34 Ollie

Ollie occupied her time largely with the traditional woman’s chores—she sewed clothing, cleaned house, cooked, ironed, bottled fruits and vegetables, and performed the myriad tasks required to run an efficient household. The one task she sometimes hired out was the heavy washing for her household of up to ten. One way she made up for the cost of a washerwoman was to mend flour sacks and sell them back to the mill.⁵³⁰ Women who had no sewing machine sometimes came to her home to use her machine.

Life had been hard for Ollie in Salt Lake City, with little children, limited income, and a husband who was absent a great deal. Life in Thatcher was more of the same. Year after year, as Andrew drove the horse and buggy to visit outlying Church wards or as he worked at a variety of jobs to support the family, Ollie carried much of the responsibility. She was a “Church widow.” With Andrew gone, she would call the children for morning and night prayers and read to them from the Bible. She supervised their weekly baths in a number two iron tub, heating buckets of water on the stove and adding some hot water as each in succession took a bath.

She kept her grief to herself, confiding it to her journal. In 1901 in the Porter house, she wrote: “I was sick with a pain in my bowels all night. It just poured down with rain. . . . All the beds and bedding got wet. Our house leaked in every room. I felt discouraged as every place but our front room was so wet but we got through the day alright and lived.”

Andrew understood her trials and helped as he could. When he first arrived he begged the people, “Be kind to my dear little wife, no matter what you do to me.”

Hospitality

The Kimballs offered hospitality to many visitors. The stake president’s home was typically their first stop and visitors would be invited to stay and eat. They might also come to consult Andrew about Church matters, personal problems, or business. All were welcome. In addition to her own family Ollie fed the threshing crews that harvested her field, hobos, stake conference visitors, and relatives.⁵³¹ In 1902 in their new home the Kimballs entertained Arizona Governor Alexander Brodie and his wife and their son for four nights.⁵³² A major part of sociability was for families to visit one another, to take buggy rides together, to call on the sick, and to exchange gifts of fruit or garden produce.

Relief Society

The Relief Society involved Ollie greatly. After she had been in Thatcher eight months she became first counselor in the Thatcher ward organization.⁵³³ After another year the bishop called her to be president of the ward Relief Society.⁵³⁴ On June 3, 1903, she became a counselor in the stake organization, while continuing as ward president.

The Relief Society was in some ways an independent organization at this time. Although Ollie paid tithing to the bishop on the group’s earnings,⁵³⁵ the women bought their own lot,⁵³⁶ built their own building, constructed their own granary,⁵³⁷ and bought wheat to fill it.⁵³⁸

As a Relief Society leader Ollie had responsibility not only for the organization itself, but also for organizing care of the sick, making burial clothes, and dressing the dead. Embalming was uncommon. Instead they cooled the body with ice, and someone stayed through the night to renew the ice until the funeral could be held the next day.

Sicknesses

Illness and death were familiar visitors at the turn of the twentieth century. The community helped provide care to the sick and respectful treatment of the dead. Often illness struck whole families.

Much ignorance prevailed about elementary sanitation. Flies bred in swarms. The water bucket and dipper at public places serviced tobacco chewers, diseased people, and babies alike. Few understood disease well during this era. Andrew had spent a long time in malaria country boiling his drinking water, unsuspicious of the bites of the annoying mosquitoes.

The mountains offered refuge. With a child near death from dysentery, parents would rush him or her into the cool mountains, hoping for the sickness to abate. Sometimes the parents, too, were sick. Multiple deaths were not uncommon, especially in the first years of Ollie’s responsibility.⁵³⁹

The Layton family’s baby died from whooping cough and measles, while Sister Annie Layton and four other children also lay sick. Her husband, Richard G., was off on a mission.⁵⁴⁰

The Merrills lost a boy and had three others down with measles. “Almost every family in Thatcher had sickness, measles, whooping cough and pneumonia the most prevalent.”⁵⁴¹ Neighbor Fannie Kimball had three children sick with measles,⁵⁴² while the Thompsons had three down with measles and one with heart failure.⁵⁴³ When a Thompson girl and a Kimball boy died, the two children had a combined funeral.⁵⁴⁴ Soon afterward another son of Fannie Kimball died. The father, Tom, was away on a mission.⁵⁴⁵ Ollie’s children took their turn being sick. Spencer spent seven weeks in bed with what he characterized in his journal as a “light case” of typhoid.⁵⁴⁶

