Beach Haven

Quite a few years ago I (Michelle) put this jar together. It's simple, but contains a powerful tool. You can see the curled up small pieces of paper. On each one is a task that relates to family history. Periodically we will pull one strip of paper from the jar, write here in this feed what it says, and each family member is to write a comment below in response. We have been holding virtual FHE monthly via Zoom during the pandemic, and this idea was discussed this month (March 2021). We decided to proceed in this manner. So here it goes. 

Tell about your favorite uncle.

This is Mike. I scanned a booklet shared with me by my sister Cris Dunn (she doesn't like it when I call her Crystal). She gave this booklet years ago to our father, Fred Beach, and encouraged him to fill it out. He did, and she kept it all these years. There are nuggets in here I hadn't heard before, and the writing is personal as it's done in his own handwriting. His personality also comes out in some of the answers. Click any picture and you can scroll back and forth through enlarged images.

Mike here. This is another story about our early church membership as I remember it, at the request of my little sister Crystal. I was young then and I'm old now so take anything I write about that time with a grain of salt.

Two of the founding families of the Berwick Branch were the Schmidt and Smethers families. They were related to each other. I believe the mothers of these two pioneer groups were birth sisters. The patriarch of the Schmidt family was someone I only knew as ‘Pappy Schmidt’. To someone as young as I was he seemed ancient, and likely actually was so. Some years after we joined the church I remember someone showing me the typical picture that showed all the head-and-shoulders pictures of the general authorities of the church at the time. Down in one of the bottom corners was Pappy’s picture with several other ‘emeritus general authorities’. At the time it seemed impressive, though I had no idea what those words meant, or even really what a general authority really is. I’ve done some searching on the church website and have had no luck finding those ‘class pictures’ from back then (early 1970s) to see what more I can find out about him. I’m sure if I chased down any of his surviving progeny they could fill me in.

The Schmidt family lived out in the woods. A good part of their property was a swamp. I remember spending time at their house with the other young men my age. Billy Schmidt was part of our deacons quorum. We occasionally got time wading around in waist-deep swamp water at his house. Billy was into trapping back then. Between Billy’s traps, snakes, muskrats, beavers, and other sorts of risks, our time playing in the swamp was sort of a form of Russian roulette. For boys of 10 through 13 or so it was a form of heaven.

The Smethers family lived within a few miles of their Schmidt relatives. Unlike the wooded swampy space of the first property, this place was tamer. I remember it to be all on the side of a hill of maybe 10 acres or so. The top part of the hill was an open grassy pasture. About halfway down the hill to one side was about a half-acre pond and a substantial barn. Below the barn was the Smethers home. Below the pasture, pond, barn and home was the bottom of a hollow with a clear cold stream running through it. The land on either side of this creek and up leading to the house was wooded.

The Smethers home was a regular venue for branch activities. I remember summers swimming in the creek and the pond. We also enjoyed fishing in both. The barn was quite large with a hay loft above, and a shop and hay stack on the main floor with a large open area in the middle for the tractor. All sorts of dangerous metal farm implements hung on the walls. In the lowest level were indoor stalls for animals. This barn made for a farm-kid play area without all the safety features. It was not unusual for us kids to jump from the loft down into the hay stacks. The tractor would get taken out leaving a large open area that made for eating, dancing, or similar group fun. In the winter the pasture portion of the hill became a favorite sledding run. The pond froze over thick enough that we could ice skate on it.
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One year at a winter party, after sledding and skating, someone got the idea to take a group picture on the pond ice. It was quite thick so there seemed to be no concerns since we had been skating on it all day. I was in the gaggle closing in for the picture. While posing I remember the distinct sound of ice cracking underneath me. We had maybe 30 or 40 people in the center of pond standing close together concentrating the weight. It was obvious I wasn’t the only person to hear the cracking sound as everyone gasped with panic and scrambled in every direction for the pond bank, slipping wildly cartoon-like. We all made it off safe and sound, and laughed about the whole thing for a long time. I think I was a little slow to try my luck skating again that day.

This is Mike sharing some early church memories as requested by my sister, Crystal Dunn.

