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| The open-pit copper mine up Bingham Canyon started operations in 1906. |
Why that is, I’m not sure.
Is it normal? I don’t know, but those memories illustrate God’s
providence in my life.
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| Copperton Park in the tree-lined town. |
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| Grandpa Butt and little Lee Hunt |
In fact, there have been seven episodes that were especially
frightening, painful and memorable, and which could have resulted in the end of
my sojourn here on earth. The earliest one occurred at my grandparents’ home up
in Copperton, Utah, when I was between five and seven years old.
In my pre-teen years, I especially loved going to see Grandpa
and Grandma Butt at their home in the mouth of Bingham Canyon. Grandpa was a
train engineer at that time for Kennecott Copper Mine. He had worked at the
mine all his adult life, eventually becoming one of the numerous conductors
of the ore trains at the mine. That’s
back when the mine used trains instead of the giant trucks that are used today.
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| Bingham
Canyon ore train Nov. 1942. Photographer: Andreas Feiningerhttp://www.loc.gov/pictures/ item/owi2001038400/PP/ |
Grandma was a housewife, typical for those years. I remember
on many of my weekend visits seeing her making doll lamps in her studio and
kitchen, which she sold to a couple of outlets in Salt Lake City.
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| Leona Cooley Butt in front of her home in Copperton. |
During these prized visits I would often hang around grandpa
as he played solitary, which he taught me how to play. Sometimes when there
were four willing players, we would play canasta. I really enjoyed the game,
though I can’t remember the rules now. Also, I would spend a lot of hours building
towers out of the small rectangular blocks that grandpa made for the grandchildren
to play with on their visits. I remember I could get mine at least two-feet
tall from the circular base of about a foot and a half.
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| One of Grandma Butt's doll lamps. |
One of the highlights in my early school years was grandpa teaching
me some math skills. Eventually I could add short columns of numbers in my
head. He was the one who helped me get proficient in multiplication and especially
division.
On many of my visits, I would watch Vivian, David and
Clifford play basketball in the driveway shared by my grandparents and the
neighbors next door. The garage was also shared, with a one car garage on each
half of the building and a basketball backboard and hoop fixed at the upper center
of the garage building.
All three Butt boys were stars on the Bingham High School
basketball team.
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| Ray, Vivian and Clifford Butt at their ancestral home in Copperton. |
I was too little to join the games, so I was mostly content
to watch and learn. When they weren’t around, I would take out one of the old
basketballs and dribble and dribble and dribble. For quite a while, I couldn’t
throw the ball high enough to even reach the basketball hoop.
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| David Butt in his Bingham High School basketball uniform. |
When my three uncles weren’t playing basketball in the
driveway, they usually were off with their friends somewhere else.
But there was this one time when Clifford, who was about seven
years older than me, was home and actually with me – or technically I was with
him – as he conducted an aviation experiment on the old rotating clothesline in
the backyard. However, the experiment turned out to be an introduction to the laws
of centrifugal force and gravity.
At first, I was happy just being with Clifford as he worked
on his experiment, tying a shallow cardboard box with four small ropes to two adjacent
clotheslines that fanned from the 4-inch round center metal post. I don’t
remember the conversation, but I’m sure he asked if I wanted to take a ride on
the merry-go-round or something like that. Once this little squirt was seated
inside the shallow box and holding on to the sides of the box, Clifford started
rotating the clothesline.
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| Grandma's clothesline had a 4" center pole with several wood two-by-four branches at right angle from center pole with metal clothesline wires wrapping around the wood branches. |
Wow! This is fun! Can we go faster?
Clifford started to increase the velocity of the spin –
faster and faster I spun around the backyard. I’m sure I was getting dizzy –
but then it happened: the small ropes ripped through the cardboard and I flew
out of the box at an almost parallel level from the clothesline. I crashed into
the metal tin garbage cans next to the back of the house. If I had landed just two
feet to the right, I would have hit the concrete steps leading into my
grandparents’ home. If I had landed two feet to the left, I may have hit the
concrete foundation.
I’m sure I made the garbage cans clang, but more likely it
was my screaming and wailing that brought grandma running out the back door. The
next thing I remember was lying on the couch in the front room as grandma chewed
Clifford out for – well, let’s just say his “failed experiment.”
I didn’t break any bones, but my back was in a lot of pain. My
near-death flight into orbit wasn’t too long before the first time I had hurt
my back.
I had been playing with Merrill on some bales of straw at
our home on Redwood Road in West Jordan when I jumped from the height of two
bales of straw and landed on my butt on the straw-covered ground. That’s when I
felt a shock of pain rip up through by back. I wailed and screamed and Mom and
Dad came running. Merrill, I’m sure, was just puzzled. Why did I get hurt in
such a small fall? Well, first of all, the small layer of straw covered a layer
of bricks, which meant I landed basically on a bunch of bricks.  |
| By Greg Olsen https://gregolsen.com/blog |
But when Mom and Dad later took me to the doctors and X-rays
were taken, the doctor said my backbones looked thin or not complete. He said to
keep an eye on the situation and hopefully the bones would fill out and get thicker.
Looking back at the numerous times when I had similar falls
and back pain, I wonder if that first X-ray actually showed the presence of the
Osteogenesis Imperfecta that we never realized I have until after Evie Wentz was
born almost a half-century later.
But lucky for me that my first flight into orbit wasn’t my
last flight. I must have had a guardian angel guiding me into those garbage
cans and not the concreate steps in the backyard of my grandparents’ home in
beautiful tree-lined Copperton, Utah.
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