Ollie had difficulty finding two ladies to sit up during the night with the Zingers, who were sick with typhoid. No one wanted to get that close to the disease. Death spread fear. Christian Zinger died and the corpse began bloating, so Ollie helped sew together burial clothes that same night. Brother Zinger left five sick children for his widow to look after.⁵⁴⁷ The doctors seemed helpless in the matter. The sick lived or they died. One day Ollie visited five families with typhoid.⁵⁴⁸ Again she had difficulty finding women who would stay with the sick overnight.⁵⁴⁹ The Cole family had both parents and two children down with typhoid. Ollie visited the family on at least fifteen separate days, during which time two died.⁵⁵⁰ Smallpox appeared only occasionally, but when it did, public meetings closed.⁵⁵¹ It was a matter worthy of comment when there was in the community “but little sickness.”⁵⁵²

Ollie

On occasion the Relief Society held fast and prayer meetings for the sick. Each woman prayed in turn, and as a result one meeting lasted two hours.⁵⁵³ Women sometimes washed and anointed other women who were sick or experiencing childbirth. When Armedia Layton lay sick, Ollie wrote, “We went to wash and anoint her. Sister Woodruff [a wife of President Woodruff in Thatcher attending Relief Society Conference] was mouth in the washing and Sister Phillips in the anointing.”⁵⁵⁴

A Sister Farley died in childbirth, but the baby survived.⁵⁵⁵ The Relief Society provided a quilt to replace the one that had been burned when a Sister Hanks died.⁵⁵⁶

The death of young men was less common than children and old people. When two young men who died of typhoid had a joint funeral, the hall was filled, with people standing.⁵⁵⁷

Maude, Mary, and Fannie

None of this could help Ollie come to grips with the death of her own little ones. She waded with pain “through the deep river of sorrow,” wrote Spencer. Years before, she had lost her first child, Maude Woolley, in infancy. In 1903 she bore her tenth child, Mary Woolley. Andrew had hoped the baby would have red hair and blue eyes like “Olive, my precious jewel of a wife.” But this child “stayed only long enough to get her body and her name and hurried away.”⁵⁵⁸ Her upper jaw on the left side was somehow crushed in. Ollie’s heart nearly broke. She could hardly keep up courage. The ward choir sang at the funeral, “They are treasures you’ve laid up in heaven.” But heaven seemed far away. As the tenth child, Mary had been the Lord’s, said Andrew, and God had taken her back to himself as a tithe.⁵⁵⁹

Alice with Fannie, who died in 1904.

In 1904, just a few months later, five-year-old Fannie fell ill. The illness dragged on, so they called a Dr. Platt. He said inflammatory rheumatism had damaged her heart. Painfully ill, her legs swollen, her heart fearfully weak, her breath almost smothered, Fannie suffered for weeks. On March 29, Andrew had her in a baby buggy in the front yard. She asked for a lump of dirt. He gave it to her. She ate some of it till Ollie took it away. In the afternoon Fannie grew so sick she could barely breathe. She screamed and quivered with pain for hours, then died at 9:30 p.m.⁵⁶⁰ in her mother’s arms, all the children gathered around.⁵⁶¹

Ollie “broke down and mourned for her child and couldn’t be comforted,” wrote Andrew.⁵⁶² He worried that it might kill her. One friend criticized, saying she grieved more than was right, that there were things worse than death. Ollie heard the counsel in meekness. “I do not wish to grieve too much and displease my Heavenly Father.” But her despair took months to subside.

Ollie’s Return to Utah

Ollie’s first opportunity to return to Utah to visit her family came in the spring of 1901, after three years in Arizona.⁵⁶³ It was a glorious occasion, a whirlwind of visits and parties and general conference meetings. In the temple Andrew and Ollie received their second anointing, an ordinance of blessing for the especially faithful.⁵⁶⁴ They did not leave for Arizona again until they had spent three weeks in Utah. During one stage of their journey home the people so crowded the rail car that they had to sit on their suitcases on the platform between cars. They found that during their absence “all the trees [at home] are out in full leaf, and everything is nice and green.”⁵⁶⁵ Although at first reluctant, Ollie had come to love her adopted home in Arizona. When Bishop I. E. D. Zundel, having returned from a visit to Oregon, urged young people to move there, Ollie recorded, “I did not enjoy his remarks at all for . . . we are already in a good country.”⁵⁶⁶ She demonstrated a stubborn strength. Following Andrew so far from her home and family had tried her, and she amply fulfilled her “duty.” People who met her quickly forgot she was just five feet high. Andrew’s brother J. Golden called her “a queen.”