Although each of our baptisms were the same in that the ordinance is a consistent priesthood act, yet for each of us the journey and experience was different. To be clear, I certainly don’t assume to speak on behalf of other members of our family regarding their baptismal experience. I only have a few flashes of memory of my own. Witnessing those of the others my role was as a third-party observer, and a young uninformed observer at that. There is a lingering story out there that I may have greeted the missionaries on occasion with a shot or two from my bb-gun. I may have even perpetuated that story, but in reality I don’t remember that happening. Others may have their own recollections.

My mother and sister Lisa were first to be baptized. They were actively participating in the missionary discussions. My father sat in on the discussions mostly as well, though likely less engaged in the conversation. I don’t really remember participating in the discussions more than the typical rough-housing with the missionaries before and after. I was only seven years old at the time. The missionaries that taught us at the time was Elder Drew Smith from Montpeiler, ID and Elder Jackson (don’t remember his first name) from Draper, UT. My mom managed to stay in contact with Drew Smith, but we lost touch with Elder Jackson. That’s always saddened me a bit as Drew was able to see some of the fruits of his labor. His companion has not had the pleasure.

That first experience with baptism in our family took place in an indoor pool at the Berwick YMCA. It was winter time and cold. The pool was a typical lap-swim style with four or five lanes. There was a shallow end and deep end with diving boards. The baptisms were at the shallow end of course. That’s really about as much as I remember about the event. At the time we were still attending the Sunbury, PA branch.

My baptism happened later. I turned eight in April. Sometime after, my parents and local church leaders realized my birthday had passed and I should be considered for baptism. There must have been some agreement that I needed to have my own experience with the missionary discussions, so I met with the newest set of missionaries. I didn’t remember either of them and have since felt bad about that. As I sifted through the picture book my mom left for me I found a baptism picture. She wrote in the caption that it was Elder Rick Hart doing the baptism. I really don’t remember much about the discussions other than I remember understanding the basics, and more importantly I felt baptism was the right thing to do. By this time the Berwick Branch had formed and we were meeting in the local justice-of-the-peace court building.

The ordinance took place in June in wonderfully warm weather. Unlike my mom and sister, I was joined by another youngster from our branch. I don’t remember his name. We did not go into the YMCA pool, or any other man-made structure. Rather, we wandered out into the woods outside of town and held the baptism in a creek. To give you an idea, on the edge of town was a large dairy. The dairy was surrounded by large corn fields where they raised feed for the cows. I was very familiar with this area as it was a regular place for kids in our part of town to ride our bikes. We would often run through the rows of corn when it got high. We also sometimes ‘procured’ ears of corn in late fall to fill bags of the hard seeds for Halloween ‘corning’. This would be something very familiar to kids of that area and era. I assume the idea of corning is probably lost on most readers of this little history (if there are any readers). I don’t remember the name of the dairy, and a quick look on the ‘net seems to suggest it no longer exists. If you look at a map it was located about where Orange St. and Freas Ave. cross each other. The stream in question is called East Branch Briar Creek.

I remember we all just parked off of the side of the road on a little dirt patch. At the edge of the dirt there was a small narrow footpath leading through a green weedy field for a short distance before entering the woods. There was a little bit of effort walking along the creek bank until a sufficiently deep pool was located and the bank was easily accessible for getting into and out of the water. I don’t remember which of us were baptized first. I felt very special all dressed in white. I remember my parents were both smiling. After the ordinance was done and I climbed out of the creek, someone put a towel over me and my parents both gave me a hug. The feelings were peaceful. I felt very happy and I knew immediately I had done the right thing.

My dad took more time to make the commitment. He participated in branch activities and attended church regularly. I’m not sure what all he wrestled with. I do know he was able to agree to tithing, and living part of the word of wisdom, putting aside coffee and alcohol pretty much immediately. The one struggle I do remember was his addiction to tobacco. He smoked cigarettes mostly, though he would entertain the occasional pipe while sitting on the front porch on a summer evening. As a kid, one of my chores was to roll smokes for him. He would buy the white paper with a little bit of paste on one edge, much like one would find on a letter envelope. He would buy shredded tobacco from a company called Bugle and it came in small cans. He had a little rolling machine that was essentially a strip of paper that was rough but flexible. It had a lever on a frame that was a little shorter than the rolling paper and a little wider than the length of a cigarette. My job was to lick the paper, put it into the roller, add enough tobacco, then move the lever until the paper rolled around the tobacco. I did hundreds of these for him.

