Memories of childhood with my big brother

Merrill, left, and youngest brother, Rendall

Several months ago, Merrill's wife and kids asked us to submit memories we had of Merrill -- my older brother.
These are some of those memories -- ones not included in earlier posts.
When the family was living in West Jordan on the hill at Papanicholis’ home, we played a game on the edge of Redwood Road next to our home. We would hide in the weeds next to the irrigation ditch that ran along the side of the road and then run up out of the weeds toward the road as cars approached. We would, of course, stop at the edge of the road, but the cars would swerve fearing we were running out into the road. We did this several times before a man finally stopped his car and scolded us quite severally. It must have been a good speech, because we stopped doing it and realized that it could cause an accident. I felt pretty foolish after. I was probably about 5 years old and Merrill about 7 years old.

Merril Ray Hunt on his 11th birthday
in front of our home in Granger.

When we lived there, Merrill had a great time riding Papa’s sheep that he had grazing in the field across a fence on the south side of the house. I thought it was too dangerous for me! He was a rodeo man! I remember Momma getting mad at him for riding the sheep, but Papa wasn’t too upset about it.
There was a small haystack in the yard. Merrill and I and Steve Bateman played on those haystacks quite a bit. But one time I fell off one that was probably three bales high. I landed on the ground on my butt. The ground was covered with loose straw or hay. It really hurt my back. Of course that kind of fall wouldn’t hurt Merrill, so they wanted to keep playing. But my screaming and crying finally got Merrill to run into Mom and tell her I was hurt. We found out that a layer of bricks had been lined under the loose straw/hay where I fell. The doctor said the X-rays showed my back bones seemed to be shallow or not completely formed. He said I would probably grow out of it. (Actually, it probably was the first undiagnosed sign of Ostogenisi Imperfecta (a form of brittle bones malady).
Before Merrill’s junior year in high school, he went down to Uncle Lloyd’s farm in Sevier and worked for several weeks baling hay with his cousin Ray, who was his same age. They got along great. Sometime during the stay, he fell off the hay wagon and broke his arm just above the wrist. When he came home, the cast was all green from still working with Ray baling the hay. He got back just in time to start football practice. He went clear through practice and a couple of games before the cast came off. Actually, it just literally crumbled off his arm. I think he wore it bandaged and wrapped for the rest of the season.

Merrill Ray Hunt, center, with neighborhood friends Travis
Wilson, left, and Gene Openshaw.

Merrill is mad at Dad for
"accidentally" pulling his
first big hair off his chest.

Every time Merrill and I got into a neighborhood baseball game or football game, Merrill would be the leader and usually he and Gene Openshaw would pick sides. I was always the last one picked – and usually Merrill had to be the one to pick me. In basketball, it was a little different by the time I was in high school. It usually was Merrill and I against the neighborhood – and usually the game was out on our driveway – which had big cracks and crumbling concrete (not cement)! We had the advantage because we knew every foot of that driveway and didn’t have to watch our dribbling. We would try to force our opponents into the bad areas and take advantage of the bad bounces. Merrill was incredibly good at flying down toward the garage and making a layup and instantly ducking below the entrance to the garage. If the garage door wasn’t open, then he and everyone else would fly up against the wooden door, banging against it, and then bounce off and go on with the game. It drove Mom crazy every time we would do it. Eventually she would come out and tell us to open the garage door before we broke it. We never did break the door. If the car was in the garage, Merrill had the “privilege” of backing it out of the way. I was always too young!

Merrill playing catch with Lee at
Liberty Park about 1964.

Merrill was really a good basketball player and could have played in college if it hadn’t been for us going to Harrisburg, Pa., for the summer right after we graduated. Merrill never found out until too late that some junior colleges had tried to contact him about playing for them on scholarship. I loved watching him play sports – so it was natural for me to end up being a manager for the high school football team and then the basketball team.
The highlight to Merrill’s football career, at least the memory that still sticks in my head, was a cold wintry night in Copperton at Bingham High School – where Mom and her brothers went to school. This is in 1965, way before they built that new high school in South Jordan and named it Bingham. On that night in ’65 at Bingham High, Matt Mendenhall, a junior, was quarterbacking and threw a perfect post pass to Merrill that caught the Miners sleeping. Merrill went in untouched for a touchdown. I think we won that game, but I’m not sure – I just remember “the catch.”

Merrill playing on a rec team after high school. He wore
No. 32 throughout high school on basketball team, baseball,
and church teams. 

I remember how especially proud one of the Pep Club members was – her name: Vicki Kershaw! After the game, she had red frozen cheeks but a big happy smile! Her man was a hero!
When Merrill and I were little kids, we had to sleep in the same bed – at least that’s how I remember it. More likely I was too afraid of sleeping alone so I would crawl into bed with Merrill. He didn’t like the dark that much either. I remember many nights in our home in West Jordan on Redwood Road where our room was upstairs, we would have to go down the stairs to go to the bathroom. Going down to the bathroom was not near as scaring as trying to go back up those dark stairs to our room upstairs. I don’t know why we didn’t turn on the light before going down. Many times we would cuddle up in the bathroom, and Mom or Dad would find us there and take us back up stairs.

Besides basketball, Merrill was an amazing baseball player.
He mostly played shortstop and homered many times at
Monroe in church softball play. 

