just before fifth grade began, the Latter-day Saint ward where Betty Jean lived took part in a tradition that had its roots in her father's birth. The day Dan Nickle and his twin brother, Dave, were born, their father brought home two watermelons. The other children in the family first saw the watermelons and then the twins. Not knowing where the babies really came from, they surmised that they came from the watermelons. This humorous incident gave rise to a tradition of eating watermelon in August, the month the twins were born. At a Church service on the evening of August 21, 1938, Betty Jean's uncle Dave "announced that there would be a water mellon feast at the Zoo Park tuesday evening, and if the weather was bad to come to the chap[el]."
Betty Jean spent the 1938-39 school year in fifth grade at Bowerman School, where her teacher was a Miss Swanson. Meanwhile, her family became increasingly involved in their Church branch, establishing a pattern that she would follow as she matured. Her father, Dan, continued to officiate regularly in administering the sacrament, either by breaking and blessing the emblems or by passing them to the congregation. Her mother, Lena, was one of the branch genealogical officers, and her mother and older sisters served in the Church's auxiliaries, the Primary (for young children), the Mutual Improvement Association (for older youth), the Relief Society (for women), and the Sunday School (for youth and adults). Her parents and older sisters also frequently gave talks, bore testimony, or prayed in Church meetings.
In some ways, it was difficult to distinguish between Church and family activities because so many members of the Church's Springfield branch were Betty Jean's relatives by blood or marriage. The minutes of the branch's monthly fast and testimony meetings show that often more than half of those who rose to speak shared the Nickle surname.
Betty Jean's family reached an important spiritual milestone on July 30, 1939, when branch president James W. Nickle announced in sacrament meeting that Betty Jean's father, Dan Nickle, was being recommended for advancement to the office of elder in the Melchizedek priesthood. Holding the Melchizedek priesthood made it possible for Dan to perform such priesthood ordinances as blessing children, confirming newly baptized members, and blessing the sick. It also fulfilled a prerequisite for taking his family to a Latter-day Saint temple, there to participate in sealing ordinances that according to Church doctrine would make it possible for them to live together eternally. Before another year passed, Betty Jean and most of her family would make it to the temple.
In the meantime, however, she would begin and finish her final year of elementary school. Betty Jean split her sixth grade year, 1939-1940, between two schools. For part of the year, she attended Bowerman school, where her teacher was a Miss (or Mrs.) Wood (or Woods). Then the family moved from a home at 2438 North Lyon Street in Springfield to one at 521 West Kearney, and for the rest of the year, she attended Doling school, where her teacher was Miss Atteberry.
The most lasting memory of her sixth grade days at Bowerman was an unpleasant one. "I can remember only one unhappy experience during my grade school days," she wrote in 1963. "In the sixth grad[e] my teacher was a Mrs. Woods and she was a wonderful singer. I had a very deep voice and this one day they were singing a song that didn't need deep voices, and I know she didn't mean too, but she did, she hurt my feelings very deeply when she asked me to refrain from singing this song. I though[t] she thought I was a terrible singer. Even too this day I do not sing and do not know one note from another as for years I develoveped a hate for music because of this. It was not until my 20th did I beging to appreciate good music although I do not understand it, I love it."
Even if Betty Jean's sixth grade year was not always a pleasant one from the standpoint of her secular education, it proved to be a year in which she blossomed spiritually. Her father, Dan Nickle, continued to administer the sacrament regularly, and her parents and other family members continued to serve in Church callings and to speak, pray, and bear testimony in Church meetings. Rather than just listening, however, by February 1940, Betty Jean began rising to bear testimony during the Church branch's monthly fast and testimony meetings, meetings in which most of those who spoke were relatives.
Latter-day Saint women are assigned to be visiting teachers to other women of their faith, and Betty Jean would later recall beginning nearly a lifetime of service as a visiting teacher in about the sixth grade. "Mother and I were visiting teaching companions," she would explain. "Of course, I was only about eleven when I started visiting teaching. And some of our places were seventy miles away. And once a month, Daddy would take off from his work, and he would drive me and Mama to go out and do our visiting teaching. It would take a whole day. But he would go with us and sit out in the car while we went in and got our visiting teaching done."