Eventually he decided to try to quit. He tried cutting down gradually. It didn’t work for him. He got some sort of drug from the doctor. It didn’t help either. Eventually he went cold turkey. Mom warned us to stay away for a few weeks as he would likely be short-tempered as he went through withdrawal. I don’t actually remember him being any different other than he seemed to take up constant gum chewing during the transition. I don’t remember how long he went after that before his baptism happened, but it must have been winter time again because we were back at the YMCA. The only unusual thing I can remember about his baptism was after the ordinance, he was so excited that he swam a lap back and forth across the pool.

My brother Dan had an experience similar to my own. A young girl from the branch joined his service to be baptized at the same time. We drove up to what was Harmony, PA in early church history to visit the area (if not the specific site) where Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery were the first people to be baptized in this dispensation of the gospel. What was the town of Harmony is now the two towns of Oakland and Susquehanna. When we arrived, the only footprint of the church was a historical marker along the road. There is much more to see there now. We parked near the marker and followed the footpath through the woods heading to the bank of the Susquehanna River. A short walk along the bank led us to a small spot where an eddy had formed on the side of the river. The water swirled in and out of the eddy to such a point that it formed a small circle in the bank almost exactly the size of a baptismal font. I’m not sure if this was natural or someone dug it out that way. In either case, we were alone as family of the two, and some additional branch members. Dan will have to say more than that if he has a mind to. I know I really enjoyed the surroundings and the event.

Finally, our youngest sister, Crystal, was baptized after our move to Utah. Her ordinance was in a fount at a chapel and scheduled in with other youngsters of similar age from around the Brigham City North Stake. She too will have to fill in more than that. I don’t remember anything unusual except that I remember her as being very happy. As her big brother I was happy for her.
  

Note- One year after Nels Peter Jeppsen Jr and Luella Nelson’s children were grown Ardell Jeppsen asked his sister Wanda Jeppsen Adams to furnish something she remembered from her life for a family reunion. The following is from a letter she sent him.
 
Dear Ardell,
I was having a difficult time thinking of what I could write from my life that would be of interest to others.  Then it came to me that most of your life you were too young to remember your oldest brother, Lloyd. You  were only eight days old when he died of pneumonia.  We had moved down from Mantua and were living in Brigham City that year, because Lloyd and I were both in High School and Mother and Daddy wanted to be with us.  Lloyd was a freshman (9th grade) and I was a junior.
 
Lloyd had just recovered from the measles, but said he felt well enough to go to a football game at the high school.  The afternoon of the game it turned cold and stormy and he felt chilled when he got home.  He developed a high fever and Dr. Fister diagnosed his illness as pneumonia.
 
Ardell you were  born on November 29, 1926, and Lloyd died on December 7th.  Mother was in bed throughout Lloyd’s illness and death. Grandma Nelson came to attend to Lloyd and I stayed out of school to care for Mom.
 
Your birth had been difficult and I can’t imagine the stamina it took for her to stay in bed.  She was not even able to attend his funeral. I am sure she could not have endured it if it hadn’t been for her great faith and belief in God and of the salvation of the dead. 
 
I remember Grandma put a mustard plaster on Lloyd’s chest which was standard procedure for chest congestion in those days.  When Dr. Fister came to see him he snatched that plaster off and threw it across the room and swore.  But Dr. Fister’s remedies didn’t help either.
 
While he was so very ill and gasping for each breath and the congestion was  rattling in his chest, he ask me to get his patriarchal blessing and read it him. I could not for it was left in Mantua in Mother’s treasure trunk. I have always been sorry that I couldn’t  have done that for him. 
 
Even at that time I was sure he would get well and the shock and sorrow was great when Daddy woke me from my sleep and told me that Lloyd had left us.  There was no more sleep that night as I listened to the constant howling of Lloyd’s big black dog as he sat on the cellar roof and gazed through the window straight into the room where Lloyd lay in bed.
 
The next morning I rode with my father (in the Model T Ford) to Mantua to make arrangements for the funeral. After they were made we went out to Grandma Jeppesen’s for awhile.  Daddy had let Lloyd’s dog come with us.  When we started for home, we forgot about the dog, but he came running after us, accompanied by a dog of Grandma’s.  They were tussling and fighting a little and Lloyd’s dog bounded in front of the car and died on impact.
 
