Orson Pratt Skousen

Orson Pratt Skousen was the husband of Lora Belle Tenney Skousen, and the son of James Niels and Anna K. Skousen. He was the father of Wayne, Ethel, Earnest, Lena, Ida and Samuel J. Skousen. Orson was born September 19, 1877, at Joseph city, Navajo, County, Arizona. Due to the heavy demands of helping with the chores on the farm and herding cattle, Orson's boyhood did not include much schooling. He barely learned the three R's. When he was thirteen, the family moved further up into the White Mountains to Alpine, Arizona. Father Skousen did not trust the local "gentile" teacher, so he sent Orson and his older brother, Erastus, to a school several miles away. In inclement weather, which came often in the high altitude, they sometimes arrived just in time for dismissal of classes. Sometimes they would have two horses, sometimes none and often just one between them to "ride and tie" some five miles from home. Discouraged, Orson finally quit.

About this time, Father Skousen took a government contract for four years to carry the US Mail between Springerville and Luna. Springerville was twenty-five miles to the North and Luna was twelve miles to the East of Alpine. Orson filled this assignment more often than not. Three round trips were made each week. He had available three horses and two carts to get the mail through. One cart would be used as a spare if the other broke down. He would stay overnight in Luna, which was just over the border in New Mexico. He would sleep alone in a small house and stable that his father either built or rented, and leave in the early morning with the mail. He became acquainted with another Mormon teenager in Luna, Lora Belle Tenney. He probably had no premonitions that she would someday become his wife.

All of this country was over 7,000 feet, allowing cool lovely summers amid the beautiful green pine trees. However, the winters were bitter cold. Orson would make the twelve mile run to Alpine, stop at home to change horses, then go on twenty five miles to Springerville, staying overnight with his older half sister Caroline and her husband, Alex DeWitt. The following morning, he would leave with a fresh horse heading back to Alpine and Luna.

The government paid $50 a month for this job which required the full time of either Orson or Erastus along with the care and feeding of three horses and maintenance of two carts. When a man asked Father Skousen what he made out of the job, he replied that he kept the contract because it was a way of converting his horses' feed into cash. Orson was sometimes able to pick up a few dollars for himself on this mail run by carrying packages or passengers along the way.

Fred Hamblin, who was in charge of the project, invited all available men of Alpine to work on the road with the understanding that the $300 would be divided equally among them. Orson and Erastus were among the eight or ten who responded. During the construction, Fred Hamblin had noticed Orson Skousen's ability to move dirt very efficiently. So, when Fred had to go away for a few days, he left Orson in charge, even though he was the youngest of the group. Upon his return, he was amazed at the work accomplished and congratulated everyone for cooperating so well with the young man. Orson received his share of $40, half of which he gave to his mother, Ane. All of the group had earned at least three dollars per day for their time on the road, and in those days, that was very good money. About the turn of the century, Orson got his first craft job as a blacksmith. He went to work for the Clifton Guthrie Railroad handling their shop, repairing construction equipment while the rails were being widened from narrow to standard gauge. He sharpened all tools, earning $3.73 per day for a six-day week. Room and board, if that is what one could call it, was seventy-five cents a day.

Shortly afterwards, he got a request from Erastus to help him on a job he had disassembling a smelter building so it could be moved. Erastus had found that when he climbed high on the rafters, he got dizzy. He knew his steady headed brother could do the job, and asked Orson to work with him. After the smelter had been moved to Magdalena, New Mexico, Orson stayed on to chop wood for the boiler at the mill. He became a little famous for the amount of wood he could chop. His average production was three cords per day, almost twice what the normal man could do. He finally got the company to let him handle their blacksmith shop for the mining and smelting operations. He again built quite a reputation for he got so he could sharpen mine drills averaging one per minute.

