CV Rick

Growing Up Mormon – Apartheid Billy – Part Five

Things between Billy and my father were coming to a head.  Billy couldn't repair a television if its only problem was that it was tuned to a dead channel.  William and Billy wouldn't work together another day.  The shop was losing money like a sieve.  Every day Dad would yell at me and every week he'd promise to pay me some money next week.  My mom worried all the time and cried a lot.

There was only one thing to do:  Pray.

And pray we did.  We prayed in the early morning before work or school.  We prayed every night before bed.  When we weren't praying, we were arguing and when arguing didn't work, blaming did.  I was blamed sometimes but not often.  The situation just wasn't working for anyone. 

Billy had another idea.  For him praying wasn't enough.  Dad got a phone call and then made a trip to the LDS Stake Center building. When he got home, we had a family meeting. 

“We're going to branch out into the video business,” Dad announced.

Mom had her arms crossed.  “How are we going to afford that?”

“I've been assured that the Lord will provide.”

“Maybe the Lord will help pay for the inventory.  Maybe he'll pay the mortgage.  At least the payment we're behind.”

“Dear, it is not your place to question what the spirit dictates.”

Mom's eyes became glassy.  She'd heard enough, but my father wasn't done speaking.

“I am the priesthood holder in this family and the Spirit will communicate through me.  The stake presidency and I prayed about this decision and it's the right thing to do.”

Growing Up Mormon - Apartheid Billy - Part Four

I worked nearly every day at my dad's Television Shop.  My duties included cleaning the store, answering the phone, calling customers, and delivering televisions, both new and used.

The television deliveries were often very difficult and almost always a long drive.  The sets were big, bulky wooden consoles.  Remember, back then televisions were pieces of furniture that you placed vases on and that you matched your couch to.  Some of the sets were triple consoles - a television in the middle, a stereo record player on one side, and an eight track player on the other. 

Since it was a small shop and we couldn't afford to take the technicians, William, Billy, or my dad away from their work, I'd recruit a friend to help me on deliveries.  Sometimes it was Kelly, my rock-solid red-headed classmate who resembled a tank more than a boy.  Sometimes it was Blaine or Shane, twin brothers who were always anxious to make some cash but rarely capable of actually carrying something bulky and heavy without dropping it.  Sometimes it was Alma, my troubled Native American friend.  He almost never wanted the money and wasn't excited about the work, but getting out of the house and away from his adoptive parents was motivation enough.  We also talked a lot on the long drives.  All the other kids told me that Alma was quiet and reserved, but in that delivery truck he was animated and talkative.  I don't know if he was like that with anyone else, but I feel like I got to see a side of Alma no one else saw. 

I think y'all can see where this disaster is heading, so I'll skip a lot of the niceties.

One day I called Alma to come over and help with three deliveries.  The standing rate for my friends was five bucks a delivery, so that was going to be fifteen dollars to drive around for an hour and carry three large, bulky sets up horrible, small staircases.  I just now realized that all of my friends were saints or masochists. 

Growing Up Mormon - Apartheid Billy - Part Three

I rode with my dad to Idaho Falls to greet Apartheid Billy.  They were flying in from Salt Lake after flying from South Africa. 

I didn't know what to expect.  They way I'd heard people talking this was going to be a destitute family escaping from a battlefield.  I knew South Africa had problems, so I guess I assumed that there were troops in the streets and black people were fighting white people and everyone was dying. 

Billy wasn't what I expected.  He was as tall as my dad, but he was very thin with broad shoulders.  His hair was thinning and blonde.  I put him about my dad's age – mid-forties.  Billy's wife was beautiful.  She was maybe twenty-five, blonde hair, blue eyes, slim and perfectly put together like a make-up model.  Their daughter was just a baby.  It was one of those marriages that a teenage boy doesn't understand – why was she with a guy who could be old enough to be her father? 

Billy shook my dad's hand and ignored me.  Billy's wife nodded but didn't speak. The men discussed some things for a few minutes until the Stake President and one of his counselors showed up.

The stake president handed Billy some paperwork and keys to a car.  Billy drove away in a brand new Oldsmobile.  We drove back home in a beat-up delivery van with a failing clutch.  I didn't understand what was going on.