In June 1940 when sixth grade had finally ended for Betty Jean and the summer recess had begun, she and most of her family traveled to Utah. The main purpose of their trip was to visit the Church's temple in the Mormon pioneer community of Manti. According to Latter-day Saint belief, only couples sealed via a special ceremony to each other in such a temple may live together for eternity, along with any children born to them after the sealing or, if born to them earlier, sealed to them in a temple thereafter. In 1940, the Church had only seven operating temples in the world, four in Utah, one in Arizona, one in Hawaii (which was then a U.S. territory), and one in Alberta, Canada. The family went to Manti because their branch of the Church was assigned to the Manti Temple district.
When Betty Jean's family left for Utah, one family member stayed behind, and a soon-to-be family member went along. Because Evelyn had married outside the faith, she could not go to the temple and so remained in Missouri. After Evelyn had married, the next oldest Nickle sister, Gladys, had fallen in love with a young man named James Gray Drummond. Gladys and Jim, as he was known by friends, met at a roller skating rink at Doling Park in Springfield. Jim was a champion roller skater and a Presbyterian, a member of the largest church in Springfield, a church attended by many of the upper class of the area. After they met, Jim asked Gladys out, and they began to date.
Gladys told Jim she would not marry him unless he joined her church. He investigated its principles, became converted, and in November 1939, gave up the prestige of his Presbyterian congregation to join The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and meet with its small group of members in their humble chapel. Just six months after he joined the Church, Jim received the Melchizedek priesthood and permission to be married in the temple. Ordinarily, a year was required for new members to receive such a privilege, but an exception was granted because the Nickle family had planned their trip to the Manti Temple, and the long distance from Missouri to Utah made it uncertain when Gladys and Jim might have another opportunity to marry in a temple.
The group traveled to Utah in two cars, Jim driving one, and Betty Jean's father, Dan, driving the other. Betty Jean's mother, Lena, never would learn to drive. It took the travelers two days to reach Utah via Kansas and Colorado. Along the way, they stopped at Pike's Peak, where there was still snow, and threw snowballs at each other. The mountains of Colorado and Utah awed Betty Jean. While riding, she got car sick, laid her head down, and gazed at the tall mountains through which they were driving, marveling at how spectacular they were.
By June 17, 1940, the family had arrived in Manti. That day, Dan and Lena Nickle went through the temple to receive the Church ordinance known as the endowment, a requirement for salvation according to Latter-day Saint belief, and to be sealed to each other for time and eternity.
The next day, each member of the family received a blessing from Moroni Lazenby, a Church patriarch. Because the family lived in an area that had no ordained patriarchs, Church policy permitted them to receive a blessing while visiting an area that had patriarchs, as Manti did. This was the family's first trip to Utah, and both they and the patriarch thought it might be their only opportunity to receive such a blessing.
In his blessing to Betty Jean, the patriarch declared, "The Lord loves you for the purity of your life and for the choice spirit that inhabits your body." He observed that if she learned to recognize the Lord's influence, she would grow in His favor, develop her talents, "work good in the earth," and "bring to pass righteousness." He then added a special promise whose fulfillment she would recognize repeatedly throughout her life: "His Angels have been given charge concerning you and they will never for one moment depart from your presence so long as you shall live. If you prove true to your covenants they will guide you apast dangers both seen and unseen and will always be near to minister to your wants."
Though patriarchal blessings provide their recipients with a glimpse of their spiritual potential, their fulfillment hinges on personal worthiness. Not surprisingly, the patriarch admonished Betty Jean to live a worthy life. "Remember these things," he said, "and live clean and pure, guarding your virtue as you would your life, being honorable and upright in all your deportment, so that their power and influence shall not be weakened, [and] you shall receive in your heart a testimony of the truth. You will be able to testify that you know that God lives and also, to know that your life is approved by Him, and thus you may reap a fullness of joy, in the knowledge, that you are a daughter approved of God."