As Orson worked on his father's farm during his teens, there was a constant demand to find ingenious ways of fixing things, especially the farm equipment. He needed the equipment of a blacksmith shop, but not having such luxuries. He improvised what he needed. He used a section of rail for an anvil. His hammer and his forge were homemade. He made his own charcoal for his fire from pinion pine in his cooking oven. To improve on his primitive equipment, he made himself a ball-peen hammer from a miner's drill shank. He made this when about sixteen years old and it is still valued as a keepsake by his children.

When Orson was about twenty and Erastus about three years older, Orson decided he needed some good spurs and announced that he would make them. Erastus responded, incredibly, "Like heck you will. I'll eat all the spurs you make!" Erastus was confident that there would never be such spurs for the manufacturing process requires casting, forging, welding and machining. But Orson got to work. He fashioned the bows for his spurs from flat iron. Then he punched square holes in their centers to take the shanks that were square to keep them from turning. But he still needed to braze them in place and he had no torch or other welding equipment. He took each spur in turn on his forge with the shank down, and heated it to the melting point of copper. Then, with the spur still in the fire, he very carefully fed a length of copper wire to the union between shank and bow. The wire melted on contact and brazed the two pieces together. When the spurs were completed, trimmed and polished, Orson offered Erastus a chance to "eat them," but he declined.

Orson, twenty-six years old in 1904, received an offer of a job from his older brother to do some lumbering with him in Raymer, New Mexico. On his way, he stopped over in St, Johns for the St. Johns Stake quarterly conference and while in St. Johns, he received a letter from Ben Crosby, who was in partnership with John Brown, to build a high line canal to provide water power for the making of cement on the giant Roosevelt Dam. They wanted Orson to do their blacksmithing for them.

Orson says he felt a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush and the same went for jobs so he wrote Crosby and Brown accepting their offer. He sent his wagon and team back to Alpine and joined the firm in Springerville where he helped prepare the equipment and materials for the job. Then he went with them to the dam site where he kept their tools, such as picks and drills, sharp and their horses shod. Orson did a good job, but the partnership found they had underestimated the difficulties in the job and went broke, ending Orson's job.

A Mr. Powers, who knew the dam operation asked Orson to go into partnerships with him and bid on a subcontract to dig two tunnels which were required at the dam. Again, Orson's ability to perceive the most efficient way to get a job done proved a success. After the tunnels were completed, they found that they had earned $15.00 a day for the brief period that it took to complete the job. After the tunnels were finished, Orson went over to the dam itself and obtained employment from the Federal Government as a blacksmith, shoeing horses and doing general tool upkeep.

Orson was a very conservative spender. For example, during the year he worked on the dam, he averaged $3.00 per day plus room and board. Out of this he saved $400. This was important to him for he had been doing a little courting over at Thatcher, by mail, with a young woman by the name of Lora Belle Tenney Wimmer. Lora had had an unfortunate marriage that had ended in divorce after the birth of two children. The boy, John Wayne, was nearly eight and the girl, Ethel, was almost five.

Orson had first met and admired Lora when he carried the mail to her home town of Luna, New Mexico, as a teenager. Later, when Orson was twenty-two, his younger sister, Anna Kristina, married a boy from Luna which happened to be Lora's brother. Anna Kristina and her husband were living in the family Home in Alpine when their first baby died and Anna also became very ill. Lora came to help take care of her during her illness. She and Orson got better acquainted as a result. Lora then returned to her parents in Luna and shortly thereafter moved with them to Thatcher, Arizona, where the romance between Lora and Orson flourished by mail. As the work from the Roosevelt Dam was coming to a conclusion, Orson found his $400 "nest egg" reassuring. Lora happily informed him that her father, Samuel Benjamin Tenney Sr., had arranged a job for him in Thatcher.

When Orson made known his intention to marry this beautiful young grass widow, Erastus suspicious in those days of any divorced woman, warned him, "You don't want to marry that woman, she's already had one man and couldn't keep him." But Orson defended her and said, the husband was to blame for the failure of the first marriage.

When Orson arrived at Thatcher, Lora asked him very frankly, "Where do you stand regarding my children?" She was pleased when he responded, "I love those kids because they're yours." Later, as soon as it was possible, he had them sealed to him during the temple ceremony that followed their civil marriage.