A few days later Billy showed up at work.  The first thing he complained about was the dinky little shop.  The second thing was that he was expected to work on equipment that ought to just be thrown away.  Those weren't the last of his complaints.  He complained more than anything else. Every word out of his mouth was against someone or something.  He held nothing back.  I think he should have because it got old. 

Billy had a a South African accent, but since I'd never heard a South African accent before, I couldn't distinguish it from Australian.  I just knew it didn't really sound British. 

Growing Up Mormon - Apartheid Billy - Part Two

Last week I told you about how my mother and my father consulted with the Lord about purchasing a radio and television repair shop in my father's hometown of Blackfoot, Idaho.  My uncle Bob worked out a deal where the current owners would finance half of the purchase price and the other half would be through a bank loan guaranteed by some Veteran's Administration program.

Now this is important to remember: What my father got for no money down was a building, three delivery vans, a shop full of equipment, and a library of maintenance manuals. This is what my uncle inspected and negotiated for.  “We're lucky to have an advocate right on site,” my father said.  “Between our prayers that this is the right decision and my brother's prayers over the property, we have the Lord on our side.”

My father put in his paperwork and three months later we were a civilian family headed to our new life in Blackfoot, Idaho. 

Blackfoot is a potato town halfway between Idaho Falls and Pocatello. It sits against the edge of the Fort Hall Indian Reservation, one of the poorest reservations in the country.  The residents of the town are mostly laborers, working in one of the three potato processing plants, or in services that support them.  But in Blackfoot potatoes rule and are only rivaled by the second area crop: beets.  In case you didn't know it, Southeasterrn Idaho is a desert.  It's also an ancient lava bed.  The finely ground lava seem to make the perfect soil composition for potato growing and not a whole lot else, except for beets.    

When we got there we went to the Sanderson Radio and Television Repair Shop first thing, even before unloading the station wagon at Grandma's house.  I was shocked. 

We drove across the main road in town, over the railroad tracks and through an old residential neighborhood to a low brown building next to a large pole barn. 

“This is it,” my father announced. We piled out of the car.  The parking lot was dusty dirt and the building was tiny.  The front door was flimsy and twisted when I pulled it open.  Before me was a showroom with permanently stained carpet, a counter greasy like you'd expect to see at an old garage, and double swinging door with a sign above: “Employees Only.” The televisions in the showroom were all used cabinet models with the fake wood veneer.  I turned one on and it hummed while the vacuum tubes warmed up. 

Growing Up Mormon - Apartheid Billy - Part One

The man who said the prayer at our dinner table was an unabashed racist.  He called blacks brush-bunnies, niggers and spear-chuckers.  He thought Americans were stupid to not finish the job of exterminating the American Indians. He felt that the holocaust was an exaggeration and that they Jews had brought it upon themselves.  This man had been invited into our home and into our lives by my father at the urging of the Lord and this is the story of how he ended up there, praying to a white Jesus to bless our food.

18 Months Earlier:

“I will not go,” Mom said.  Dad had just gotten orders to go to Germany on a four-year accompanied tour. That meant that he'd get to take all of us with him – that was me, my mom, my younger sister, and our baby brother.  Mom wasn't interested. 

She stood there with her arms crossed in the tiny living room while my father sat on the dingy plaid-brown sofa pleading with her.  She was wearing her church dress, dark blue yet faded, floor-length.  It had a wide belt that she'd had to pin to the dress just to keep it in place.  She's only a shadow over five foot but that day she towered over my tall father. 

“It comes with another stripe,” he said.  “I'll be running the avionics shop.”

“Then you go by yourself.  I don't want to go back overseas.  I don't want to fly in an airplane.  I don't want to leave the states for the rest of my life,” she said. Mom hated life overseas.  For her it was entrapment.  When  we got a spot in base housing, she never left the confines of the compound. When we didn't get a coveted housing spot, she stayed inside the apartment.  She was scared of people who didn't speak English.  She didn't like food she couldn't recognize and for a North Dakota Norwegian, that was almost all the food out there.  She hated subtitled television programs.  Trans-Atlantic telephone conversations were so expensive that she couldn't afford conversations with her family.  For seventeen years she'd lived this transient lifestyle and she'd had enough.  Besides she was really scared of flying. 

“Can't we just pray about this?”

“I have prayed.  The spirit tells me that I'm going to go live with my family.  The spirit says you can go to Germany if you want.”