I remember we got into a habit of tickling each other’s back before we would go to sleep. Not really rubbing, just tickling! We would have a contest to see who could tickle the softest. I think Merrill always got the best of those back ticklings.
Here’s a confession: Merrill was a thief! And it was because of me he got busted! When Merrill was 12 or 13, we would go over to a farm nearby and try to steal pigeons roosting in the eaves of the cow pens. Then we found a shed at one of the homes off 3500 South and near Monroe Elementary, which is where Gus Paulos has his car dealership now on the corner of 4000 West and 3500 South. This shed harbored roosting pigeons. We captured several and took them home and put them in our clubhouse/pigeon coop/chicken coop/rabbit pen/submarine. One time, I was stationed at the door of the shed. Actually I was always stationed at the door of the shed because I was too little to do much else. I was supposed to scare the pigeons back into the shed if they tried to escape. I decided I’d use a board to shoo them back into the shed. One time I shooed a pigeon so good he ended up in heaven – I smacked him with the board! I felt so bad. I think it was the next time we went to the shed to capture more pigeons that we heard the owner coming after us and we all

Stan Bawden, with his signature eye patch, relaxing during
our 1964 Explorer HAFB overnighter, which I organized.

started running! I thought it was because I had killed one of his pigeons and we had “stolen” other pigeons. Of course Merrill, Gene and Bruce Sharp were bigger and faster and outran the property owner, but I was too slow. He caught me and I think he also caught Dennis Paxton – a “runt” like me. It was old Stan Bawden – who had to be 80 years old. He wasn’t that old I know now, but he was old but still fast. He took me to Dad. Come to find out, someone had let his prize peacocks out of their pen. I promised him it wasn’t us and that we would ask him before going after any more pigeons. He didn’t care about those stray pigeons – but he wanted to protect his peacocks and other animals. It’s funny, but I don’t remember going over to that shed again. It wasn’t near as much fun when we actually had permission. Mr. Bawden later became a good friend of all of us boys and helped many of us and me personally with merit badges and Scouting. He was a nice little man.
I remember that when Merrill became one of the jocks at school, he didn’t have time to do much with his little brother – but if anyone ever picked on me, he would be there to intervene – if he was around.
One time he saved my life! I was being suffocated by a big bully and Merrill had to pull him off of me! Really! I was traumatized by the event. I still have dreams about suffocating in a tunnel, under water – and I think that event was what triggered it. We were having a snowball fight out in front of Brent Gardner’s home and I must have got Gene Openshaw a good one because he grabbed me and held me down in the snow and I couldn’t breathe. And, of course, I couldn’t break free either. Finally Merrill pushed him off me! I really thought I was going to die! Gene didn’t realize I was panicking and couldn’t breathe!

Merrill Ray Hunt in 1964 in
front of the Juniper that was
always used for backdrop.

Of course it was OK if Merrill wanted to pick on me! One time after school I was walking home and – bang – something really hard hit my bare skin on my left arm! Merrill was riding home with a friend in a Jeep and he had held out his arm to slap me on the arm. But because the Jeep was going so fast when his hand slapped my arm, it really left a welt. When I cried to Mom after I got home, Merrill said in his defense that it hurt his hand bad, too! Ya, right!
Merrill and I liked to play war when we were young. If we weren’t playing football, basketball or baseball, we were playing war. Merrill was always the boss and Gene was second in command – and the rest of us were runts! We used the clubhouse a lot for our fort, bunker or submarine. We actually made a periscope from a toy we got out of a cereal box and plastic pipes we found around the garage. Also, we had several Navy uniforms that we found from Dad and I think from Uncle Silvan. One was a helmet he brought back from Iwo Jima. We were ready for war –- but

Backyard of our home in Granger. Note the "bomb shelter,"
left under willow tree behind garage, that Dad and us boys
built to "save us" in cae of an attack. It became our food
storage cellar and domain of many giant black widows.

mostly just practicing and preparing – remember, we were children of the Cold War years. We thought any time there would be war between the U.S. and the Russians. We had the bomb drills at school and all the Cold War phobias. There was a big ditch across the field behind our house (west). Actually the Midwest Mobile Home Park is now where the field was, and the ditch is where the border is between the trailer park and Pioneer Valley Hospital. That ditch itself was less than a foot deep, but the banks were about six feet deep and about 12 feet across. So we could play all day along those banks and fight off the Germans advancing across the fields. WWII was the war we knew all about – the war our fathers fought in – and it was only 10 or 12 years in our past!

We were like Spartan warriors.

I remember part of the “army training” we did in our backyard involved pretending we were Spartans. I don’t remember which of the older boys introduced the Spartan life to us, but it was a real part of our “training.” We were told the story that in the time of Sparta, the youths were taught to be strong, lean and endure all forms of pain and not sure any pain no matter how bad the pain was. As the story was taught to us, a young Spartan stole a fox and had hidden it under his tunic when he and others were called into formation. While he stood rigidly in formation, the fox under his tunic started biting and eating away at his stomach. Before he showed any pain, he fell over dead and the fox ran away. As part of this “training,” we took turns hitting each other in the stomach – including me. I had strong stomach muscles at the time and endured some pretty good punches even from Merrill and Gene. Of course, Merrill could handle any punches from any of us.

Using a regular bow and an arrow tied to a string, we would
go huntng for carb in the canal north of 3100 South.

One summer the weeds behind Bruce Sharp’s home across from our home got six feet tall – and we made trails throughout the field of weeds. We had a great time – but it was hard on Bruce and Ralph Sharp. Their allergies to the weeds were terrible. But before they had to stop playing in the weeds, we had a great time!
Sometimes we would venture down to the canal south of 3100 South and try to catch fish in the canal. Sometimes we would go with Bruce, and he would take his bow and arrows. Merrill and Bruce would try to shoot carp. We weren’t very good at fishing there in the canal. The area was swampy before the canal was put in, but the whole area now is housing. I don’t think the canal is even still there.