Orson and Lora were married by Bishop William Woody in Thatcher on April 5, 1905 and were sealed in the Salt Lake Temple the following October 15th by John Winter. Lora's father had given her a herd of goats while she was still a divorcee. They continued to range with her father's herds for some time until she sold them for $650.00 not long after she married Orson. She contributed this to help buy the home in which all six of Orson's children and two of his grandchildren were born They lived in this house for forty-two years. It cost them $750.00 and originally consisted of only a large living bedroom and a kitchen. Later two large bedrooms were added. In 1930, one bedroom was partitioned to provide a bathroom.

The job Orson's father-in-law had arranged for him was to work for the local blacksmith F.P.Lee. However, after only about four months work, there came a slack period and Orson was laid off. He bought the place by paying $1,000 to Freeman Hubbard who had foreclosed a mortgage on the people Lee had been renting from. The purchase included the shop that was on a 50 by 100 foot lot. Orson also paid $200 for the stock of materials.

On the morning that Lee found out that his fired helper was the new owner, he walked out leaving a job partly finished. Orson finished the job and happily announced to his wife that he had made $4.00 the very first morning.

Orson's fame as a blacksmith began to spread throughout the entire Gila River valley. No man in Arizona Territory could do things faster and better than the Thatcher Blacksmith. He was very successful in properly shaping plowshares, carefully adjusting the new points that he welded on so that they would stay at the proper level in the ground and plow a clean, straight furrow. Plowshares were brought to him from as far away as Virden, New Mexico, some forty-five miles of wagon road away.

Orson had a blacksmith's temperament and knew when to let people know where they stood. For example, one time Orson did a piece of work for a man and charged him a normal price and the man, a known tightwad, reacted with, "Dam you, Skousen, you use good material but you charge so much. Orson took a deep breath, looked the man straight in the eye and informed him that this business was not appreciated because he always growled so much. The man was shocked and went away in quite a huff, but Orson noticed that he kept bringing his work back. There was never any more growling.

Lora went to work too. She obtained the agency for a gasoline burning flat iron and made selling trips to neighboring towns in a rented buggy showing people the marvelous wonder, an iron that was able to heat itself. She also took two Academy students in as boarders. Another job in which even the little ones could help, was custodial work at the school. The family cleaned some eight rooms in the district school each day, but much of this work, as well as the house work, was done by thirteen year old Ethel.

The second year Orson was on the mission, diphtheria struck the family and struck hard, Ida, just a year old, had it twice. Then all the family, except Wayne got it. Lora's own condition was very bad, Ethel, just turned fourteen, cared for her mother in spite of her own illness. The family was quarantined and most of their friends would not come in and help because of their fear of exposing their own families to the dread disease. Wayne was kept isolated for his own protection so he could avoid the quarantine and keep his job.

Due to the emergency nature of the situation, the Stake Presidency wrote to Orson's Mission President to say he was needed at home. He was released immediately, arriving home on February 22, 1915. By the end of the year, conditions were getting back to normal. The blacksmith shop was busy and the family was in good health, but conditions in the business world were changing. The horse was sharing the burden of transport with millions of Model T Fords. Orson could see the way of the future for a blacksmith, so, in 1916, in his typically decisive way and with Lora pregnant, the whole family went to Los Angeles for six months so that Orson could take a course on automobile mechanics. Nineteen year-old Wayne enrolled in a course on elementary electricity at the Los Angeles Polytechnic Trade School while the rest of the children continued with their regular courses.

That short, half year was like a great vacation for the family. The happy parents decided that this was a good time for a second honeymoon and so they took the white steamer to Catalina Island. They insisted that they planned to return the same evening but since they missed the boat, they had to stay overnight. The whole family went with them on their next jaunt, down the coast 150 miles to the squatting little border town of Tijuana, Mexico.