As one who had faced many health problems in her less than twelve years of life on earth, the next promise would take on particular significance as the years went by. "If you will pray each day and ask the Lord for life and health," the patriarch assured her, "you shall live as long as life is desireable and shall rejoice in your preservation. You will live to witness the judgments of God poured out upon the wicked and shall stand in preca[ri]ous places, with danger and death upon the right hand and upon the left, yet you need not fear for you will be spared to fill the full measure of your creation in the earth and accomplish, successfully, your mission in life and perform the work that you were sent on earth to do and when you have finished that for which you were sent, you shall return back home and hear the voice of the good shepherd declare 'Well done thou good and faithful servant.'"
If she had not yet contemplated the possibility of marriage in her future, the next line, and the events of the following day, must have inspired the thought. The patriarch proclaimed, "You shall become a mother in Israel and bear the souls of our Father's children." The final portion of the blessing pointed her beyond earthly life as the patriarch promised that if she lived worthily, she would have "the blessings of life eternal with power to come forth in the resurrection of the Just and in connection with your loved ones receive a crown of exaltation in the Celestial Kingdom of God."
The following day, June 19, Betty Jean went to the temple with her parents and all her sisters, except Evelyn. There in a beautiful room designed for such purposes, her parents were sealed to all their daughters except Evelyn and to their two deceased sons, the latter by proxy. That same day, Gladys and Jim received the endowment ordinance and were married in the temple. Although her two younger sisters were not allowed in the room because they were considered too young, Betty Jean and two of her older sisters were permitted to witness their sister's marriage.
The sealing and the marriage ceremony impressed Betty Jean deeply. Several years later as a young college student, she wrote, "I was sealed to my parents in the Manti temple which is very beautiful. One of my sisters were married in the Manti temple and I watched her get married. I have never seen a more beautiful wedding before or since."
Later, Betty Jean and most of her family drove to Salt Lake and did some sightseeing before returning to Missouri. But it was the events in Manti that would remain most vivid in her mind, becoming a milestone in her childhood, the distinguishing event between her early years of childhood and the years of junior high school and high school that lay ahead.
Notes
1. Betty Jean Nickle Turley, "My Birth," circa 1983. This account is stapled together with a life-story outline titled "Me" In the Betty Jean Nickle Turley Papers (hereafter "BJNT Papers"); Betty Jean Nickle Turley, Autobiography (1976); Audiotape Titled "Misc. Memories—Jean T. 1992"; Tape BJNT 920406.
In later years, Lena often recounted Betty Jean's birth to her. "She told me that I was worth all the pain she had gone through," the daughter recalled. "I only hope so." Betty Jean Nickle Turley, Autobiography (1976).
Nearly a half century after her breech birth, Betty Jean would write, "I came into this world feet first, and have been jumping in with both feet every [sic] since." Betty Jean Nickle Turley, Autobiography (1976).
2. Betty Jean Nickle Turley, Autobiography (1976). Because Betty Jean was born in her home and not in a hospital, she did not have a hospital-issued birth certificate. Her government-issued birth certificate is birth registration number 40604, Division of Child Hygiene, Missouri State Board of Health. 1928 File, BJNT Papers.
Jean was born in her parents' home at 2158 North Franklin Street. Betty Jean Nickle, Autobiography c. 1949, pp. 17, 24. Her 1963 Life Sketch gives the address as 2148 No. Franklin St. Jane's book of remembrance in her file has "A Collection of the Pictures of the Homes I Have Lived in in Springfield, Missouri" that is complete with pictures. It includes the statement that the third home Jane lived in was "2180 North Franklin/Betty Jean and Joan/Were Born Here."
Her blessing certificate of 1930 gives her address as "2180 Franklin Springfield Mo." 1930 File, BJNT Papers.
3. Tape BJNT 920406.
4. "I was born in our home and weight seven pounds and like most babies had no hair, teeth and knew how to do little except cry," Betty Jean explained as a young woman. "But I was the best cry baby we've had in our family." Betty Jean Nickle, Autobiography c. 1949, pp. 17, 24.