I remember the good times Lloyd and I had playing together in Mantua.  We, with our cousins, Joysa and Helen Jensen, we played ball, hide and seek, kick the can,  climbed trees, roamed the hills, and sailed boats in the creek. 
 
Best of all was when Lloyd and I rode our horses. I remember once we rode over to Paradise Creek.  As we were coming home I was riding our horse, Polly.  She always had to be the lead horse.  As we galloped down the hill, through a shallow creek and around a sharp curve, there in the middle of the road was a huge rattler, all coiled and ready to strike. Polly planted her feet and stopped so suddenly that I was thrown over the saddle horn. I kept myself from landing on the snake, by clinging onto the mane and ear of the horse. 
 
The rattler uncoiled and slithered into the bushes and maple trees.  Lloyd jumped off his horse and went after the rattler with a big stick.  All I could do was jump up and down and scream at him to come back.  I was sure the snake would be waiting for him, but it was not to be found.
 
I remember another time when Lloyd got on old Polly, with a long leather belt with a heavy buckle on one end. He said he was going hunting rattlers.  I know of several other times he went and came back with a trophies.
 
To me Lloyd seemed more sober and responsible that the rest of us.  Bishop Hansen said at his funeral, “I am sure that if the young man’s faith could have saved him, this boy would have been alive today.  I told the people of our ward last Sunday, that it had been a long time since I had seen the amount of faith exhibited by a young boy when we administered to him. He was very thankful for things that that were done for him.  I recall that he thanked us two or three times before we left, for coming to administer to him.”
 
Lloyd loved the outdoors and together we followed the trails and climbed Maple Hill just south of the fish hatchery.  We picked hands full  of wild flowers to take home to Mother.  Flowers and birds abounded on the mountain. We were always watching for new ones and trying to identify them.
 
Lloyd was allowed to use the 22 rifle to shoot ground squirrels and king fishers.  Ground squirrels abounded all around the farm and did great damage to the crops.  On one occasion he asked me to go with him.  After many squirrels had bit the dust at his accurate shots he allowed me to take a turn.  I was as good at missing, as he was at hitting, and he was somewhat disgusted with me, but not so much as the time I missed the king fisher.  King fishers fed on the fingerlings in the shallow channels. Lloyd was the protector of the small fish and it was woe unto the king fishers that were sighted by him.
 
Lloyd suffered pain without a whimper.  I have forgotten just how he broke his arm but it was a bad break, just above the wrist.  The doctor tried to set it several times and finally had to operate.  They found when trying to set it, they had been trying to turn the bone the wrong way.  This was before the day of the X-ray. Another time he was bitten by a muskrat he had trapped and had to have a tetanus shot.
 
His leaving was a great loss to us.  I am sure though that he is in a better place now and is doing the things that were promised in his Patriarchal Blessing.

Here’s another remembrance from our early days in the church.

We had continued to attend church in Sunbury, PA for maybe a year. At some point there was talk about creating a branch of the church in our little home town of Berwick, PA. Obviously, as an eight-year-old I was not really aware of what was going on, but I do remember our parents discussing this idea. After we made the switch I later remember the stories of what had happened.

Apparently, church leaders went to many different buildings where there was space for rent. Place after place turned them down. Eventually they were accepted by an unlikely person. I understood his name to be Nicholas Piazza. He was the local justice of the peace and had a small building used for court hearings. I remember him also being depicted as somehow involved with the local Italian mafia. That may be overstated, but the connection may be somewhat true. My uncle was a town cop in those days and I remember one or two stories at family events that would seem to support the idea. I remember our little branch was no more than maybe five or six families and a few single adults. Two of the families were related; Schmidts and Smethers. We were all locals. I don't remember any Utah members coming into the congregation at that point, though that changed when we made the move to a later building the church actually owned.

Recounting those days in later years, Mom and Dad told stories of needing to go into the building early on Sunday morning to clean out cigarette ashtrays and the like. I have only vague recollections of that, and it may be memories resulting more from the stories than actual events. I do remember sacrament in the courtroom, and classes in a corner of one of the hallways near a coat rack. I also remember vividly the neighborhood. Some years later I attended Berwick Jr. High that was just a few blocks away from it, up a hill on West 3rd St. I seem to remember a laundry mat across a parking lot and a hoagie shop around the corner that was tempting on a Sunday since I really liked the hoagies there. Eating out was a rarity in those days. This was long before any chain sub shops existed, at least in that area. At any rate, it always smelled good whenever we passed the sub shop. The Susquehanna River was only a few walkable blocks away, but we never made the stroll on a Sunday.