Shortly after their return to Thatcher, the last of their children arrived, Samuel James was born February 19, 1917. It was also the same year that they purchased their first new car, a Maxwell. Illustrating the love and trust for his twenty year old stepson, Orson gave Wayne a key as soon as he got the new car.

The Skousen blacksmith shop began to gain another reputation. Orson became an outstanding Model T Ford mechanic. Many would bring their temperamental gasoline buggies to him and Wayne and then take them away rejuvenated. Since the expensive specialized tools, normally required for engine overhaul, were not within their budget, Orson used his skill and ingenuity to solve the problems his own way. For example, one customer, a Mr. Ballantyne, strenuously objected when he came in and observed Orson and Wayne filing down the contact surfaces of the valves of his car using a common drill press. Orson hastily and emphatically informed the man that the work was 'guaranteed' and his money would be given back if the work was not satisfactory. Then, when the valves had been "honed" into place, the job finished and Mr. Ba1lantyne had driven his car for a while, he came back and admitted that he had been mistaken. and that the car was real peppy.

While working on cars, Orson still had considerable opportunity to prove his ability as an excellent wheelwright. He worked on wagons all through his blacksmith life. As roads improved and trucks came into the farm economy, he cut many high wheeled gravel wagons down to hay rack size and built the racks on them. Both his sons helped during their separate periods. To cut a wagon down, he would ordinarily cut the large rear wheels that had sixteen spokes down to a size small enough for the front, sawing off the spokes, fitting new "fellies", or rim pieces with shorter radii, and cutting pieces out of the iron tires. The fourteen spoke wheels which had been in front were moved to the rear and the wagon was then about 18 to 24 inches closer to the ground. When a farmer wanted to pay for a fancier, more "balanced" job, all wheels were cut down and the wheels with fewer spokes remained in front where they logically belonged.

Expansion sometimes came across Orson's mind. About 1919, after World War I, the Thatcher shop was rented out while Orson formed a partnership with John Fredericks to rent another blacksmith shop in Safford and prosper as a team. In spite of all their fine work, the Safford business did not hold up in volume and so they dissolved it. Orson went back to his Thatcher shop. It was about this time that Orson's first-born son Ernest, promising and bright, had a ruptured appendix and died, July 4, 1919.

In November 1919, the original Thatcher Ward was divided and Orson was appointed first counselor to Bishop Ernest Shumway of the Thatcher West Ward. He was ordained a High Priest and set apart by Stake President Andrew Kimball. Three years later, he was made the bishop being ordained by Apostle George F. Richards on August 20, 1922. Orson served as the bishop of the Thatcher West Ward for five years. Those acquainted with his bishopric say he was a spiritual strength in the community and an able administrator of his ward.

He visited the sick, the widows, and the orphans, bringing them comfort and blessings and giving of his own means to help them when necessary. Under his guidance, the auxiliary organizations prospered.

Orson was released as bishop October 29, 1927 at the age of fifty. By this time, Wayne and Ethel were married, and just before being released as bishop, he had the privilege of marrying his twenty-year old daughter, Lena, to Milo W. Lines on August 10, 1927. This left only two children at home, Ida, age fifteen and Sam, age ten. Then came the trying days of the depression during the "Thirties". Orson, in his fifties, found conditions difficult, but being used to fairly simple fair, they got along. All farming communities were hit particularly hard. Ida, their youngest daughter was married in 1936 and their baby, Sam became a pilot during World War II.

One highlight of the depression was the graduation of Orson's wife, Lora, at the age of fifty-six, from junior college at the same time as her son, Sam, graduated from Gila's High School. Orson was probably more proud of that day than the rest of the family. He had received such little schooling himself, he delighted in seeing his family grow in knowledge. As the duties of work gradually decreased with time Orson began spending more and more time reading. Through books, movies, television and conversation, he gradually developed an aquaintanceship with many lands and peoples. He and his family always attended the visiting chautauquas circuses, and other such shows. He and Sam, for example, visited a barnstorming air show in 1930 when Sam was about thirteen years old. Orson permitted his son to go up for a ride when most people still doubted the airplane had come to stay.

Lora says the following when referring to those school days, "He loved the educational atmosphere in his home. With reference to the educational accomplishments of his family, he said, "Congratulate me too, I've had algebra, and English for breakfast, dinner and supper, and like it." While Lora was at school during the day, Orson would watch the beans on the stove. He would run back and forth between his blacksmith shop and the house, taking bread from the oven and stirring whatever was in the kettle. It delighted him. Some friends called his home "Skousen's Free Hotel" because, for many years, one or two students came to live, each school year in the home.

Finally by 1947, with all of their children married and gone away, Orson and Lora sold the old family home and moved to a small prefabricated house next to the home of their son Wayne in Tucson, Arizona. They felt that as the years went slipping by, it would be well to be closer to their children. After several years, with Wayne getting a job at Queen Creek, the spry but aging couple moved to Salt River Valley to be near more of their children. Wayne, Lena and Ida were all there with their families.

Orson Pratt Skousen was a quiet man but one who would have to be considered seriously if he was annoyed. He was a good disciplinarian with his children and was sometimes annoyed with their foolishness. However, he was unusually patient and understanding when it came to their important problems.

One of the examples of Orson's patience the family remembers was when his daughter, Ethel, and Mary, Wayne's wife, broke the gears on an early power driven washing machine. They had accidentally dropped a piece of cloth in the mechanism. As the cloth caught, the gears spun the cloth around making a fan that cooled the girls off. So, when the cloth came off, they put another one in, suddenly the gears broke under the pressure. They fearfully told Orson what they had done. He soothed their feelings and told them, he would fix up the machine.

Perhaps the best way to explain Orson's blunt but sensitive balance to life can be compared to the way he fixed faulty wagon wheels. He had an order at one time to fix the rear wheels on five huge Bain wagons that were used in logging on Mount Graham. The original spokes were tapered a little too much where they fit in the hub so that when the wagon was under a heavy load, the pressure would squeeze the spokes deeper into the hub thereby making the spokes loose on the outer rim. As he was replacing the spokes, a bystander asked him to explain how he could know when the exact size had been reached in his tapering job of the new spokes so that they wouldn't do the same thing as the old ones. Orson replied "Well, I can show you when they are too large and I can show you when they're too small, but to know when they are just right that's something you have to feel.

That is the way this honorable servant of The Lord tried to meet life. He wanted to "feel" right about what he did. Because of this, Orson Skousen grew old very gracefully, becoming ever more understanding and patient. His clever craftsmanship never dimmed, for he continued making fine spurs, knives, unique tools and other iron specialties. For example, he made miniature Anvils for all the women of his immediate family, which were greatly prized. Living in Salt River Valley, he helped three of his children build their houses. He helped remodel his Chandler church house and worked on Ellsworth Park in Mesa. He worked for wages from time to time, on various jobs, usually as a carpenter. His handy little backyard blacksmith shop was never idle. Besides the small specialty items already mentioned, he occasionally handled a large job worthy of his skill. He built some fine horse trailers when commissioned to do so. But he had to content himself with only occasional jobs since few prospective employers could believe that a man well past seventy-five was still capable of a full day of competent work. At the age of eighty-seven, Orson died on July 29, 1964.

The tribute paid to him by his daughter, Lena, while he was still alive, testifies to the fact that he obtained the most satisfactory measure of success in living: "What a wonderful man Daddy has become in his declining years. He reached his fiftieth wedding anniversary treating Mama like a sweetheart, saying he'd always been glad for their marriage, and, of course, he should with a wife who has been so patient and fine all through the years. What a joy it was to watch him and Mother show their love as they lived in their "doll" house next to our home for seventeen years, more patient than he has ever been before. He loves his children and grandchildren and they all adore him. His relatives, from far and wide, come to see him often and treasure the souvenirs of his handwork and his happy laugh. Surely he is nearer the perfection man should reach for than ever before in his life."

Author Unknown

SOURCE: Find A Grave.com