​This is Mike. As I mentioned in an earlier family history posting, my sister Crystal asked if I would put down some recollections of the early days of our family’s introduction and growth in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Thinking back, much of the early interactions with the missionaries who taught my mother, sister Lisa, and my dad are second hand. This is true because I was only seven years old, and had the attention span to go with that age. I think it fair to say that at that age I would have been more distraction than participant. Now that I mention it, that’s probably as much true today as then.

The story as I recall hearing from our mother was that she was visiting her friend, Dorothy (Dot) Mowery (spelling?) on a Saturday back in the early ‘70s as was her norm back then. The missionaries knocked on Dot’s door during the visit. Their names were Elder Drew Smith of Montpelier, Idaho, and Elder Jackson (don’t remember his first name) of Draper, Utah. For someone like me who could not remember being anywhere except in the immediate area of where we lived, these sounded like far away exotic places.

Out of pity maybe, the ladies allowed the young men in for some water. Out of politeness they listened to the message. For Dot, this was as far as the commitment went. For Mom, the discussion peaked an interest she had on the topic of religion for some time. Both sides of the family were not overly devout, and there were a variety of sects represented within the extended family. Our parents were not at the time partial to any in particular, so our church attendance was held to maybe once or twice a year, and rarely to the same church from one occasion to the next.

Since Dot offered little sympathy for the missionary message and Mom seemed interested, they young men asked if they could visit our home the next Saturday. She was uneasy about the idea as Dad had physically tossed, I mean that in the literal sense, two members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses church off our porch just a few weeks earlier, grasping one in each hand as he marched them from the front door to the bottom of the porch steps.

Due to Mom’s apprehension, the four agreed to meet the follow week at Dot’s house again. The next week came. Mom and the missionaries showed up. Dot was not home, or at least did not answer the door. Reluctantly, Mom agreed to meet the missionaries back at our house. She supposed Dad to be on a Navy Reserve drill that weekend and expected him to be gone. She was wrong. When they arrived he was there. Thankfully, he was more tolerant of these two young men. Maybe it was because they were less hell-fire-and-brimstone than their Jehovah’s Witnesses counterparts. Maybe it was because Mom had invited them. Maybe it was because they were not interrupting whatever he was doing between cigarettes and a weekend can of beer. Whatever the reason, he not only failed to object, but he stayed and listened.

That’s the gist of the story. A few weeks later, Mom and Lisa were baptized in the Berwick YMCA swimming pool. I came later the next year after tuning eight (another write up for another day). Dad took longer as he struggled with giving up smoking.

I don’t know that I have any pictures to share. Perhaps somewhere in the family history items Mom left behind we can find one. If I do I’ll update this post with what I find.

This is Mike. Michelle generally posts to the M&M Gang blog. In the past it was our traditional quarterly what’s-happening-in-our-family report-style write up. Like most of the other similar traditional BHP, postings were scarce. A while ago Michelle and I discussed making this particular blog be more family history oriented. If you’ve looked at it recently, you’ve noticed the obvious change.

Recently, my little sister, Cris, asked some of us older family members to capture for her and others our recollections of our family's early membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She wants to compile what she sees as our family gospel pioneer stories. Much of it happened at a time when she was too young to remember, and the following generation is completely unaware. I asked her if posting it here in snippets, story-by-story as I remember them would be appropriate for what she was looking for, rather than some sort of larger work. For me at least, writing in smaller parts means it’s more likely to progress as opposed to trying to capture it all at once.

If the reader has an interest, unlikely as that may be, there are already a few of these stories captured in the more than two decades of BHP documents published on this website. There’s a link to the archive at the bottom of the BHP page. Feel free to browse. In any case, along with the more traditional family history submissions Michelle posts on the M&M Gang blog, I’ll post the occasional ‘pioneer’ story of the sort I hope Cris has in mind.
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Fred and Paulene Beach at Disney September 21, 2005